Every service marketplace has the same trust problem. A buyer lands on a seller’s page, knows nothing about them, and has to guess whether this person will deliver. Reviews help, but a seller with two five-star reviews and a seller with two hundred look similar at a glance. A badge fixes that, as long as it means something.
The test for a badge is simple: can anyone buy it, or does it have to be earned? A badge that can be bought, claimed or handed out freely tells a buyer nothing. WP Sell Services works out seller levels from what sellers have actually done on your marketplace, and it does the arithmetic for you.
This guide covers the four levels, the exact thresholds, how often they refresh, what sellers are told when they move up, where an admin can override, and one honest note about a requirement that isn’t measured yet. Seller levels are part of the free plugin.
The four levels
A seller sits on one of four levels:
- New Seller. Where everyone starts.
- Rising Seller. The first earned level.
- Top Rated. The highest earned level.
- Pro Seller. Granted by an administrator only. The plugin never assigns it automatically.
That last one is useful. Earned levels are about performance on your site. Pro Seller is your own mark for people you’ve vetted yourself, for example a professional agency you recruited directly.
What the plugin measures
Rising and Top Rated each have a set of requirements, and a seller must meet all of them. The numbers are:
- Rising Seller: 5 completed orders, an average rating of 4.0, at least 3 reviews, on-time delivery on 80 percent of completed orders, and 30 days since the seller’s profile was created.
- Top Rated: 25 completed orders, an average rating of 4.7, at least 10 reviews, on-time delivery on 90 percent of completed orders, and 90 days since the profile was created.
Each of those has a precise meaning in the code.
Completed orders counts orders with a completed status. An order that was cancelled or is still in progress doesn’t count.
Average rating and review count use approved reviews only. A review waiting in moderation doesn’t count yet.
On-time delivery is the share of completed orders that were finished at or before their delivery deadline. If a seller completes ten orders and eight arrive by the deadline, the rate is 80 percent. A seller with no completed orders has a rate of zero.
Days active counts from the creation of the seller’s profile on your site, not from their first order. A seller who signs up and waits still builds days, but they can’t reach a level without the orders and reviews as well.
The time requirements matter for planning. Even a flawless seller needs 30 days on the platform for Rising and 90 days for Top Rated. On a brand-new marketplace, nobody can be Top Rated for three months.
A note on response rate
The level table also lists a response rate: 80 percent for Rising and 90 percent for Top Rated. I want to be straight about it. The plugin doesn’t track a response rate for sellers today. The profile has no stored value for it, and the level calculation treats every seller as meeting it. In practice, the requirements that decide a level are the five above.
If you plan to tell sellers that they must answer messages quickly to be promoted, that isn’t enforced by the level system. Set that expectation in your seller terms and your own moderation instead.
How often levels refresh
Levels aren’t recalculated the moment an order closes. A recurring background job recalculates every seller’s level once a week. It runs through Action Scheduler, the same job queue WooCommerce uses.
That has two effects. A seller who completes their twenty-fifth order on Monday may wait until the next weekly run to see Top Rated. And a seller whose numbers slip can drop a level at the next run. Say this clearly in your seller guide so nobody is surprised by the timing.
What sellers are told
When the weekly run promotes a seller, two things happen. The seller gets an in-app notification titled “Congratulations! Level Up!” that names their new level, and an email goes out as well, using its own template. Developers can also listen to a hook that fires on promotion and passes the seller, the new level and the old one.
A drop in level is applied without a message. The code only notifies on promotions. If you want to tell a seller when they lose a level, you’ll need to build that on the level-updated hook, which fires on every change.
Where buyers see it
The level shows in three places. A service card in the listings carries a badge for Rising Seller, Top Rated or Pro Seller, and shows nothing for a New Seller. The seller card shows the level, and the seller’s own dashboard shows it too. Buyers see the badge while they browse, which is the moment a trust signal matters most.
The REST API exposes levels too. There’s a route for the signed-in seller’s level, which can include progress details, a route for any seller’s level, and routes that return the list of levels and the requirements for each one. A custom front end can use them to build a progress bar.
What a seller can do to move up
Because the rules are plain, you can tell sellers exactly what to do. Each habit maps to a number the plugin tracks.
- Deliver before the deadline. On-time delivery counts completed orders finished at or before the deadline. An early delivery can only help.
- Ask for a review after each order. Rising needs three approved reviews and Top Rated needs ten. A seller with great work and no reviews can’t move.
- Protect the average. The rating is an average over every approved review, so a single poor review matters less as the total grows.
- Be patient with the clock. Days on the platform can’t be rushed, and the weekly run decides when a new level appears.
The on-time rate is calculated across a seller’s whole history of orders, not a recent window. One late order early on fades as more on-time orders pile up, but it never disappears entirely. That’s fair to buyers and gives a seller a clear reason to treat every deadline seriously from the first order.
Where an admin steps in
Open a seller’s detail in the Vendors admin screen and look for the Seller Level (Admin Override) section. It shows the level the plugin calculated and lets you set any level manually, including Pro Seller.
There’s one detail worth knowing before you use it. The weekly job skips sellers who are on Pro Seller, because that tier is admin-only. It doesn’t skip anyone else. If you manually set a seller to Top Rated and their numbers don’t qualify, the next weekly run will set them back. So:
- Use Pro Seller for sellers you want to keep at a trusted level whatever their numbers.
- Treat a manual change to New, Rising or Top Rated as temporary.
Commission by seller level
Levels also connect to money. Pro adds commission rules, and one of the rule types works by seller level. You could take a lower commission from Top Rated sellers, as an incentive to earn the level and stay. The vendor payouts guide covers how commission and payouts work, and the Pro rules sit on top of that.
For developers
The thresholds are fixed in the plugin. There’s no setting for them, and the filter that exists on the level list changes what the REST route returns, not how levels are calculated. If you need different numbers, the supported route is to manage levels by hand with the override and keep the automatic ones as they are.
You get two routes under the seller-levels path (the list, and one level’s requirements) and two on the vendor side (your own level, and any seller’s level). There are also two action hooks, one when a level changes and one when a seller is promoted. That’s enough to build a custom badge, a progress meter or a message for demotions.
Planning your launch
A new marketplace has no history, so everyone is a New Seller on day one. A few habits help:
- Decide whether you’ll hand out Pro Seller to your first vetted sellers, so buyers see a trust signal from the start.
- Explain the levels on your seller onboarding page, with the numbers above.
- Remind sellers that on-time delivery counts. Late orders drag the rate down, and they only recover through more on-time orders.
- Keep reviews moderated and prompt. Pending reviews don’t count toward a level.
- Tell sellers that levels refresh weekly.
The two marketplace modes explained post helps with the bigger structural decision, and guiding an order from payment to completion shows where completed orders and deadlines come from.
Test it before you announce it
Use a test seller and a test buyer.
- Create a test seller and confirm the level starts as New Seller.
- Complete five small orders on time with approved reviews of four stars or better.
- Rising also needs 30 days since the profile was created, so use an older test seller or wait. Check the Vendors screen to see what level the plugin calculates.
- Run the weekly recalculation from your scheduler and confirm the level changes and the notification and email arrive.
- Set the seller to Pro Seller by hand, run the recalculation again, and confirm it stays.
- Set a different seller to Top Rated by hand, run it again, and confirm it resets.
Where to go next
The features page lists the rest of the marketplace toolkit, and Free vs Pro shows what needs Pro. The pricing page has the plans.