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Amazon Account Health – A Guide for FBA Sellers in 2023
Account health is Amazon’s policy that helps sellers measure and improve the customer experience. It is measured by a set of metrics you can find in the account health dashboard in your Seller Central. These metrics show merchants whether they are compliant with Amazon selling policies.
To maintain a healthy account, Amazon encourages sellers to monitor the account health dashboard regularly, review the guidelines and targets, and do their best to achieve them.
Keep reading to find out what metrics affect your Amazon seller account health and what to do if you fail to comply with Amazon targets.
What Is Amazon Account Health Dashboard?
Amazon account health dashboard is a tool on your Seller Central account that displays your service performance, Amazon policy compliance, and shipping performance using a set of metrics.
When you sell on Amazon, you must comply with their rules and policies. Among others, these rules include maintaining sales metrics at certain levels. This is called account health.
Amazon attaches unequal importance to different metrics. Failure to comply with Amazon targets for some of them may result in a warning, account suspension, or even removing your selling privileges. Non-compliance with other metrics is not considered critical.
Amazon introduced the account health dashboard to ensure that sellers deliver the best services to the customers.
How to Find Account Health Dashboard?
Sign in to your Amazon Seller Central account. In the menu, select Performance, then click Account health. You will get to the account health dashboard.
What Does Account Health Dashboard Show?
Account Health Dashboard displays three categories of metrics that determine your overall account health - customer service performance, policy compliance, and shipping performance.
Maintaining performance targets in these categories helps you create an excellent customer experience and build a successful business on Amazon.
Customer Service Performance
Customer service performance is the first section in the account health dashboard. It helps measure customer satisfaction with your products and services.
Order Defect Rate
To determine customer service performance Amazon uses Order Defect Rate (ODR).
ODR is measured over 60 days and includes the percentage of negative feedback, successful A-to-z claims, and credit card chargeback.
Customer feedback
Customer feedback is a review shopper leaves on your product’s listing. It is considered negative if the shopper leaves a product review of two stars or less.
A-to-z guarantee claims
A-to-z guarantee ensures that the product shoppers purchase on Amazon is delivered timely and in good shape. If the buyer is unsatisfied with the product and can’t settle the issue with the seller, they can file an A-to-z guarantee claim to Amazon. With an A-to-z claim, buyers can ask Amazon to investigate a dispute about the order and resolve it.
If a buyer wins the A-to-z claim and gets a refund, this negatively impacts ODR.
Chargeback claims
A chargeback happens when the order amount is refunded to the buyers because of a dispute or return.
ODR target: ODR should be kept lower than 1%.
Product Policy Compliance
Product policy compliance is the second section in the account health dashboard. It covers intellectual property issues, authenticity concerns, product condition inconsistency, and other Amazon policy violations.
If you receive a notification of a policy violation, you should respond to Amazon immediately. This may mean that someone has filed a claim against you or you failed to comply with Amazon policies.
Suspected intellectual property violations
Suspected IP complaints are potential intellectual property rights misuse or violations. If Amazon notifies you about Amazon account health IP claims, it means that they suspect your listing violates intellectual property rights. If you don’t react to their suspected IP claim notification, they may deactivate your listings or even your account.
Suspected intellectual property violations often happen because you added the wrong brand name to the title or the Brand field.
For instance, if you mentioned in the listing title that you sell “accessories to iPhone,” but the product itself belongs to another brand, Amazon may consider this suspected IP violation. If you correct the brand name, the listing may reactivate automatically, and the account health defect will be removed.
Received intellectual property complaints
Received intellectual property complaints are claims of rights or brand owners submitted to Amazon that confirm your listing infringes IP rights. Similar to suspected intellectual property violations, this claim involves intellectual property rights, but you need to address these violations differently.
Contact the rights owner and obtain a retraction or authorization letter, or reply to Amazon and attach invoices confirming your product purchase.
Related: What is Amazon IP Complaint? How to Avoid IP Complaints
Product authenticity customer complaints
Product authenticity customer complaints mean that Amazon received a claim that your product is not authentic. Amazon refers to violations related to product authenticity as intellectual property violations. Therefore, you need to check on your suppliers, verify the authenticity of the products you source, and store all purchase documents, such as purchase orders and invoices, to prove the product's origin.
Product condition customer complaints
Product condition customer complaints mean that customers filed a complaint that a product you sold to them doesn’t match the condition described on the product detail page; your product listed as “New” has signs of wear, is damaged, or has defects.
