> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # eBay Health Score, eBay > Composite, seller-standards × fulfilment × inverse defect-rate × inverse INR. Single CXO number. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Key Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Marketplace](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) > 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** | Five things to notice: 1. **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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/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. 2. **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. 3. **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. 4. **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. 5. **A score of 80 with no alert means quietly degrading.** The `<70` threshold 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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/late-shipment-rate) | The on-time-shipping component (25% weight). Tracking-uploaded-late or carrier-scan-late events count as defects. | | [Cases without Resolution](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/cases-closed-w-o-resolution) | Case-closed-without-seller-resolution counts as a hard defect and flips your standing fastest. | | [eBay Total Revenue](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/total-revenue) | Cross-platform 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](/nerve-centre/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](https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/seller-level) (US) or [equivalent in UK](https://www.ebay.co.uk/sh/performance/seller-level): tier, defect rate, late-shipment rate, cases-without-seller-resolution rate. > [Seller Hub → Performance → Service Metrics](https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/servicemetrics): 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. | **Why our number may legitimately differ from any single eBay tile:** | 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. | **Cross-connector reconciliation against other connectors the same seller may run:** | Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [`amazon.account_health`](/nerve-centre/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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/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`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/google-analytics/revenue-trend) | None, GA4 doesn't see eBay traffic at the purchase event level. | n/a | ***
Same-shape marketplace peer (for sellers running multiple marketplaces) A similar composite seller-health concept lives on Amazon. This is **not a reconciliation**, the populations and scoring rules are entirely independent. The cross-link helps a multi-marketplace seller navigate between equivalent metrics. * [`amazon.account_health`](/nerve-centre/amazon/account_health), Amazon's AHR (Account Health Rating).
## 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 by `marketplaceId`) 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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/cases-closed-w-o-resolution) and [Open INR Cases](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/open-inr-cases) for forensic detail. **What's the action playbook when this card alerts (`<70`)?** 1. Open [Open INR Cases](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/open-inr-cases). Resolve every case under the 8-day auto-decide window. Each saved case is worth 4 to 8 score points. 2. Open [Defect Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/defect-rate). If above 0.5%, surface the SKUs and ad-listing pairs driving the defects. Pause those listings or fix descriptions. 3. Open [Late Shipment Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/late-shipment-rate). Late tracking-uploads are the easiest fix (warehouse process), late carrier-scans are harder (carrier choice / handover SLA). 4. Check [Seller Standards](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ebay/seller-standards-level). If you've already lost TRS this month, focus on reclaiming it next month rather than firefighting the score. 5. If the seller is multi-site, drill per-`marketplaceId`, fixes are typically site-specific. *** ### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre *eBay Health Score* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across eBay and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. [Start for free](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.