As an Amazon seller, it is critical that you keep your account in good health throughout your selling journey.

Amazon is committed towards maintaining a high level of customer trust, and ensuring a positive purchase experience for its customers—and as such, have put in place strict policies and performance targets for sellers.

If you’re unable to meet the performance targets or adhere to selling policies, you could be at risk of having your account deactivated or your products taken down. This can adversely impact your business and sales.

Below, we’ve outlined the steps you need to take to keep your account in good health. And there’s more information to come: this article is the first segment of a series of articles covering key topics relating to maintaining a healthy Amazon account. The future segments—part II and part III—will cover solutions for common account health issues and seller FAQs.

The Seller Code of Conduct outlines principles that sellers need to follow to ensure a safe buying and selling experience on Amazon. As a seller, you must:
● Provide accurate information to Amazon and our customers at all times
● Act fairly and not misuse Amazon’s features or services
● Not attempt to damage or abuse another Seller, their listings or ratings
● Not attempt to influence customers’ ratings, feedback, and reviews
● Not send unsolicited or inappropriate communications
● Not contact customers except through Buyer-Seller Messaging
● Not attempt to circumvent the Amazon sales process
● Not operate more than one selling account on Amazon without a legitimate business need

These principles are listed on the Selling Policies and Seller Code of Conduct page on Amazon Seller Central. You can also access the page via “Policies, agreements, and guidelines > Programme Policies > General Policies > Amazon Seller Code of Conduct”.

It is crucial that you adhere to these principles, as failure to do so could leave you at risk of account suspension, payments suspension or forfeiture, listings cancellation or having your selling privileges removed.

You should also make it a point to check back on this page on a regular basis. Doing so ensures that you remain up to date on the latest updates or changes that may be made to the Seller Code of Conduct and other selling policies.

The Account Health Rating (AHR) is a new feature that helps sellers monitor their account health based on their adherence to Amazon’s selling policies.

It is determined by several factors, such as the number of unresolved policy violations on your account at any given point in time, how severe these violations are and the extent to which you positively impact the customer experience through your selling activities.

The three ratings are represented by different colours: green for ‘Good’, yellow for ‘At Risk’ and red for ‘Critical’. If your AHR is ‘At Risk’ or ‘Critical’, you may be at risk of account deactivation and should take steps to address the violations listed on your Account Health page in order to improve your AHR.

Presently, this feature is available for professional sellers only. You can view your AHR on the Account Health page.

In addition to AHR, your Account Health page also lists key performance metrics you need to monitor:

The ODR measures your ability to provide a good customer experience. It is represented as a percentage, and calculated by dividing orders with one or more defects against the total number of orders received during a given 60-day period.

You are required to maintain an ODR under 1%. Sellers with an ODR exceeding 1% may be at risk of having their account deactivated.

CR refers to the percentage of orders cancelled by a seller during a given 7-day period. It measures order cancellations that are initiated by a seller—so your CR will not be affected if a customer cancels a pending order.

CR refers to the percentage of orders cancelled by a seller during a given 7-day period. It measures order cancellations that are initiated by a seller—so your CR will not be affected if a customer cancels a pending order.

The LDR indicates the number of orders with a shipping confirmation completed after the expected ship date. It is represented as a percentage of total orders over a 10-day and 30-day period, and only applies to seller-fulfilled orders.

You are required to maintain a LDR under 4%. Sellers with a LDR exceeding 4% may be at risk of having their account deactivated.

The VTR refers to the percentage of total shipments with a valid tracking number. This is measured over a 30-day period, and only applies to seller-fulfilled orders. Certain items are exempted from the VTR requirement, and further information on this is available on Seller Central.

You are required to maintain a VTR above 95%. Sellers who fail to meet the target may face the risk of account suspension.

The OTDR refers to the percentage of total tracked shipments that were delivered by the estimated delivery date. This metric only applies to self-fulfilled orders.

You are required to maintain an OTDR above 97%. At present, there are no penalties for sellers who are unable to meet the performance target.

The RFR measures how satisfied your customers are with their return experience. It is represented as a percentage, and calculated by dividing negative return requests over the total return requests.

A return is considered negative if any of the following applies: you receive negative feedback, you fail to respond to a return request within 48 hours or a return request is incorrectly denied.

You are required to maintain an RDR under 10%. Currently, there are no penalties for sellers who are unable to meet the performance target.

Performance notifications are messages sent by Amazon to notify you about important issues relating to your account health. These include policy warnings, listing deactivations, account suspensions or changes related to your credit card and bank account.

You can locate your performance notifications on Seller Central, via “Performance > Go to the Performance Notifications page”. You will also receive an email each time a performance notification is sent out.

deally, you should be checking your performance notifications on a daily basis. If you are selling items on multiple Amazon sites, keep in mind that you need to check the performance notifications for each site individually.

Lastly, we cannot emphasise enough on the importance of responding to performance notifications in a timely manner. Failure to do so can leave you at risk of having your account deactivated—regardless of your account status. This means that you could still be at risk of account deactivation—even if you have achieved a “Good” AHR—if you do not address account issues promptly.