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Methodology

Supplier audit

How we audit our suppliers

The supplier scoring rubric, weekly review cycle, random-sample audit protocol, and demotion thresholds behind every claim of audited supply on this site.

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Reviewed byLikes.io TeamContent Team at Likes.io

Why we publish the process

Almost every page on this site that says "real, active accounts" or "1-year refill if engagement drops" is making a claim that depends on something most SMM services keep behind closed doors: how we actually audit our supply pool. This page is that audit, written down. The five-component scoring rubric, the weekly review cycle, the random-sample protocol, the demotion thresholds — all of it.

The companion page at /methodology/real-account-definition defines the BAR every account in our supply pool must clear (the conjunctive five-point criterion: profile completeness, account age, follow ratio, recent engagement, cross-account interaction). This page documents the PROCESS — how we measure compliance against that bar at supplier scale, what triggers demotion, and what the routing layer does once a supplier fails.

The five-component scoring rubric

Each supplier in our routing pool receives a weekly composite score from 0–100 across these five components. Weights add to 100%; thresholds for probation and immediate demotion are published per-component below. A supplier's composite score determines what fraction of the coming week's orders they receive.

01

30-day drop rate

30%

What percent of delivered units (followers / likes / views) have dropped from the recipient account within 30 days of delivery completion. Computed weekly as a 30-day rolling window across that supplier's last 1,000 orders. Lower is better.

Threshold

Target: < 5% drop. Suppliers above 8% on a 30-day rolling window enter probation; suppliers above 12% are immediately demoted.

02

7-day drop rate

15%

Same metric, but the early-window cut. Drops within the first 7 days correlate strongly with platform integrity sweeps (which clear obvious bot patterns fast). A 7-day drop spike is the earliest signal a supplier's pool has degraded.

Threshold

Target: < 2% drop in first 7 days. Above 4% triggers an immediate audit-sample re-pull regardless of the 30-day score.

03

QA sample pass rate

25%

1 in every 50 orders is randomly selected for manual inspection. We pull a sample of the delivered accounts (typically 10-20 per sampled order) and score each against the published five-point real-account criterion (see /methodology/real-account-definition). Pass rate = % of sampled accounts that meet all five points.

Threshold

Target: ≥ 90% sample pass rate. Below 80% triggers immediate demotion regardless of drop-rate scores.

04

Delivery time vs. promise

15%

Median delivery completion time across the supplier's last 1,000 orders, compared against the package's stated time window. Late delivery is itself a quality signal — suppliers who can't meet their stated SLA are usually the same suppliers whose accounts are already being throttled by the platform.

Threshold

Target: median delivery within stated SLA. Two SLA misses on consecutive review cycles = probation.

05

Customer complaint rate

15%

Refund requests + refill claims + low-rating reviews per 1,000 delivered units. We weight refund requests 3x higher than refill claims because a refund means the customer judged the delivery un-recoverable, where a refill claim is recoverable.

Threshold

Target: < 1.5 weighted complaints per 1,000 units. Above 3.0 triggers probation; above 5.0 triggers immediate demotion.

The weekly review cycle

The audit cycle runs every Monday-through-Friday and is fully scripted in our internal pipeline — supplier scores, probation decisions, and demotion actions are applied automatically based on the rubric thresholds above, without weekly negotiation or operator override. Operations reviews exception cases (small-supplier buckets, missing data, scoring ties) on Friday before the next week's routing weights take effect.

01Monday 06:00 UTCData pull

Order, delivery, and complaint data from the past 7 days streams into the supplier-scoring pipeline. Supplier identity, package tier, and order volume are joined; counts that fall below 100 orders for a supplier in the prior 30-day window are pooled into a small-supplier bucket so single-order outliers don't skew their score.

02Monday 08:00 UTCScore computation

Each supplier gets a fresh weighted score across the five rubric components. The router's selection probability for the coming week is derived from the score: top-quartile suppliers receive ~55% of new orders, second-quartile ~30%, third-quartile ~12%, bottom-quartile ~3% (and only on packages where a higher-tier supplier didn't have stock).

03Tuesday-WednesdayQA sampling

Operations runs the random-1-in-50-order audit. For each sampled order, 10-20 of the delivered accounts are pulled and inspected against the five-point criterion. Pass-rate scores feed into the next Monday's review.

