Suspension, reports, and the outer edge

This lesson prepares you to: Know what suspension actually is, what triggers a report, and what recourse exists.

Suspension is an account action, not a shop metric

Helm can suspend or ban an account. It happens at the sign in layer, so a suspended account cannot do anything at all rather than losing selling specifically.

There are two shapes:

• Time bound. Suspended until a date. It expires by itself and you are back with no action needed from anybody.
• Indefinite. No end date. It stays until somebody lifts it.

A ban is permanent and never expires.

You are told which, and the reason is included in the message if one was recorded. There is no silent suspension.

What triggers it

A person decides. There is no automated suspension in Helm, no threshold that trips it and no metric that leads to it. Your refund rate cannot suspend you. Bad reviews cannot suspend you. Not shipping cannot suspend you.

The realistic routes are the obvious ones: selling something that breaks the Shop policies you accepted when you applied, or a pattern of buyer reports.

Reports

A buyer can report a shop, and this is deliberately their recourse when a refund is declined. Track 6 sets out the rule directly: an explicit decline is final, Helm does not sit in judgement over a seller's storefront, and the buyer's route from there is to report the shop.

A report is a signal to staff rather than an automated action. One does nothing on its own. That cuts both ways, and the honest reading is that declining refunds you should have granted does not cost you anything immediately, and accumulates into the one thing that can end your shop.

What recourse you have

Being straight about this. There is a formal appeal process for reviews. There is no documented appeal process in the codebase for a suspension. If it happens, contacting Helm is the route, and it is a conversation rather than a mechanism.

That is a gap worth naming rather than dressing up.

The whole of it, in one place

What happens	What it costs you	Recovery
Refund rate over 5%	Payout hold goes to 14 days	Automatic, as the window rolls
A bad review	Your public rating	Reply, or appeal if it breaks the rules
Not shipping	The sale, and the money stays held	Ship it, or refund it
Policy breach	Potentially the account	Talk to Helm

Nothing else on Helm measures you. That is a smaller list than most marketplaces and it will grow. When it does, this track will say so.