Allegro has redesigned sales quality. Customer service now accounts for half your score

Everything changed, even though you did nothing

A typical scenario for the coming weeks looks like this. A seller opens the panel in mid-September. They ship just as quickly as in July, respond just as quickly, and have the same customers and the same offers. Yet the quality level is lower than before the summer holidays.

This is not a system error or a penalty. It is simply a different system.

Allegro announced the reform on April 27, 2026. After a wave of feedback from sellers, it published an updated version on May 20—with several concessions, which we will discuss shortly. The original implementation date, July 27, was postponed by a month to give sellers time to get used to the “New results” tab. The new rules ultimately took effect on August 26, 2026.

The stated goal is clear: the sales quality level should be affected exclusively by actions within the seller’s control. Hence the removal of metrics that some in the market regarded as a lottery.

What exactly has changed

Until August 25, the system was based on eight metrics and a pool of 500 points. Since August 26, there have been six metrics, and the pool is 400.

The level thresholds have also been recalculated. Super now means 230–400 points, Good 101–229, Neutral 0–100, and below zero means Needs improvement.

The change to the Super threshold is also a good illustration of Allegro listening to the market. In the April announcement, the threshold was supposed to be 220 points. After the May update, it was raised to 230, following a change in the way points are calculated for three metrics.

The first change in philosophy: this is no longer a point-earning system

The most important thing is not visible in the metrics table. It becomes clear only when both sides of the calculation are added together.

There are 400 points to earn. There are far more to lose. On-time shipping alone can subtract up to 460 points. Timely responses, 285. Unresolved customer cases, 200. An account block means another 300 points deducted; blocking the listing of offers together with their termination means 200; blocking listing alone means 150. There are also warnings—50 points for the first and 50 more for each subsequent one—removed offers, up to 320 points, and offers removed for serious violations: 150 points for every day on which this occurred.

A single metric can deduct more than the entire system is able to award

This is not a cosmetic adjustment to weighting. It is a change in logic. Under the old setup, a seller built their score: adding points for recommendations, quick responses and efficient shipping. Under the new one, they start with a certain ceiling and primarily defend themselves against sliding downward. The practical consequence is that optimizing what already works well is no longer the priority; eliminating individual, rare but costly incidents is.

One Allegro concession is worth noting because it goes in the opposite direction. Penalties for repeated violations of the terms have been eased: each subsequent block deducts the same number of points as the first. Previously, each subsequent one was counted double.

The second change: customer service is now equal to logistics

For years, the answer to the question “what affects sales quality on Allegro the most?” was simple: shipping. That is still true in terms of the single largest source of points—fast shipping remains worth 160 points, the most in the system.

But the overall distribution of weight now looks different. Three of the six positively scored metrics are now purely customer-service operations:

• timely responses—up to 50 points,
• fast refunds—up to 100 points,
• complaint resolution time—up to 50 points.

That makes 200 out of 400 positive points. Exactly as many as logistics provides (160 + 40). On the negative side, customer service accounts for exposure of 485 points, counting timely responses and unresolved customer cases; logistics accounts for 460.

Customer service is no longer a back office that merely has to avoid getting in the way. It has become half of the evaluation system.

The third change: the end of measuring likeability, the beginning of measuring cycle time

The removal of buyer recommendations is the most underestimated part of this reform.

For years, 100 points depended on whether customers clicked the thumbs-up button. Sellers invested in thank-you notes in packages, freebies and a warm tone in messages. It was not foolish—it worked within the rules that existed.

The rules have changed. Two time-based metrics have replaced the metric that measured sentiment: how many days it takes to decide a complaint and how many hours it takes to issue a refund. The average response-time metric, which rewarded replying “as quickly as possible,” has also disappeared, leaving timeliness—whether you responded within 24 hours.

The conclusion for sellers is uncomfortable but clear: service quality is no longer improved by tone, but by cycle time. A polite, well-written reply sent after a week saves not a single point. A terse reply sent within 24 hours saves them all.

This shifts the problem from soft skills to processes. Processes can be designed, staffed and measured—unlike customer sentiment.

Complaints: the gap between the statutory deadline and the points deadline

The new “complaint resolution time” metric is the most interesting element of the entire change because it creates tension that did not exist before.

Allegro measures the average time in which a seller accepts or rejects complaints reported during the last 30 days. Complaints resulting from problems on the carrier’s side are not included. The scoring works as follows:

Now let us compare this with the law. The statutory deadline for issuing a complaint decision is 14 days in Poland and Hungary and 30 days in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

A seller who consistently responds on the fourteenth day acts fully within the law—and receives zero points. To get the full score, they must close cases in an average of less than seven days, or half the statutory deadline.

