Amazon selling · 7 min read
Amazon Account Health Rating explained: how to keep your seller account safe
Most sellers who lose their accounts had warnings first. The Account Health dashboard shows them, if you look. Here is how to read it and what to watch every week.
Nathan Cross, Author
What the rating is
Amazon's Account Health Rating runs from 0 to 1,000 and reflects your compliance with Amazon's selling policies over the last 180 days. You lose points when Amazon detects a new policy violation and gain points when you successfully address it.
- 200 to 1,000, Healthy: not at risk of deactivation under the policies the score covers.
- 100 to 199, At Risk: the account is at risk of deactivation. Act now.
- 99 or lower, Unhealthy: eligible for deactivation, or already deactivated.
Two things that surprise new sellers
New sellers start at 200, right on the edge of Healthy. A single serious violation early on can push a new account into At Risk.
The score is not the only trigger. Amazon warns that reaching the maximum number of repeat violations of a single policy within 180 days can put an account at immediate risk, whatever the score.
The performance targets behind it
Alongside policy compliance, Amazon tracks customer-experience metrics. The commonly published targets are:
- Order Defect Rate under 1%: negative feedback, A-to-z Guarantee claims and chargebacks.
- Late Shipment Rate under 4% for seller-fulfilled orders.
- Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate under 2.5% for seller-fulfilled orders.
- Valid Tracking Rate over 95% for seller-fulfilled orders.
Set your own earlier warning lines
Do not wait for Amazon's limits. Act when Order Defect Rate passes 0.5%, Late Shipment Rate passes 2%, or any single policy violation appears. Orders fulfilled by Amazon are mostly shielded from shipping metrics, but Order Defect Rate and policy compliance still apply to every order.
A 30-minute weekly routine
- Account Health dashboard (10 minutes): rating, open violations, metric trends and any notice with a deadline.
- Performance Notifications (5 minutes): read anything new in full, including the "Why is this happening?" section, and log it.
- Buyer messages and claims (5 minutes): every message answered within 24 hours, no A-to-z claim waiting.
- Listings and inventory (5 minutes): suppressed or inactive listings, stranded inventory, stock on top sellers.
- Documents (5 minutes): file this week's invoices and any new certificates.
Why invoices matter as much as metrics
When Amazon questions a product's authenticity, the answer is almost always a document. Amazon's guidance on authenticity documents asks for invoices that cover your sales volume over the last 365 days, show the full supply chain and include supplier and manufacturer contact details, because Amazon may contact them. Retail receipts and invoices from suppliers you cannot verify rarely pass.
If a warning appears
Address every notice before its deadline, and use "Call me now" on the dashboard if it is unclear. If it has already gone further, read what to do in the first 48 hours after a deactivation.
Stay Open ($9) is a 29-page guide to opening the account correctly, calculating real profit per unit and staying clear of the policies that close accounts, with a weekly health checklist, a supplier verification checklist and four more editable worksheets. Or get all three books in The Amazon Seller Series for $19.
Educational only, not legal advice. State rules vary — confirm your state's numbers and deadlines before you file or send anything.
Keep reading
- Amazon seller account deactivated? What to do in the first 48 hours
A deactivation notice is alarming, but the first two days decide more than the next two months. Here is what to save, what to read, what not to do, and how to start an appeal that has a chance.
- How to write an Amazon Plan of Action (with an example)
Amazon asks for three things in an appeal: root cause, corrective actions and preventive measures. Here is how to write each one so a reviewer can say yes, with a worked example.