Composite, seller-standards × fulfilment × inverse defect-rate × inverse INR. Single CXO number.
At a glance
A 0 to 100 composite score that fuses the four signals an eBay account-manager will flip your seller standing on: seller-standards level × on-time fulfilment × inverse defect rate × inverse open INR (Item Not Received) cases. One number for the CXO to glance at; if it’s under 70, your TRS / Above Standard status is at material risk.
| What it counts | A weighted index across four sub-metrics. The card output is dimensionless (0 to 100). It does NOT count revenue, orders, or fees, it counts operational health. |
| Listing-format scope | All formats are reflected via the underlying defect / INR / fulfilment metrics. Auctions, fixed-price, and Best-Offer-resolved orders contribute equally to the inputs. |
| Component weights | Seller Standards Level (30%) + On-Time Shipping Rate (25%) + (100 − Defect Rate × 100) (25%) + (100 − Open-INR-cases-as-share-of-orders × 100) (20%). Tunable per-workspace in the manifest. |
| GMV / fees framing | Not applicable. This is an operational health index; it is independent of the GMV (pricingSummary.total.value) and fee figures. A high-GMV seller with a 55 score is in worse account standing than a low-GMV seller with a 92. |
| Promoted Listings | Promoted spend does NOT enter the score. Promoted-driven order volume does, indirectly, since defect / INR / on-time rates count every order regardless of source. |
| Multi-site aggregation | The score is computed per marketplaceId and shown as a blended weighted average (weighted by order share). UK-only sellers get a clean UK score; US + UK sellers get a hybrid that masks per-site detail; drill into per-site cards for clarity. |
| Currency | Not applicable, this is a dimensionless score. |
| Best-Offer-resolved orders | Counted in inputs identically to BIN orders. |
| Refunds | Refund volume itself doesn’t enter the score, but defect rate (which DOES enter) counts every defect-bearing order including those that were later refunded. |
| Cancellations | Seller-cancelled / out-of-stock cancellations push defect rate up, which pulls the score down. Buyer-cancelled-pre-payment events are ignored. |
| Time window | RT/7D (real-time gauge plus a 7-day rolling baseline; eBay’s own seller-standards evaluation runs on rolling 12 months for established sellers, 3 months for new sellers, both feed in). |
| Alert trigger | Score <70 flips the card amber and triggers a health_score sentiment notification |
| Roles | owner, finance, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your eBay data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US apparel seller running ebay.com only, previously Top Rated, drifted to Above Standard last month after a warehouse-shipping incident. Period: real-time snapshot taken 28 Apr 26.| Sub-metric | Raw value | Component contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Seller Standards Level | Above Standard (eBay tier 2 of 4) | 70 / 100 (TRS would be 100, Below Standard would be 30) |
| On-Time Shipping Rate (30D) | 92.4% | 92.4 / 100 |
| Defect Rate (30D) | 0.84% (above the 0.5% TRS cap) | (100 − 84) = 16… wait, formula is (100 − defect_rate_pct × 10) for sub-100 scaling = 91.6 |
| Open INR cases (live) | 4 unresolved over the last 14d, on 1,200 orders = 0.33% rate | (100 − 33) = 67 (the high INR ratio drags this component) |
| Weighted composite | 0.30(70) + 0.25(92.4) + 0.25(91.6) + 0.20(67) = 21.0 + 23.1 + 22.9 + 13.4 = 80.4 |
- The score reads 80, but the cause is the INR component. Three of four components are healthy (90+); INR is the drag. Drilling into Open INR Cases and resolving the 4 unresolved cases lifts the INR component from 67 to ~95, which alone takes the score from 80.4 to 86.0.
- The Above-Standard demotion costs more than the score reflects. Seller-standards level only weights 30% of the composite, but in eBay’s own machinery it has cliff effects: TRS unlocks a 10% FVF discount, the “Top Rated Plus” badge, and Best Match search lift. Losing TRS is worth 5 to 8% of net revenue per month for a typical seller, far more than the 30-point swing in this composite suggests.
- Defect rate above 0.5% is the headline alarm, not the score. TRS requires defect rate ≤0.5%. This seller is at 0.84%, which is what triggered the demotion. The score is a summary indicator; the threshold indicator is the seller-standards card itself.
