Except the Allegro algorithm, which has just issued you an invoice. The amount depends on a variable most sellers never factor in: how many messages you get in a month.
How Allegro scores timely replies
After the sales quality overhaul of 26 August 2026 the maximum pool is 400 points, and the Super level starts at 230. The Timely replies measure ranges from −285 to 50 points and works on a single threshold rule:
- the threshold is 95% of messages answered within 24 hours,
- every 1% above the threshold earns 10 points, and the full 50 points requires 100%,
- every 1% below the threshold costs 3 points, down to −285.
What counts: questions from Discussions, from Message Centre, and those asked via "Ask the seller a question" and "Ask about the purchase". Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays are excluded from the clock, so a weekend message gives you until Monday 23:59.
The scoring is percentage-based, so the price of a single slip is not fixed. The fewer messages you get, the more each one costs you.
Why the same mistake costs different amounts
A seller with a hundred messages a month who is late once sits at 99% — still 4 percentage points above the threshold and 40 of the 50 available points. A seller with twenty messages who is late exactly once lands on 95% and gets nothing in this measure.
| Messages in 30 days | Timeliness after 1 late reply | Points in the measure | Loss vs. 100% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 90% | −15 | −65 |
| 20 | 95% | 0 | −50 |
| 25 | 96% | +10 | −40 |
| 50 | 98% | +30 | −20 |
| 100 | 99% | +40 | −10 |
The chart below shows the same thing at system scale: 50 points is 12.5% of the entire positive pool, lost to one message nobody answered within a day.
Why this is not a theoretical exercise
The Super level starts at 230 out of 400 points. The single largest pool — 160 points for Fast delivery — is in practice capped by your logistics model and cannot be changed overnight. Timely replies, by contrast, is a measure where the result depends purely on whether somebody is sitting at the inbox. At low message volume it can decide on its own which side of the threshold the account ends up on.
One more thing is worth noting: a seller nobody wrote to in 30 days gets the full 50 points in this measure, provided they have at least 10 orders. The system does not distinguish excellent service from no service at all. It does, however, distinguish a single late reply — very precisely.
What this means operationally
- Calculate your unit cost. Divide 100 by your message count over the last 30 days: that is how many percentage points one reply is worth to you. Above the threshold, each such point is 10 quality points.
- Aim at 100%, not 95%. The threshold is not a target, it is the zero line — scoring only starts above it.
- Check who answers on Friday after 15:00 and on Monday morning. Excluding weekends means the Friday and Saturday queue lands on a single day.
- Remove the single point of failure. One holiday, one sick note or one feverish day in Q4 is enough to push you below the threshold at low volume — for the whole 30-day settlement period.
The last point is usually the hardest to solve in-house, because it requires a second person with nothing to do on the remaining days. This is the moment to compare the cost of maintaining that cover against the cost of an external team. A model where the in-house team keeps sales and platform message handling moves to Marketplace365 turns a fixed cost into a variable one and removes the dependency on one person.
Sources
- Allegro Help for sellers, "How we award points in each sales quality measure", as of 1 September 2026: help.allegro.com
- Allegro Help for sellers, "We are postponing the sales quality changes to 26 August", 24 June 2026: help.allegro.com
For over 10 years he has supported online stores in cross-border expansion. As Head of Operations at Salesupply Customer Care and Salesupply Fulfillment Poland he runs outsourced customer service in 25+ languages across Europe and the US, and e-commerce fulfilment from warehouses in the EU, UK and US. Founder of Marketplace365 and of the Cross Border Commerce Association.