Seller Performance Measurement

Amazon places a high importance on maintaining the trust of our millions of satisfied buyers. We have established performance targets for sellers so that buyers can shop with a sense of safety and security about their third-party transactions.

Seller Performance Targets

All sellers should be working toward achieving and maintaining a level of customer service that meets the following seller performance targets:

• Order defect rate: < 1%
• Pre-fulfilment cancel rate: < 2.5%
• Late shipment rate: < 4%

Failure to meet these targets may result in the removal of your selling privileges.

Measuring Seller Performance

These Customer Metrics are used to measure seller performance:

Order defect rate (ODR): This is the percentage of your orders that have received a negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim or a service credit card chargeback. It allows us to measure overall performance with a single metric.

• A seller who maintains a low percentage of negative feedback reflects our customer-centric philosophy. One- and two-star ratings are considered negative.
• A seller who works proactively with customers to resolve order problems will avoid most A-to-z Guarantee claims. We measure your claims rate using the percentage of all orders, of any status, that involved a claim.
• When a buyer disputes a purchase charged to their credit card with their bank, it's referred to as a service chargeback request.

Pre-fulfillment cancellation rate: This is the number of orders cancelled by a seller prior to shipment confirmation divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. When computing this metric, we consider all order cancellations initiated by the seller for any reason.

Late shipment rate: This is the number of orders with a shipment confirmation that is overdue by 3 (or more) days divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. Orders that are ship-confirmed late may lead to increased customer contacts and negatively impact customer experience.

Refund rate:  This is the number of orders refunded by a seller divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest. When computing this metric, we consider all refunds initiated by the seller for any reason.

Performance Review and Notification Process

Monitor Your Performance with the Customer Metrics Tool

We strongly encourage you to monitor your performance regularly using the Customer Metrics tool in your Seller Account. This tool provides data on all of the performance metrics so you can easily see if you are meeting our targets. Learn more in the Customer Metrics FAQ and Customer Metrics Scorecard Help.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I check my feedback, A-to-z Guarantee claim, and refund rates to ensure that I'm in compliance with the seller performance targets?

A. Please use your Customer Metrics to track the quality of the customer experience that you provide. Each seller can view only their own metrics and must log in to do so. Your customers will continue to see the same feedback information on your Seller Profile.  To reach your Customer Metrics page from your seller account, click "Customer Metrics" on the Performance tab.

Q: Will you ever change the terms of the seller performance targets?

A. Yes. We do anticipate making adjustments to the seller performance targets over time. We also expect to expand the number of performance metrics that we expose to sellers.

Q: What can I do to improve my performance?

A. The answer for each seller is slightly different. All sellers should use the following best practices:

• Carefully describe and categorize items to avoid any customer confusion.
• Provide helpful and timely customer service.
• Carefully pack items to avoid any damage that might occur during shipping.
• Ship orders within 1 to 2 business days.
• Provide post-transaction support (refunds, returns, and exchanges) to help ensure customer satisfaction.

Learn more about seller best practices.

Additionally, we notify sellers by e-mail every time an A-to-z Guarantee claim is filed against their account. To ensure that the A-to-z Guarantee claim is not processed, it is important that you quickly respond to the claimant and resolve the dispute.

Q: How will I know if Amazon.com thinks I'm a poor performer?

A. Compare yourself against the seller performance targets. If you, like most of your peers, are meeting these targets, then Amazon doesn't consider you a poor performer. Amazon will contact sellers with serious performance problems via e-mail.

Q: How does Seller Performance Management benefit the seller community?

A: The standards benefit sellers in two ways. First, they set clear performance expectations. Sellers will understand the difference between an excellent seller and an underperforming seller. Underperforming sellers will have the opportunity to make operational adjustments.

Second, by establishing and maintaining a platform that provides a great customer experience, we anticipate a greater number of repeat purchases in addition to positive word of mouth. Sellers will directly benefit from both.

Q: Why are you counting refunds against a seller?

Some refunds represent a quickly processed return, or an order cancelled at the customer's request. These are excellent customer experiences and we do not intend to punish sellers for providing this basic level of service.

However, in our marketplace the vast majority of refunds are due to inventory availability and accuracy problems. A low refund rate demonstrates a seller's ability to fulfill on inventory promises. For media product lines, the 5% refund rate threshold should more than accommodate buying customer requests for returned or cancelled orders.

Q: Why are my sales numbers listed with my performance data?

A: Your sales numbers are there to put the other numbers in context. Refunding 100 units is a lot if you only sold 120 units, but it's small if you sold 10,000 units.