Product safety customer complaints
Product safety customer complaints mean that the shopper complained to Amazon that your product is unsafe. Often, product safety complaints are not related to product safety itself. They may result from a damaged product or alleged used product.
Listing policy violations
Amazon gives you a warning of listing policy violations if you are not in line with their listing policy. Listing policy violations appear if you create duplicate listings, inconsistent variations that don’t comply with Amazon variation policy, and more.
Restricted product policy violations
To list restricted products, you must receive approval from Amazon. If you sell one of the products in the restricted category or a restricted brand without Amazon approval, this is considered a restricted product policy violation.
Related: Amazon Restricted Products – Complete Guide for Sellers
Customer product reviews policy violations
Customer product reviews policy violation means infringement of Amazon reviews policy. For instance, they don’t allow sellers to review their own items or competitor products. You can’t ask a buyer to make, change, remove a review or incentivize them to leave a positive review with refunds and discounts.
Product policy compliance target: 0% (you should avoid all policy violations).
How to Avoid Amazon Policy Violations?
In order to proactively avoid problems with your account health, IP claims, and other Amazon policy violations, you can use Seller Assistant Аpp. It’s an all-in-one extension that incorporates the features vital for product research.
Advanced IP Alerts can immediately tell you if a product has any sales restrictions or has led to problems with account health in the past. Another functionality, Restriction checker, shows a red closed lock icon if a product is restricted right on the Amazon search page or product pages.
Shipping Performance
The shipping performance is the third section in the account health dashboard. It measures shipping and tracking services quality and whether the products were shipped on time. The most important metrics it includes are late shipment rate, pre-fulfillment cancel rate, and valid tracking rate.
Late Shipment Rate
The late shipment rate (LSR) is the ratio of orders confirmed after the expected shipping date and total orders over 10 or 30 days, expressed in percentage. LSR only applies to seller-fulfilled orders.
LSR target: Sellers must maintain a late shipping rate under 4%.
Pre-fulfillment cancel rate
The pre-fulfillment cancel rate is the ratio of seller-canceled orders and total orders during 7 days. This metric only applies to seller-fulfilled orders.
Pre-fulfillment cancel rate target: Sellers must maintain a cancelation rate under 2.5%.
Valid tracking rate
The Valid tracking rate (VTR) measures the percentage of seller shipments with a valid tracking number. VTR is calculated over a given 30-day period. This metric only applies to seller-fulfilled orders.
VTR target: Sellers must maintain a VTR greater than or equal to 95%.
What Happens if Your Account Health Metrics Aren’t on Target?
When you sell on Amazon, they expect you to adhere to their performance metrics and policies. If you fail to do so, they may remove faulty listings or temporarily deactivate your account.
Where to find Amazon policy violations?
If you react timely to Amazon policy violations, they can be remedied. You can find all Amazon policy violations on your account in your Account Health dashboard. You need to address them as fast as you can.
If you have any notifications from Amazon about policy violations on your Account health dashboard, you can review all details by clicking View details in the Product Policy Compliance section. There you can find the violations history, current status, and the following steps to resolve the issue.
How to address Amazon policies violation?
Amazon gives you guidance on how to proceed with the violations for each item in the Next Steps column.
Typically, they will ask you to provide a Plan of Action (POA) within 48 hours. POA should confirm that you understand the problems and outline how to address them.
What is Account Health Rating?
Another indicator of your account health is Account Health Rating (AHR). To maintain ‘Healthy” account health, timely address all policy violations. If your Amazon account health is “At Risk| or “Critical,” your account may be deactivated.
AHR rates your account health in three colors - green for “Healthy,” orange for “At risk,” and red for “Critical.”
Final Thoughts
When you sell on Amazon, you must provide high-quality customer service and comply with all applicable policies. Amazon helps you do so. They measure your performance using different metrics aggregated in the account health dashboard.
If you violate any Amazon policies, they may remove your listing or even deactivate your account. As a rule, you can reinstate it by submitting the appeal to Amazon, but it takes time and effort.
A good solution is to use Amazon seller tools to keep your account in good standing and proactively avoid Amazon policy violations. Seller Assistant App helps you immediately see if a product has any sales restrictions or has led to problems with account health in the past. It combines an FBM&FBA profit calculator, Quick View, Stock Checker, and Restrictions Checker in one tool.
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