Seller score criteria, how the Buy Box works, real profit after commission and shipping, and a weekly operating rhythm — a Trendyol store management guide with actual numbers.
On Trendyol, revenue is not decided by listing products — it is decided by running the store as an operational discipline. This guide covers what the seller score actually measures, how the Buy Box is won, what is really left after commission and shipping, and which numbers to review every week.
Opening a Trendyol store is free and takes a few hours. The hard part comes afterwards: winning orders against dozens of sellers listing the same product. The mechanisms that decide this — seller score, Buy Box ranking, shipping performance — are interlocked, and operations sit underneath all of them. Ranking bought by cutting price is handed straight back two weeks later by a shipping delay.
The guide below follows the same order we work through when managing a Trendyol store on a client's behalf.
The three levers behind sales
Revenue on Trendyol is a product of three variables: visibility × conversion × basket size. Most sellers only push the first one, and only through price. All three can be managed separately:
- Visibility — correct category, complete attributes, Buy Box position and advertising.
- Conversion — image quality, title, review count and average product rating, delivery promise.
- Basket size — bundles, free-shipping thresholds, cross-selling.
Increasing visibility while leaving conversion untouched only burns ad budget. The order matters: make the product page convert first, then drive traffic to it.
The seller score: what it measures, and what it does not
The seller score is the numeric form of Trendyol's trust in your store. It directly affects whether you can enter the Buy Box and whether you are invited into campaigns.
| Criterion | Calculation window |
|---|---|
| Failure to supply / return rate | 70% last month + 30% last 3 months |
| On-time handover to carrier | 70% last month + 30% last 3 months |
| Time to hand over to carrier | 70% last month + 30% last 3 months |
| Disputed return rate | 70% last month + 30% last 3 months |
| Return processing time | 70% last month + 30% last 3 months |
| Seller reviews | Last 3 months |
| Average product rating | Last 3 months |
| Customer complaint rate | Last 3 months |
| Question response time | Last month |
The practical conclusion: the score is weighted heavily towards the last 30 days. A bad month pulls it down quickly — and a good month pulls it back up just as quickly. One disciplined month is usually enough; closing the store in a panic is not the answer.
Sources disagree on the colour bands. The commonly repeated split is 9–10 green, 8–9 orange, below 8 red; other sources describe five tiers (above 9.0, 8.5–9.0, 8.0–8.5, 7.0–8.0, below 7.0). Verify the thresholds in your own seller panel — but under either reading the target is the same: stay above 9.0.
What the score does not measure matters just as much: campaign participation, sales volume and the commission rate you pay do not affect it. There is no "I sell a lot, so my score rises" mechanism — selling more usually makes the score harder to hold, because it multiplies the chances of a mistake.
New stores are not scored immediately. Reported thresholds vary by source (15 days and at least 5 orders after the first sale, or after 20 orders). For fairness, the last 21 days are excluded from the return criterion and the last 7 days from all others — so an improvement you make today shows up in the panel a week later. Not knowing this leads sellers to conclude "nothing changed" and revert a change that was working.
The Buy Box: how the featured seller is chosen
When several sellers list the same product, Trendyol promotes one of them, and the large majority of orders go to that seller. The decision rests on a combination of factors rather than a single one:
- Price — the strongest signal. When your other metrics are close to a rival's, a few lira can flip the position.
- Delivery time — the algorithm favours the seller who will deliver fastest. Same-day and next-day commitments give a clear advantage.
- Seller score — 9.0 and above is advantageous. Stores in red status cannot enter the Buy Box at all; those in orange only appear low in the list.
- Customer experience — product reviews, low return and cancellation rates.
The most common mistake is reading the Buy Box as a pure price race. A store whose score has fallen below 8 cannot rank no matter how deeply it discounts — it erodes its margin and gains nothing. Price is a lever that only works once the operational criteria are level with the competition.