04ThursdayProbation decisions

Suppliers whose score crossed any probation threshold during the week receive a probation notice. Probation is a 14-day window with halved order routing and a doubled audit sample rate (1-in-25). If scores recover, probation ends; if they don't, demotion follows.

05FridayDemotion + replacement

Any supplier whose score crossed an immediate-demotion threshold is removed from the routing pool entirely. Their share of the next week's orders is redistributed to the highest-scoring same-tier supplier. The demoted supplier can re-enter the pool only after a 60-day cool-off + a fresh 1,000-order audit.

The random-sample audit

The QA sample pass rate (component 3 above, weighted at 25%) is our highest-fidelity quality signal — drop rates lag by 30 days, but a sample audit catches the same pattern in 48 hours. The protocol:

  1. 01Sampling rate: 1 in 50 orders. Higher rate (1 in 25) on suppliers in active probation. Lower rate (1 in 100) on suppliers in the top decile of scores for 4+ consecutive review cycles, freeing operations capacity for the suppliers under closer scrutiny.
  2. 02Per-order sample: 10-20 of the delivered accounts, drawn uniformly from the order's recipient list. We don't oversample the first or last accounts (a known gaming pattern where bad suppliers ship clean accounts at the start to defeat sequential sampling).
  3. 03Per-account scoring: each sampled account is scored against the published five-point real-account criterion. Each point is independent — an account fails the audit if it fails any one point, even if the other four pass.
  4. 04Pass-rate computation: percent of sampled accounts that pass all five points. Below 80% on a single audit triggers an immediate operations escalation; below 90% on two consecutive weeks triggers probation; below 95% on four consecutive weeks demotes the component-3 weight to its threshold floor.
  5. 05Audit operator rotation: no single operator audits the same supplier twice in a row. This eliminates the risk of a relationship-based scoring drift between an operator and a supplier they've evaluated repeatedly.

How the router selects a supplier

Once a supplier's weekly score is set, the router uses these rules to assign individual orders. The rules apply in order — earlier rules override later ones when they conflict.

  • Pin no single supplier above 40% of weekly orders — even our best-scoring supplier maxes at 40% of routing share, so a quality regression at any one source affects no more than 40% of orders before the next weekly review catches it.
  • Match supplier to package tier — Premium-tier orders (real-account criterion strict) only route to suppliers whose QA sample pass rate is ≥ 95%; Standard-tier orders route across the broader pool.
  • Scope by platform — TikTok orders route to TikTok-specialised suppliers, not Instagram suppliers serving TikTok deliveries. Cross-platform supplier capacity is a known quality-degrading pattern that the per-platform scoping eliminates.
  • Scope by geography — orders flagged with a geographic preference (e.g. "USA accounts") route only to suppliers whose pool has verified geographic distribution matching the preference.
  • Backoff after failure — if any supplier returns a delivery error or partial fulfilment within 48 hours of a placement, their routing weight is automatically halved for the next 7 days regardless of their weekly score. Two error events in 14 days = probation.

What we don't claim

  • We do not publish per-supplier scores publicly. The reason is straightforward: we don't want to give bad-actor suppliers a leaderboard to game. Suppliers see their own score and the threshold values; only Likes.io operations sees the full ranking.
  • We do not claim the QA process catches 100% of drift. The 1-in-50 audit sample is statistically powerful for catching systemic quality issues but will miss isolated incidents — a small pocket of bad accounts in an otherwise-good supplier pool can slip past until the 30-day drop-rate signal catches up. The auto-refill mechanic exists exactly for that gap.
  • We do not claim our scoring rubric is industry-leading or unique. Most reputable services aggregators run something similar. Our two specific bets: (a) the conjunctive five-point real-account criterion at the supplier-acceptance bar (most aggregators use weaker criteria), and (b) the 40% concentration cap that prevents any single supplier from compromising more than 40% of orders during a quality regression.
  • We do not retroactively re-score historical orders. A supplier demoted today doesn't trigger refund-on-trust for orders that supplier shipped two months ago — those orders are evaluated against their delivery-time pass/fail and the auto-refill 2-year window. If a customer raises a specific concern about a historical order, support evaluates it case-by-case against the methodology pages, not against the demoted supplier's recent score.

Related methodology

How to cite this methodology

Likes.io — Supplier QA process (revised 2026-05-05). https://likes.io/methodology/qa-process

Machine-readable copies of every methodology page are available at /llms.txt.