Revenue at Risk (live), OnBuy

Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Marketplace

Sum of (suspended_listings x velocity x ASP) + (mis-categorised listings x velocity loss), recoverable.

At a glance

Live recoverable revenue locked behind suspended listings, mis-categorised listings, and stale inventory on OnBuy. The number a marketplace ops manager works to drive to zero. This is a derived figure, not a single API field; it sums per-issue revenue exposure in real time.


What it counts	`SUM((suspended_listings.velocity_30d x suspended_listings.asp) + uncategorised_listings.velocity_loss + stale_listings.velocity_decay)` expressed as recoverable GBP per 30-day equivalent.
Source data	Derived. `GET /v2/listings` (status, category_id, last_updated_at) joined with the engine’s 30D velocity index built from `GET /v2/orders`. Refreshed every 15 minutes.
Currency	GBP only (OnBuy is UK-domestic).
Tax / fees	Gross of OnBuy commission (consistent with `onbuy_total_revenue`).
Refunds	Not relevant (forward-looking exposure metric, not a sales metric).
Cancellations	n/a.
Channel scope	OnBuy only.
Time window	`RT` (real-time). The figure is the live exposure, not a trailing window.
Alert trigger	`>$0`. Any non-zero value is actionable. The dollar sign in the registry trigger is artefact; the unit is GBP.
What “recoverable” means	Revenue that would return if the issue is fixed within 7 days. After 7 days OnBuy’s algorithm assumes the listing is genuinely cold and recovery rates drop sharply.
Roles	owner, finance.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your OnBuy 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 small UK pet-supplies seller, snapshot at 27 Apr 26 09:00 BST. The seller has 184 active listings, dispatches in-house, and has been on OnBuy for 11 months.

Component	Listings affected	30D velocity per listing	ASP	Revenue at Risk
Suspended listings	3 (image-quality flag)	4 orders / month	£18 avg	£216
Uncategorised listings	6	0.5 orders / month (cold)	£22	£66
Stale listings (>180d no update)	14	1.2 orders / month (decayed from 2.8)	£24	£269
Total Revenue at Risk				£551

Suspended:        3 x 4 x £18    = £216
Uncategorised:    6 x 0.5 x £22  = £66
Stale velocity:   14 x 1.6 x £24 = £269 (delta from peer-listing velocity)
Total recoverable per 30D                 £551

What it means for this seller. £551 a month is roughly 8% of their current OnBuy revenue (~£6,800 / month). The cheapest fix is the stale listings, refreshing 14 product descriptions and primary images is a half-day of work and should recover most of the £269 within 4 to 6 weeks. The 3 suspended listings need image-quality fixes (OnBuy requires 1000x1000 minimum, white background); a 1-hour photo-shoot covers them. The 6 uncategorised listings are a 30-minute admin task in the OnBuy Seller Console. If all three issues are cleared this week, the seller should see onbuy_total_revenue lift by roughly £550 / month within two months once OnBuy’s search algorithm re-warms the listings. That is a very high return on a single afternoon of work, which is why this is a hero card.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Revenue at Risk is an aggregator of three different ops issues. To act on it you need the component cards:

Card	Why it matters next to Revenue at Risk	What the combination tells you
Suspended Listings	One of the three components, usually the largest.	If 70%+ of risk is suspensions, the priority is image-quality and listing-data fixes.
Uncategorised Listings	Listings missing `category_id` are invisible to category browse.	Pure admin fix; should never persist beyond a week.
Stale Listings (>180d)	The decay component.	Larger than 50% of risk = cold catalogue, refresh metadata in a single batch.
Total Revenue	The size of the impact.	Risk as % of revenue tells you whether to drop everything (>10%) or batch this for next sprint (<5%).
OnBuy Health Score	The composite.	This card moves Health Score by 5 to 15 points depending on size.
Listings Suspension Burst (24h)	New entries to the suspended bucket.	Rising risk + recent suspension burst = a category-wide policy change, not random.
Shopify Revenue Trend	Shows whether DTC is compensating for OnBuy ops issues.	If OnBuy risk is high and DTC is flat or up, the urgency is lower; if both are bleeding, OnBuy is your highest-leverage fix.

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in OnBuy’s own dashboard: OnBuy does not natively publish a “Revenue at Risk” figure, this card is genuinely Vortex-IQ-only. The closest views in OnBuy’s Seller Console for the underlying components are:

OnBuy Seller Console (https://seller.onbuy.com) -> Listings -> Filter: Status = Suspended Lists every suspended listing with the reason code (e.g. “Image quality”, “Missing required attribute”, “Price-policing flag”).

OnBuy Seller Console -> Listings -> Filter: Last updated > 180 days ago Returns the stale-listing population.

OnBuy Seller Console -> Listings -> Filter: Category = (none) Returns the uncategorised population.