This creates a two-track system: one deadline protects against legal liability, while another protects offer visibility. The latter is twice as short.

There is also something that removes the most common excuse in complaints. What counts is the speed of the decision, not its substance. Rejecting an unfounded complaint in three days earns exactly as many points as accepting a valid one in three days. “The case was disputed, so it took longer” ceases to be an argument—the algorithm does not see the dispute; it sees the date.

Unresolved customer cases: a penalty for escalation, not for the problem

The second new metric operates only on the negative side and checks a ratio, not an absolute number: how many cases ended with compensation from Allegro Buyer Protection compared with all Discussions and complaints from the last 30 days.

The safeguard is stronger than the table alone would suggest. Negative points are applied only when, during the last 30 days, there have been at least three Discussions and complaints as well as at least three paid compensations. An account with four cases and two compensations loses nothing. Requests resulting from problems on the carrier’s side are also excluded from the metric.

The meaning of this metric is unambiguous: Allegro does not penalize the occurrence of a problem. It penalizes the seller for failing to resolve it themselves, forcing the platform to step in. Hence the practical consequence Allegro states explicitly in its help materials: buyers should not be directed to file a Buyer Protection claim instead of having the complaint handled independently. It is convenient in the short term and costly in points.

There is also an exception worth pursuing. After the May update, Allegro does not include compensation in this metric if the situation was resolved in accordance with the law and the terms—even if the compensation entered the settlement. The condition is that the course of the case be documented. For sellers, this means that proper documentation of the complaint process has stopped being bureaucracy and become a points-bearing asset.

Pre-sale inquiries have entered the scoring system

A seemingly technical change, but in practice one of the most important: for the first time, questions submitted through the “Ask about purchase” option count toward the timely-responses metric.

Why does this matter more than one sentence in the announcement suggests?

Because pre-sale inquiries are the largest category of customer contact in e-commerce—not WISMO. Contact-volume analyses indicate that pre-purchase questions account for about 26% of all contacts, more than questions about order status. At the same time, this is the category least suited to automation, because it is the moment of the purchase decision, when customers want to talk to a person.

Until now, sellers treated this stream as purely sales-related: you respond quickly because you want to make a sale. Since August 26, it has also been scored. The channel that previously affected conversion has begun to affect visibility.

That is good news for companies that already took pre-sale questions seriously. It is bad news for those that queued them behind post-sale service, assuming that “complaints are more urgent.”

Where small businesses lose structurally

The above applies to every seller. But there are four areas where the new system hits 5–20-person companies harder than large ones, regardless of how well they operate.

1. The weekend—but not where you might look

Contrary to what can be read in some analyses, Allegro does not count response time for customer questions and messages in Discussions on Saturdays, Sundays or statutory holidays, in accordance with the Polish calendar. Christmas Eve has also been excluded from the calculation for several years. A message received on Saturday can be answered by the end of Monday.

However, the clock stops only for response-related metrics. It does not stop for shipping, refunds or counting days in complaints. A seller operating from Monday to Friday therefore loses not because of silence over the weekend, but because a long weekend eats two or three days from the average complaint-resolution time and pushes refunds beyond 24 hours.

This is an important correction to a common belief: the problem for a small company is not an unanswered message on Sunday, but an operation that has stalled.

2. The ten-order threshold

Allegro introduced a concession requested by sellers: in three metrics—complaint resolution time, timely responses and fast refunds—the absence of events means the maximum number of points. An account that sells without generating complaints is not penalized for silence.

But the condition is at least ten orders in the last 30 days. Below this threshold, half the points are awarded: 25, 25 and 50. This means the smallest sellers lose up to 100 points from a pool of 400—one quarter of the system—solely because of scale. Scale itself has become a quality factor.

3. Results calculated jointly across all markets

If a company sells on allegro.pl, allegro.cz, allegro.sk and allegro.hu, quality results are not separated by market—they are calculated together. One market served less effectively, for example one where the seller lacks language skills, lowers the result in all the others. Expanding into another Allegro country is therefore also a customer-service decision, not just a decision about the offer and logistics.

4. The cascading effect of the quality level

It is worth remembering that the quality level is not just a ranking. It is a gateway to Allegro Smart!, Top offers, the Deals Zone, Allegro Days, the automatic transaction discount, the AlleObniżka program, the SUPERCENA label and making offers available in foreign markets. Falling below the Neutral level means the risk of account suspension.

Losing points in customer service therefore does not end with a few positions in search results. It cuts a company off from promotional tools on which small businesses usually base a significant share of their volume.

