Helm › Helm University › Track 9 › Lesson 9.1
Lesson 9.1There is no shop health score
Other marketplaces grade you. Helm does not, and it is worth knowing exactly what it does instead.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Name the three things that actually judge a shop on Helm, and stop looking for the one that does not exist.
Start with what is not there
If you have sold on other marketplaces you will be looking for a dashboard with a score on it, a defect rate, a late shipment percentage and a strike count. Helm has none of those.
Specifically, and this was checked rather than assumed:
- No shop health score.
- No strikes, no violations, no warnings.
- No defect rate.
- No late shipment metric. As track 4 lesson 4.5 covers, there is not even a shipping deadline to be late against.
- No seller standards framework of any kind.
We would rather tell you that plainly than invent a framework to sound like a grown up marketplace. When one is built, this track will document it.
The three things that do judge you
Three mechanisms exist, they are completely separate, and only one of them is automatic.
| Mechanism | What it decides | Who runs it |
|---|---|---|
| Your payout tier | How long your money is held | Nobody. It is arithmetic. |
| Reviews | What buyers see about you | Buyers, with an appeal to staff |
| Suspension | Whether you have an account | Helm staff |
Why the tier is the one that matters
Of those three, the payout tier is the one you will feel. It decides whether you wait 2 days or 14 days for every sale, it moves on its own, and most sellers do not know it exists until they notice the money is slower.
The next two lessons are about it in detail, because understanding it is worth actual money.
No human sets any of this
The tier is worth trusting for a reason that is unusual: there is no admin screen that overrides it and nobody at Helm can move you up or down. It is computed from your own order history every time it is needed. Nobody can be favoured and nobody can be punished.
What this means practically
You cannot lose your shop for being slow, because nothing measures speed. You can lose money to a longer hold, and you can lose customers to reviews. Those are the two levers that exist, and both of them respond to the same thing: fulfil what you sell, and refund quickly when you cannot.