How we score.

The store is live and its public product feed answers with at least one product. Every listed store clears this, which is exactly why it is worth 5 points and not twenty — rules v0.7 cut it, because a component everyone maxes cannot separate anyone. A reachable feed with zero products earns no score at all: the profile shows “Audit in preparation”.

Depth counts DISTINCT products — the same title repeated, or a product duplicated across variants, counts once. Since v0.7 the full 25 needs 300 effective products, not 100: 100 products score 8, 200 score 17, 300 or more the full 25. A feed of 100 rows with 2 real products scores 0 points here, not 8 — and the audit flags that duplication as a con on the profile.

The fraction of products with an image on the feed, times 15. Every product photographed = 15; half = 8, because each component is rounded to a whole point. A product without an image URL counts against the whole catalog.

Only descriptions longer than 40 characters count — the floor for saying something real about a product. A bare title or a one-line “Great quality!” doesn’t clear it.

The fraction of products with a real price greater than zero, times 8. Missing prices and $0 placeholders both score nothing.

The owner proved control of the domain — a meta tag on the homepage, a file under /.well-known or a DNS TXT record, about two minutes — and answers for the data publicly. The only component a store controls directly, and v0.7 raised it from 5 to 15: standing behind your own data publicly is the strongest trust signal a store can give us. It never unlocks editing the score or the audit text; 03 lists what an owner can change.

Up to 20 points from facts beyond the feed, awarded only when we have collected them: +8 for refund + shipping policy pages that have terms written on them, +8 for a sampled product rated 4.3+ across 50 or more reviews, +4 for a sub-400 ms server response from our own probe. v0.7 moved weight here on purpose — these facts are where real stores actually differ. No fact collected means zero — never a penalty. Each fact is shown on the profile with where it was read; the audit keeps only its strongest pros, so a point does not always get a pro line of its own.

Every point is arithmetic on public data anyone can re-check — the store’s product feed, its policy pages, one sampled product page and one timed request (05) — plus the fixed claim points. There is no editor to persuade and no judgment call in the pipeline.

A score moves when the store’s data moves, or when we change a rule — and every rule change is on the changelog. Each day’s read is snapshotted, and the history is public — on every profile and in the JSON API.

Claiming unlocks a public reply under the audit and exactly +15 — accountability points. The owner can edit the store’s name, description, social links (one audit line counts them) and partner terms; the product data, the policy, review and speed facts, the audit text and the rest of the score stay out of reach. $0 placements sold — ever.