Your ad reports and your Amazon account health dashboard measure two different things, and only one of them decides whether you keep selling. ACOS, ROAS, and impressions tell you how your campaigns are doing. The account health dashboard tracks whether Amazon still trusts you to fulfill orders, keep customers happy, and follow its rules. You can run the most profitable campaigns of your life and still get deactivated, because nothing in your advertising touches the numbers that matter here.
Most sellers miss this. They watch one scoreboard all day and never check the other one until a policy notification lands. Here is what the account health dashboard actually tracks, what each number means, and why your ad metrics cannot warn you about any of it.
TL;DR
• The Amazon account health dashboard tracks three things: customer service, shipping performance, and policy compliance. Advertising is not one of them.
• Your Account Health Rating runs from 0 to 1,000. Green is 200 and up, yellow is 100 to 199, and below 100 puts you in deactivation review.
• The metrics that get accounts suspended are Order Defect Rate, Late Shipment Rate, cancellation rate, valid tracking, on-time delivery, and policy violations. None of them move with your ad spend.
• A single critical policy violation, like a counterfeit or safety complaint, can drop your rating to zero on its own.
• Watching ACOS while ignoring these numbers is how healthy-looking accounts end up suspended.
What the Amazon Account Health Dashboard Actually Tracks
The account health dashboard lives in Seller Central under Performance, and it scores three areas of your business. None of them is advertising.
The first is customer service performance, measured mostly through Order Defect Rate. The second is shipping and fulfillment performance, which covers how fast you ship, how often you cancel, and whether your tracking is valid. The third is policy compliance, which covers intellectual property, product authenticity, restricted products, and listing accuracy. All of it rolls into one number, your Account Health Rating.
Your ad campaigns sit in a different part of Seller Central entirely. ACOS, ROAS, click-through rate, and impressions live in the advertising console. They never feed into your account health, and a great ad account gives you zero cover when a compliance problem hits. That separation is the whole point. Amazon uses advertising to decide how much visibility you buy. It uses account health to decide whether you get to sell at all. Preventing an Amazon account suspension starts with knowing which dashboard holds that power.
The Non-Ad Metrics at a Glance
Below is the full set of metrics the dashboard scores you on, with Amazon’s threshold, the window it measures over, and what happens if you cross the line. Keep it handy. It is the difference between reacting to a suspension and preventing one.
| Metric | What it measures | Threshold | Window | If breached |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Order Defect Rate ODR | Negative feedback (1–2★), A-to-z claims, chargebacks | Under 1% | Rolling | Buy Box loss, suspension risk |
| Late Shipment Rate LSR | Seller-fulfilled orders shipped after expected date | Under 4% | 10 / 30 days | Loss of seller-fulfilled privileges |
| Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate | Orders cancelled before shipping | Under 2.5% | 7 days | Account review or deactivation |
| Valid Tracking Rate VTR | Seller-fulfilled orders with a valid tracking number | 95%+ | 30 days | Category listing suppression |
| On-Time Delivery Rate OTDR | Seller-fulfilled orders delivered on time | 90%+ | Rolling | Reduced Buy Box competitiveness |
| Account Health Rating AHR | Rolled-up policy and performance score | 200–1,000 | Real-time | Below 100 triggers deactivation review |
Customer Service Performance: Order Defect Rate
Order Defect Rate is the metric most likely to end your account, and it is also the one sellers misread most often. Amazon wants it under 1%. Cross that line and you can lose the Buy Box and land in suspension review.
ODR is a composite. It combines three things: negative feedback (1-star and 2-star seller ratings), A-to-z Guarantee claims filed against you, and credit card chargebacks. The A-to-z part catches people off guard, because a claim counts against you whether or not Amazon sides with the buyer. The claim itself is the defect.
The trap is order volume. ODR is a percentage, so the fewer orders you have, the more each defect weighs. A seller doing 50 orders a month can blow past 1% on two bad reviews and a chargeback. A seller doing 5,000 orders barely feels the same three defects. If you sell in a high-return category like apparel, where return rates run 20% to 30%, your margin for error is thinner than the raw 1% suggests.
None of this shows up in your ad reports. You can be spending efficiently, converting well, and watching your ACOS drop while a bad batch of inventory quietly pushes your Order Defect Rate toward the line. The first real warning most sellers get is the performance notification, and by then the damage to the Amazon account health metrics is already done.
Shipping and Fulfillment Performance
Four metrics live here, and they only apply to orders you fulfill yourself. If you ship it, Amazon is watching how well you do it.
Late Shipment Rate measures how often you confirm shipment after the expected ship date, over rolling 10-day and 30-day windows. Keep it under 4%. One detail catches people: Amazon calculates it from when you confirm the shipment, not when the carrier actually picks it up. Set conservative handling times so a busy week does not push you over.
Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate covers orders you cancel before shipping, usually because you oversold or ran out of stock. Amazon wants it under 2.5% over a 7-day window. Real-time inventory tracking is the fix.
Valid Tracking Rate measures the share of your seller-fulfilled orders that carry a working tracking number. You need 95% or higher over 30 days. Fall short and Amazon can suppress your listings in the affected category.
On-Time Delivery Rate is the newer one. Since September 25, 2024, Amazon expects seller-fulfilled orders to hit at least 90% on-time delivery, with 95% recommended. This directly affects your Buy Box competitiveness.
Fulfillment method changes which metrics you watch. It never removes the compliance and customer-service risk underneath.
Fulfillment method changes which of these you watch, but it never removes the compliance and customer-service risk underneath.
Policy Compliance and Violations
This is the fastest path to deactivation, and it has nothing to do with performance percentages. Policy violations are pass or fail. You either have them, or you do not.
The categories that matter most are intellectual property complaints (trademark, copyright, or patent claims against your listings), product authenticity complaints (a buyer or brand claiming your product is counterfeit), restricted product violations (selling in a gated category without approval), and condition or listing accuracy issues (the product does not match the listing).
Amazon sorts violations into four severity tiers: critical, high, medium, and low. The tier decides how hard your score gets hit. Low and medium violations chip away at your rating. Critical violations do not wait for a threshold.
High ad spend on a listing with a brewing authenticity problem means you’re paying to drive traffic to a listing that’s about to disappear.
Your advertising spend offers no protection here at all. You can be the biggest advertiser in your category and still lose the account to one unresolved IP complaint. High ad spend on a listing with a brewing authenticity problem just means you are paying to drive traffic to a listing that is about to disappear.
The Account Health Rating Score
Every metric above rolls into one number: your Account Health Rating. It runs from 0 to 1,000 and updates in near real time, so you see the impact of a violation or a resolution almost immediately.
The color bands are simple. Green means 200 to 1,000 and a healthy account. Yellow, or orange, means 100 to 199 and an account at risk. Red means below 100, which puts you in deactivation review. New accounts start at 200, right at the edge of healthy, and build from there.
One part rewards good operators: you earn 4 points for every 200 orders you fulfill successfully over a rolling 180-day window. Clean fulfillment slowly builds a buffer, and that buffer is what absorbs the occasional minor violation without dropping you into the yellow.
You will find the score in Seller Central under Performance, then Account Health. Check it weekly, not because it changes daily for most sellers, but because the one week you skip is the week a notification lands. Trends matter more than the snapshot. A rating sliding from 700 to 550 over a month is telling you something is wrong upstream, usually in customer service or a batch of inventory, well before you hit an actual threshold. Keeping your Account Health Rating out of the danger zone is mostly about catching those trends early.
ACOS, ROAS, and impressions never feed into this score. A strong ad account gives you zero cover when a compliance problem hits.
Why Your Ad Dashboard Cannot See Any of This
Picture a brand running a strong quarter. ROAS is up, ACOS is down, and the ad dashboard looks like the best it has all year. The report is full of green arrows. Meanwhile, a supplier changed a component, a batch of units shipped with a packaging defect, and returns started climbing. Negative reviews followed. A few A-to-Z claims came in. ODR crept from 0.4% to 0.9%, then past 1%. The first anyone hears about it is a performance notification and a Buy Box that has gone quiet.
Nothing in the ad account could have flagged this. ACOS measures the cost of a sale. It does not know the product arrived damaged. ROAS measures revenue against ad spend. It does not track chargebacks. Impressions and click-through rate say nothing about whether an IP complaint is sitting unresolved in your case log.
That is the blind spot. Advertising metrics describe demand and efficiency. Account health metrics describe reliability and compliance. They answer different questions, and the account health questions are the ones that keep you in business.
A clean ad report is not proof your account is safe. If the only dashboard being watched on your behalf is the advertising console, half the risk is invisible. An agency that optimizes its report instead of your account can hand you a beautiful ACOS chart the same week your ODR breaches. The ad metrics were never going to catch it. Understanding how ACOS and profit actually relate is only half the picture. The other half is the health score that ad performance never touches.
None of these metrics surface in a campaign report, which is how a seller can read a strong monthly ad summary while the account quietly slides toward review. It’s also how you end up with an agency that optimizes its report instead of your account, where the numbers on the deck look fine and the account health page tells a different story. For the prevention and recovery side this dashboard can’t show you. Our complete guide to Amazon account health and suspension prevention picks up where the metrics leave off.
Amazon’s Real Thresholds vs. the Buffer You Should Hold
A lot of advice online lists safety numbers as if they were Amazon’s actual limits. They are not the same thing, and mixing them up either scares you for no reason or gives you false comfort.
Amazon’s enforcement thresholds are the lines in the table above: ODR under 1%, LSR under 4%, cancellation under 2.5%, VTR at 95%, and OTDR at 90%. Those are where Amazon acts. Your own alert should sit well below them.
Amazon’s thresholds are where enforcement starts. Your alert should fire well before you get there.
What Changed on the Dashboard in 2026
Two recent shifts are worth knowing. Amazon replaced the old Customer Reviews dashboard with a Voice of the Customer view (Seller Central, Performance, Voice of the Customer) in late 2025. It now assigns each of your products a CX Health rating, from Excellent down to Very Poor. Your Poor and Very Poor products are the ones dragging your account-level numbers down, so they are worth checking weekly.
Amazon has also tightened on-time delivery expectations for Prime-eligible sellers heading into 2026. If you run Seller-Fulfilled Prime, your delivery performance is under more scrutiny than it was a year ago.
Watch the Right Dashboard
Your Amazon account health dashboard shows you where the risk sits. Acting on it before it costs you the Buy Box is a separate job, and it is not one your ad reports will do for you. If you want a team watching the metrics your advertising never shows, see how Selouse handles Amazon account management.
Frequently Asked Questions
What metrics does the Amazon account health dashboard track?
It tracks customer service performance (mainly Order Defect Rate), shipping and fulfillment performance (Late Shipment Rate, cancellation rate, valid tracking, and on-time delivery), and policy compliance (IP, authenticity, restricted products, and listing accuracy). All of it rolls into your Account Health Rating. Advertising performance is not part of it.
Do Amazon ads affect your account health?
No. ACOS, ROAS, impressions, and click-through rate live in the advertising console and never feed into your Account Health Rating. Strong ad performance gives you no protection against a suspension caused by shipping problems, customer complaints, or policy violations.
How is Order Defect Rate calculated?
ODR combines three things over a rolling window: negative seller feedback (1 and 2 stars), A-to-Z Guarantee claims filed against you, and credit card chargebacks. An A-to-Z claim counts against you whether or not Amazon rules in the buyer’s favor. Amazon wants the total under 1%.
What is a healthy Amazon Account Health Rating?
Any score of 200 or above sits in the green, healthy band. The scale runs to 1,000, and new accounts start at 200. Between 100 and 199 your account is at risk, and below 100 you are in deactivation review.
How do I check my account health in Seller Central?
Open the Performance menu in Seller Central and select Account Health. You will see your Account Health Rating, each performance metric with its current value and threshold, and any active policy violations. Check it weekly rather than waiting for an email.
What happens if my Account Health Rating drops below 200?
You move into the at-risk, yellow band, and Amazon flags your account for attention. It is a warning stage, not an automatic suspension, but it means one or more metrics or violations need fixing. Dropping below 100 moves you into deactivation review, where selling privileges can be removed.
Does FBA improve your account health metrics?
FBA removes the shipping metrics from your plate, since Amazon handles fulfillment and keeps Late Shipment, valid tracking, and on-time delivery numbers near perfect. It does not protect you from authenticity complaints, IP issues, condition problems, or policy violations, which hit FBA accounts the same as seller-fulfilled ones.
How long does it take to recover a low Account Health Rating?
It depends on the cause. Resolving a violation updates your score in near real time, and clean fulfillment rebuilds points at 4 per 200 orders over 180 days. If your account was deactivated, reinstatement usually requires an accepted Plan of Action, after which your Amazon account health dashboard reflects the recovery as violations clear and new orders come in.
