Seller Central shows you a dozen numbers every day, but one of them decides whether you keep selling at all: the Account Health Rating (AHR). Here's how the score actually works and the monitoring habit that keeps it boring — which is exactly what you want it to be.
What the score measures
AHR runs from 0 to 200 and blends how well you're doing across three pillars, weighted by how much each violation impacts buyers:
- Policy compliance — intellectual property complaints, product authenticity and safety, restricted products, and listing policy violations.
- Shipping performance — late shipment rate, pre-fulfillment cancel rate, and valid tracking rate for seller-fulfilled orders.
- Customer experience — order defect rate, negative feedback, A-to-z claims, and chargebacks.
Not all violations weigh the same. A single IP complaint can move the needle more than a handful of late shipments, because Amazon weights each violation type by its impact score. This is why sellers with "just one complaint" sometimes wake up to a suspended account.
The thresholds where Amazon acts
Think of the score as a traffic light, not a grade:
- Green (200 down to a healthy buffer) — you're in good standing. Don't celebrate; defend it.
- Yellow — you've accrued violations and you're within range of enforcement. Every unaddressed complaint from here is a countdown timer.
- Red — enforcement is on the table: ASIN removals, listing suppression, or account deactivation depending on violation type.
The daily habit that prevents suspensions
Every suspension we've ever reversed was, in hindsight, visible days earlier as a yellow flag nobody was watching. The habit is simple:
- Check AHR and the violation detail table once per day, at a fixed time — not when you remember.
- Treat any new policy complaint as a same-day fire: read it, classify it, start the response.
- Watch the trend, not just the number — three small dings in two weeks is a pattern worth investigating even if you're still green.
- Keep a dated log of every violation and its resolution. When Amazon asks "what have you done since," you'll have receipts.
What to do when the number drops
First, don't submit anything in a panic. Read the specific violations, fix the underlying mechanism, and only then respond — the same root-cause discipline we use in Plans of Action. If your rating is deep in red or you've received an enforcement notice, that's the moment to get a specialist involved rather than learning POA writing on your own account.
Want this habit handled for you? Account health monitoring is the foundation of every plan we run — daily checks, same-day response, and a weekly summary in your inbox.