Most advice about eBay seller standards is written for people who sell new goods in quantity. The arithmetic changes when every item is a one-off, and it changes in the direction that hurts a smaller seller most.
Here are the actual thresholds, and then what they mean for a yard.
The numbers eBay publishes
eBay evaluates sellers on the 20th of each month. Falling below the minimum standards means Below Standard status, which can bring selling limits and higher final value fees until performance recovers. Two measures decide it:
- Transaction defect rate: no more than 2% of transactions.
- Cases closed without seller resolution: no more than 2, or 0.3% of transactions.
The evaluation window is the part that catches people out. If you had more than 400 transactions in the past three months, eBay counts those three months. If you had fewer than 400, it counts every transaction from the last twelve months.
A correction worth making
Late shipment rate is widely described as a way to end up Below Standard. It is not. A high late shipment rate on its own will not drop you below the minimum standards - it is a Top Rated requirement, where the bar is 3% or lower and no more than five late shipments.
That distinction matters because the two problems have different fixes, and a yard chasing the wrong one spends its effort in the wrong place.
What 2% is, in parts
Take a yard selling around 300 parts a year on eBay. That is well under 400 in any three-month window, so the twelve-month rule applies and the whole year is the denominator.
Two percent of 300 is six. Six defects across an entire year is the difference between Above Standard and Below Standard. A seller cancellation because the part was already gone is a defect. So is a case closed without you resolving it - and there the allowance is two.
Six is not a lot of bad afternoons. It is roughly one every two months.
Why the long window is the real problem
A high-volume seller with a bad week dilutes it: the denominator keeps growing, and in three months the week is out of the window entirely. A yard doing 300 a year has neither escape. The denominator grows slowly, and a bad month stays in the calculation for twelve of them.
This is the asymmetry that makes overselling more expensive for used parts than the refund suggests. The refund is over in a week. The defect is on the account for the better part of a year, and it is competing for the same tiny allowance as every other thing that can go wrong.
The part you can actually control
You cannot control a buyer who changes their mind. You can control whether two people are able to buy the same part, which is a systems question rather than a diligence question - the stock count existing in more than one place is what produces the cancellation in the first place.
That is the case for one record owning the count, and for a sale ending the other listings as an event rather than on a schedule. It is the guarantee the product is built around, and the calculator will show you what your current rate is worth in defects rather than in dollars.
Thresholds change. These were checked against eBay's published seller standards in September 2026; if you are close to the line, read the policy rather than trusting a blog post, including this one.