Commission and real profit: the anatomy of one order
Most pricing mistakes on Trendyol come from forgetting that commission is calculated VAT-inclusive and that shipping is a separate line. We cover every deduction line and a cross-platform comparison in our article on marketplace commission and profit margin. A cross-section of current rates by category:
| Category | Commission (VAT incl.) |
|---|---|
| Mobile phones | 5–6% |
| Computers / tablets | 7–10% |
| Large appliances | 9–11% |
| Supermarket / food | 10–15% |
| Small kitchen appliances | 14–18% |
| Cosmetics / personal care | 17–20% |
| Furniture | 20–22% |
| Home textiles | 21–22% |
| Clothing, footwear, bags | 21.5–22.5% |
| Jewellery / costume jewellery | 22–23% |
A concrete example. In a 20% commission category, a product sold at 600 TL including VAT with a cost of goods of 300 TL:
| Sale price (VAT incl.) | 600.00 TL |
| Sale excl. VAT | 500.00 TL |
| Commission deduction (commission + VAT) | −120.00 TL |
| Shipping | −77.54 TL |
| Cost of goods | −300.00 TL |
| Net profit | 102.46 TL |
|---|
So 600 TL of revenue leaves roughly 102 TL, about 17% of the sale price. Two things deserve attention here. First, every returned item does not merely wipe out that 102 TL — it books the shipping cost twice. In a store with a 10% return rate the real margin calculation changes completely. Second, shipping weighs disproportionately on low-priced items.
On the shipping side, the tiered support system works like this:
| Order value | Shipping cost |
|---|---|
| 0 – 149.99 TL | 34.16 TL |
| 150 – 299.99 TL | 65.83 TL |
| 300 TL and above | Standard desi-based tariff |
On a 120 TL item, shipping alone is 28% of the sale price. This is why building bundles instead of selling low-priced items individually is usually a more profitable move than cutting price. Sellers registered under the women-entrepreneur status can receive commission discounts of up to 50%; if you qualify, that is the single largest one-off improvement available to your margin.
Handover time: the fastest way to lose points
The criteria that pull a seller score down fastest are handover time and on-time handover rate. The reason is simple: the other criteria depend on customer behaviour, while these two are entirely within your control, so Trendyol shows no tolerance here.
Three adjustments that work in practice:
- Set an order cut-off. Limit the "same-day dispatch" promise to a clear cut-off such as 15:00 and roll later orders to the next day. Speed you never promised beats a promise you missed.
- Synchronise stock daily. Failure to supply is the most expensive error there is: it lowers the score and turns the order into a cancellation. If you sell on more than one channel, stock synchronisation is not optional.
- Plan Saturday evening and Monday morning separately. If orders accumulated over the weekend miss Monday's dispatch, a single weekend can wreck the monthly average.
A weekly operating rhythm
Running a Trendyol store is less about chasing campaigns than about working a regular checklist. In the stores we manage, the weekly rhythm looks like this:
- Monday — review each seller-score criterion from the previous week; where one has dropped, find the cause at order level.
- Tuesday — list the products that lost the Buy Box; was it price, delivery promise or score?
- Wednesday — clear unanswered customer questions to zero; response time is measured over the last month, so a backlog is never allowed to build.
- Thursday — check ad spend against revenue (ACoS); throttle campaigns that fall below their break-even ROAS threshold.
- Friday — verify stock and price synchronisation, prepare weekend campaigns.
- Month end — margin by category: after commission, shipping and returns, which products actually make money?
The value of this list is not in the cleverness of any single item; it is in running it regularly. What lowers a score is rarely a single disaster — it is usually three consecutive weeks of small checks that were skipped.
Five common mistakes
- Calculating margin on commission alone. Commission is not the only deduction; a margin figure that ignores shipping, returns and advertising is not real.
- Cutting price when the score drops. In red status you cannot enter the Buy Box; the discount only deepens the loss. Fix operations first.
- Incomplete attributes. A product with missing attributes disappears the moment a customer applies a filter — you lose in the filter, not in the search result.
- Dependence on a single channel. If one score drop on Trendyol stops all your revenue, channel diversification is a commercial necessity, not a technical one. Hepsiburada and Amazon Turkey are both worth evaluating as a second channel.
- Expecting results the next day. Because the last 7 days are excluded, an improvement you make shows up in the panel with a week's delay.
Conclusion
Sustainable sales on Trendyol depend on three things being right at once: a product page that converts, operations that keep the seller score above 9.0, and pricing that accounts for commission, shipping and returns together. If one is missing, the other two cannot compensate.
If you do not know which of the three is failing in your store, start with a real margin calculation by category — most sellers discover they are losing money on their best-selling product the moment they build that table.
At Commerslab we run marketplace stores on this rhythm and build the stock and price synchronisation with our own integrations. See our marketplace management service or request an assessment for your store.
The commission rates, shipping tiers and score thresholds in this article are compiled from the marketplaces' publicly published current tariffs; they vary by sub-category, sales volume and negotiated agreements, and may be updated by the marketplace. Verify the values in your own seller panel before making pricing decisions.