- The eBay system evaluates monthly, but this card updates real-time. eBay re-evaluates seller standing on the 20th of each month based on a rolling 12-month window for high-volume sellers (3 months for new sellers). Vortex IQ’s score updates in real time from the underlying metric stream, so it leads the official re-evaluation by up to 30 days, useful for getting ahead of a demotion.
- A score of 80 with no alert means quietly degrading. The
<70threshold is the firefighting line. Sellers who routinely sit at 78 to 82 are slowly bleeding TRS-eligibility margin, fix the underlying drivers before the score crosses the line. The Vortex Mind investigator can pull the trend on demand.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
The Health Score is a roll-up. Pair it with the components to act on what’s moving:| Card | Why pair it with eBay Health Score |
|---|---|
| Seller Standards Level | The single largest weighted input (30%). Tracks the official eBay tier (Top Rated / Above Standard / Below Standard). Cliff-effect lever: losing TRS forfeits the 10% FVF discount and Best Match boost. |
| Defect Rate | The 0.5% Top Rated cap is the most common reason a healthy seller falls out of TRS. This card surfaces it; the Health Score reflects its consequence. |
| Open INR Cases | Real-time count of buyer-opened “Item Not Received” claims. Auto-decide against you after 8 days of no response, biggest preventable contributor to defect rate. |
| Late Shipment Rate | The on-time-shipping component (25% weight). Tracking-uploaded-late or carrier-scan-late events count as defects. |
| Cases without Resolution | Case-closed-without-seller-resolution counts as a hard defect and flips your standing fastest. |
| eBay Total Revenue | The economic context for the health score. A 65 score on £200k of monthly GMV is more urgent than the same score on £5k. |
| Shopify Total Revenue | Cross-channel context for sellers running both. A degrading eBay health score is also a channel-concentration signal, push more volume to your Shopify storefront while you fix the eBay side. |
| Amazon Account Health | The marketplace peer. Amazon’s Account Health Rating (AHR) is a similar 0 to 1000 composite; healthy sellers are above 250. Both stores share the same root operational signals (shipping, defects, customer messages). |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in eBay Seller Hub: eBay does not publish a single “Health Score” tile, this is a Vortex IQ composite. The closest native views to reconcile its components against:Seller Hub → Performance → Seller Level (US) or equivalent in UK: tier, defect rate, late-shipment rate, cases-without-seller-resolution rate. Seller Hub → Performance → Service Metrics: rates of “Item Not as Described” and “Item Not Received” claims, the components feeding INR.The seller-standards summary on eBay updates monthly (around the 20th); this card derives the same inputs continuously and is therefore ahead of the official re-evaluation by up to 30 days. Timing, settlement, and reporting-lag table:
| Topic | Detail |
|---|---|
| Timezone | Components like defect rate and late-shipment rate use the seller’s account-level timezone (Pacific Time for US sellers by default). Vortex IQ normalises to UTC for the composite calculation. Boundary effects average out over a 7D rolling window. |
| Settlement / payout impact | None directly, the score is operational, not financial. But a low score causing a TRS loss removes near-instant payouts: a demoted seller drops back to a 2 to 5 day funds hold per order. |
| Promoted Listings cost reporting lag | None, ad costs aren’t an input. |
| API throttling | Each component pulls from a different eBay API resource (Sell Analytics, Sell Fulfillment, Account API). Throttle limits at component level can briefly stall a sub-metric refresh; the composite shows a “stale” indicator if any input is over 30 minutes old. |
| Re-evaluation cadence | eBay’s official seller-standards re-evaluation runs monthly. Vortex IQ’s composite refreshes within 60 seconds of any underlying metric change, so the lead-time advantage on demotion risk is up to 30 days. |
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Composite definition | Either | This is a Vortex IQ-defined composite. eBay’s own seller-standards page shows individual component pass/fail, not a single 0 to 100 rollup. The composite is opinionated about how to weight the four inputs; treat the score as a summary, the components as the truth. |
| Evaluation window | Ours leads | eBay re-evaluates monthly (20th of each month, rolling 12-month window for established sellers). The card recomputes continuously over a 7-day rolling window, so it can flag a trajectory before the official review. |
| Multi-site weighting | Ours blended | eBay shows seller-standards per marketplaceId. The composite blends across sites by order share. UK + US sellers see one number that hides per-site detail. |