Four operational decisions worth making now

The new system is so different from the previous one that the routine developed before the summer holidays needs to be reviewed. Four actions deliver the most with the least effort.

Set an internal complaint SLA shorter than the statutory deadline. If the legal deadline is 14 days and the points deadline is 7, the internal standard should be five business days, with a buffer for unusual cases. It is worth appointing one person responsible for complaint decisions, because distributed responsibility is most costly for this metric: no one monitors the average.

Enable automatic refunds in the panel. This is one configuration that effectively protects a metric worth 100 points—the most of all service metrics. The full pool is awarded for an average refund time of no more than one day, counted in calendar days from receipt of the returned parcel. Manual processing by a team that does not work weekends will regularly miss this threshold. Note two exclusions: the metric covers only returns resulting from withdrawal from the contract processed through Allegro Finanse, and returns sent by buyers using their own shipping are not included by the platform.

Treat “Ask about purchase” as a priority ticket, not a lead. Since pre-sale questions enter the scoring system, they must go into the same queue and be covered by the same SLA as everything else. Response templates for the 20 most common product questions solve two problems at once: they shorten response time and improve the quality of replies sent under pressure.

Close windows that cannot be staffed with full-time employees. This is the core problem for a 5–20-person company. Weekends, holidays, time off, the November return peak and promotional campaigns are periods when volume rises while availability falls. Hiring for these windows turns a variable cost into a fixed one and means overpaying for most of the year. Realistic options include automating the repetitive part of inquiries, introducing a rotating duty roster or outsourcing part of the service.

The last option has a specific logic for marketplaces. Selling through your own store and selling on a platform are two different regimes: in your store, poor service hurts retention; on Allegro, it is scored and translates into visibility. An increasingly common division is therefore for the internal team to retain communication through its own channel and matters requiring decisions, while a specialized partner takes over marketplace inboxes and is responsible for meeting platform parameters. In Salesupplywe handle sellers’ communication on allegro.pl, allegro.cz and allegro.sk in local languages—including coverage of weekends, holidays and seasonal peaks, when platform clocks do not stop along with the team.

Regardless of the option chosen, the order of decisions is the same: first determine where you are actually losing points, then choose a tool. Reversing the order ends with buying a solution for a problem that does not exist.

Start with the panel, not assumptions

Allegro has made a “New results” tab available in the My sales quality panel, showing the score under the new rules. This is the simplest possible starting point: half an hour with this tab will tell you more about the account’s condition than any article, including this one.

It is worth doing this now, not in November. The return season after Black Friday is when all four areas of the new system—complaints, refunds, response timeliness and escalations to Buyer Protection—come under simultaneous strain. An account entering this period with a points reserve and an organized process will get through it without losing visibility. An account entering with problems will emerge with them intensified—and rebuilding a score calculated over a rolling 30-day period takes another month.

Sources

• Allegro Help Centre, How we award points for each sales quality metric – help.allegro.com/pl/sell/a/jak-przyznajemy-punkty-w-kazdej-z-miar-jakosci-sprzedazy-k1wmx7KYmIz (the primary source for all point thresholds)
• Allegro Help Centre, How to achieve good sales quality results – help.allegro.com/pl/sell/a/jak-osiagac-dobre-wyniki-w-jakosci-sprzedazy-YWB0DbY11tg
• Allegro Help Centre, We are postponing the sales quality changes to August 26 – help.allegro.com/pl/sell/a/przekladamy-zmiany-w-jakosci-sprzedazy-na-26-sierpnia-RdreZ6eeaSb
• Allegro Community, See what we will change in the My sales quality panel (27.04.2026) – thread 1179927
• Allegro Community, See the updated changes in Sales quality (20.05.2026) – thread 1187498
• Seller panel, New results tab – salescenter.allegro.com/sales-quality#new-results
• Super Seller Program Terms – allegro.pl/regulaminy/regulamin-programu-super-sprzedawca-nnRVzPdO6iB
• Data on the structure of e-commerce inquiries – Salesupply contact-volume analysis

About the author

Damian Kuczyński – for more than 10 years, he has supported online stores in international expansion. As Head of Operations at Salesupply Customer Care and Salesupply Fulfillment Poland, he is responsible for outsourced customer service in more than 25 languages across Europe and the USA, as well as e-commerce fulfillment with warehouses in the EU, UK and USA. Creator of Marketplace365.pl– a new service on the Polish market for marketplace sellers, combining multilingual customer service with operations on platforms such as eMAG. Founder of the Cross Border Commerce Association, an international organization supporting sellers in expanding abroad, and Operations Director at Infinity Blue Poland, a marketplace agency operating in the USA, UK, UAE and South Africa.