Amazon Account Health Guide: Keep Your Selling Privileges Safe

Amazon Account Health is your dashboard for selling privileges. Poor Account Health leads to listing restrictions, reduced Buy Box eligibility, and ultimately account suspension. Understanding what drives Account Health lets you protect your business proactively.

Two components of Account Health: Performance Metrics and Policy Compliance.

Performance Metrics — four key rates: Order Defect Rate (ODR) must stay below 1%. ODR includes negative feedback rate, A-to-Z claim rate, and chargeback rate. This is Amazon's primary measure of buyer satisfaction. Late Shipment Rate must stay below 4% — relevant for FBM sellers who ship their own orders. Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate must stay below 2.5% — cancelling orders after confirming them hurts your score significantly. Valid Tracking Rate must be above 95% — buyers and Amazon need to track orders.

FBA sellers have an advantage: FBA performance is under Amazon's control, not yours. Amazon's own fulfillment failures do not count against your metrics.

Policy Compliance — the Account Health Score: Amazon uses a score from 0-1000. Different violation types deduct different amounts. Critical violations (counterfeit, policy abuse) deduct more than minor violations (missing required attributes). Amazon says accounts can face deactivation when the score falls below certain thresholds — the exact threshold changes and Amazon does not publish it.

Responding to violations: every policy violation in Account Health has a "View" button linking to the specific violation details and a way to respond. Always respond through Account Health, not through Seller Support — they are separate systems. A Plan of Action (POA) should explain: what happened (root cause), what you fixed (corrective action), and how you prevent it from recurring (prevention plan). Be specific. "I will improve my processes" is not a POA.