| TRS discount eligibility | Not in the score | The 10% FVF discount that TRS unlocks is consequence, not input. Score doesn’t drop when TRS is lost; the seller-standards component does, the cumulative GMV impact lives in the fee cards. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
amazon.account_health | Marketplace peer. Different scoring methodology (Amazon’s AHR is 0 to 1000 with policy-violation weighting; this is 0 to 100 fulfilment-weighted). Same operational signals feed both for sellers running shared warehousing / fulfilment. | A seller with great Amazon AHR but poor eBay Health Score is usually mishandling eBay-specific obligations (tracking-upload windows, Best Offer responsiveness) that don’t apply on Amazon. |
shopify.total_revenue | Channel-concentration context. Use as a “if eBay is degraded, can my Shopify storefront absorb the volume?” check. | Not a reconciliation, a strategic context card. |
ga4.ga_revenue_trend | None, GA4 doesn’t see eBay traffic at the purchase event level. | n/a |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is the Health Score not showing on eBay’s own dashboard? Because eBay doesn’t publish a single composite score. The seller-standards page shows pass / fail on each component; the Vortex IQ score rolls them up into one number. Treat the score as the headline; click into the component cards (Defect Rate, INR Cases, Late Shipment, Seller Standards) to act. What’s a good score? 90+ = Top Rated, healthy across the board, near-instant payouts, FVF discount active. 75 to 90 = Above Standard, broadly healthy with one or two soft spots. 60 to 75 = degraded, fix before next monthly re-evaluation. <60 = at material risk of demotion to Below Standard, which slows payouts to 30 days and removes search visibility. Why does my score swing day-to-day if my underlying performance looks stable? The INR component is the noisiest input, a single new buyer claim against a low base of orders moves the rate visibly. Sellers who do under 200 orders per month see 5 to 10 point swings in the score from 1 or 2 INR cases. Look at the 7-day rolling average, not the live snapshot, for stable reads. My score is 85 but I just lost Top Rated status, why? The score is a weighted blend; a single component falling out of TRS-eligibility (e.g. defect rate jumping above the 0.5% cap) costs you TRS regardless of how the other three components look. The composite degrades by 30 weighted points as a result, but starting from a high base of 100 you can still land at 80+. Track the TRS-cap thresholds individually, the score is a summary, not a guarantee. How is this different from eBay’s own “seller level” tier? eBay’s seller level (Top Rated / Above Standard / Below Standard) is a categorical tier evaluated monthly. The Health Score is a continuous number recomputed every minute. They’re complementary: the tier tells you what eBay’s algorithm did last month, the score tells you what eBay’s algorithm will do next month if nothing changes. Does Promoted Listings affect the score? Indirectly. Promoted-driven order volume counts in defect rate / INR rate / on-time rate exactly the same as organic orders. So if your promoted SKUs have higher defect risk (e.g. clearance items, refurbished electronics), running more promoted volume mechanically degrades the score. Action: if you scale Promoted spend, monitor the score in parallel. My UK and US scores are different, can I see them split? Yes, the per-marketplace cards (filtered bymarketplaceId) show per-site scores. The dashboard headline blends them weighted by order share. UK + US sellers should always read both, the operational practices that drive defect rate are different by site (UK has stronger return-rights law; US has faster shipping expectations).
The score dropped overnight but no metric appears to have moved, what happened?
Three usual causes: (1) eBay refreshed its monthly seller-standards evaluation on the 20th and tier-flipped you (visible only when the system update completes); (2) a back-dated buyer-feedback “neutral” or “negative” was registered for an order from 8 weeks ago, which feeds the defect rate retroactively; (3) an INR case was opened more than 24 hours ago and you missed the response window, the case auto-closes against you. Open Cases without Resolution and Open INR Cases for forensic detail.
What’s the action playbook when this card alerts (<70)?
- Open Open INR Cases. Resolve every case under the 8-day auto-decide window. Each saved case is worth 4 to 8 score points.
- Open Defect Rate. If above 0.5%, surface the SKUs and ad-listing pairs driving the defects. Pause those listings or fix descriptions.
- Open Late Shipment Rate. Late tracking-uploads are the easiest fix (warehouse process), late carrier-scans are harder (carrier choice / handover SLA).
- Check Seller Standards. If you’ve already lost TRS this month, focus on reclaiming it next month rather than firefighting the score.
- If the seller is multi-site, drill per-
marketplaceId, fixes are typically site-specific.