You can verify the listing counts match between our cards and OnBuy’s filters; the velocity-and-ASP multiplications are our derivation. Why our number may legitimately differ from a manual estimate:

Reason	Direction	Why
Velocity calculation window	Either	We use 30D rolling velocity for the affected listing; if a listing was already in decline before suspension, the figure may overstate the recoverable amount.
Recovery assumption	Ours optimistic	We assume full recovery within 7 days of fix. In reality OnBuy’s algorithm takes 7 to 21 days to fully re-warm a previously suspended listing; the actual recovered revenue lands progressively.
Category re-classification	Ours can drift	If OnBuy moves a listing’s category, our `last_updated_at` field updates too, which can briefly push a listing out of the “stale” bucket. The next full sync corrects it.
Manual seller actions	Ours can lag	If you have already actioned a fix in the Seller Console, our card may still show the listing as at-risk for up to 15 minutes until the next poll.
Multi-component overlap	Ours can double-count	A suspended-AND-stale listing should only count once; we deduplicate at the listing level, but if OnBuy returns inconsistent metadata across endpoints we may briefly show an inflated total until the next reconciliation pass.

Internal identity (within OnBuy):

onbuy_revenue_at_risk = SUM(onbuy_suspended_listings impact) + SUM(onbuy_uncategorised impact) + SUM(onbuy_stale_listings impact)

The three component cards each show the count; this card shows the GBP impact.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is my Revenue at Risk number going up even though I am fixing listings? The card is real-time and additive. Fixing a listing removes its contribution; OnBuy auto-suspending a different listing (e.g. due to a stock-level update or supplier price change) adds a new one. Watch the trend across a week, not the moment-to-moment movement. If you are clearing one listing a day but two new ones suspend, the warehouse data feed is the real problem, fix the inventory feed first. How is “recoverable” different from “lost”? Lost revenue is what you have already missed (the orders that did not happen yesterday because the listing was suspended). Recoverable is forward-looking: what will return if you fix the issue this week. We track recoverable because it is actionable; lost is sunk-cost and depressing. The cumulative lost figure is on the backlog as onbuy_revenue_lost_to_date. My number is £550 / month but I do not believe my OnBuy revenue would actually grow by that much. Three honest reasons that may temper the figure. First, our 30D velocity baseline assumes the listing comes back to its prior demand level; if your category is genuinely declining (e.g. seasonal trail-off), recovery will be lower. Second, OnBuy takes 1 to 3 weeks to re-rank reinstated listings in browse, so the recovery is delayed not instant. Third, if multiple of your SKUs were suspended together, customers may already have rebought from a competitor, and that revenue does not “come back” on a 1-month horizon. As a rule of thumb, expect 60 to 80% of the headline Revenue at Risk to actually materialise within 60 days of fixing. Should I prioritise this above DTC issues? For most small UK brands, yes, OnBuy Revenue at Risk has a higher £-per-hour-of-effort recovery rate than equivalent Shopify ops issues, because OnBuy’s algorithm is more brittle (a single image issue can suspend a listing that would never get auto-rejected on Shopify). The exception is when DTC is much larger; if Shopify is 80% of revenue, a 5% Shopify issue is bigger in absolute terms than a 30% OnBuy issue. Why does the figure include “stale” listings as at-risk? OnBuy’s search algorithm explicitly de-prioritises listings without metadata refresh in 180+ days. The decay is real and measurable: stale listings show ~50% of peer-listing velocity. Refreshing the description, primary image, or price tags is enough to reset the clock, you do not need to make substantive changes. My OnBuy account was just suspended account-wide, not per-listing. Is that in this number? No. Account-level suspension would zero onbuy_total_revenue until reinstated; this card only models per-listing exposure. If your whole account is suspended, this card will read £0 (because there are no active listings). Use onbuy_alert_token_expiry and the suspension alert as the canaries. How does this compare to Amazon’s “Buy Box loss” exposure? Amazon’s equivalent is more punishing, losing the Buy Box on a high-velocity ASIN can wipe 80% of that ASIN’s revenue overnight, so the at-risk dollar value per issue is much larger. OnBuy does not have the same Buy Box dynamic (single-seller listings dominate), so per-listing exposure is lower but suspensions are more common. Is there an action playbook? Yes. Run this in order:

Identify the largest single component. If suspensions dominate, fix images first (OnBuy requires 1000x1000 minimum, white background, single product per shot). If stale dominates, batch-edit descriptions in Seller Console -> Listings -> bulk update. If uncategorised dominates, set category_id on each.
Process oldest first. Listings stale for 200+ days recover slower than those stale for 181 days. Refresh the longest-stale 20% first.
Cross-check against onbuy_xc_catalogue_drift. If your suspended listings are also drifting against Amazon UK, the price-policing flag is the real cause; fix the price gap, not the listing image.
Schedule a quarterly catalogue refresh. A blanket re-edit pass every 90 days keeps the stale bucket near zero and avoids the larger fixes.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Revenue at Risk (live) is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across OnBuy 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 or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.

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At a glance

Calculation

Worked example

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

​At a glance

​Calculation

​Worked example

​Sibling cards merchants should reference together

​Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

​Known limitations / merchant FAQs

​Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

At a glance

Calculation

Worked example

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre