Helm › Helm University › Track 9 › Lesson 9.2
Lesson 9.2The payout tier, and its two clocks
Three tiers, and a design decision worth understanding because it was made in your favour.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Work out your own tier, and explain why promotion and demotion count different things on purpose.
The three tiers
| Tier | Reached at | Hold after delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Introductory | Everyone starts here | 14 days |
| Standard | 5 released orders | 7 days |
| Express | 25 released orders | 2 days |
A released order means one where your money actually reached you. Orders in flight do not count toward promotion; completed ones do.
Two clocks, deliberately different
This is the part worth understanding, because it is unusual and it was chosen in your favour.
Promotion counts your whole history. Someone who has already shipped 25 clean orders does not lose express because they had a quiet month. Your record is your record.
Demotion counts a rolling window. Only recent evidence can drop you. The reasoning, in Helm's own words, is that without this a bad patch two years ago followed a seller forever and the only way out was volume, which is exactly what a penalised seller has least of.
Good history is permanent. Bad history expires.
The window
The rolling window is the last 60 days or the last 30 orders, whichever covers more. If you sell rarely, the 60 days is doing the work. If you sell constantly, the 30 orders is.
It counts only orders that were actually charged, which is the same set your own order list shows. Abandoned and cancelled checkouts are not evidence either way. That is deliberate too: if they were counted, a burst of abandoned carts could push real refunds out of a 30 order window and hide them.
What moves you down
Exactly one thing: a refund rate above 5% inside that window. Nothing else. Not slow shipping, not a bad review, not a complaint, not a report.
And it outranks volume completely. A seller with a thousand orders and a 6% refund rate is on introductory, waiting 14 days, the same as somebody on their first week. Volume is not evidence of a clean record.
Getting back up
Because demotion uses a rolling window, recovery is automatic and needs no appeal. Clean orders push the bad ones out of the window, the rate falls back under 5%, and your tier returns on its own the next time it is calculated. Nobody has to decide anything.
There is nobody to write to, and that is a feature rather than a gap.