Why your Glovo rating dropped and what actually changes it
Glovo tells restaurant operators exactly what a bad rating is made of, in one sentence, which is rarer than it should be. Glovo states that “Customers give bad ratings whenever they experience that their order has missing or wrong products or if the meal tastes bad or has a bad quality.” That is a two part definition: accuracy and quality. Notably absent from it is lateness, which Glovo tracks separately as waiting time. So on Glovo a slow but accurate store and a fast but wrong one land in different metrics, even though both customers were unhappy.
The rating then feeds a specific place in Glovo’s ranking. It is not a standalone reputation number, it is one third of a factor, and knowing which factor changes what an operator should chase.
Where does the Glovo rating sit inside the ranking?
Inside Partner Performance, one of four factors Glovo names for positioning stores in the app. The four are Conversion Rate, Partner Performance, Newness and Fairness, and Distance Factor. Glovo describes Partner Performance as covering “ratings, waiting time and cancellation rates”, and adds the time it takes to prepare dishes and when the order ready button is pressed.
Glovo states the effect plainly: “Partners who perform better in terms of ratings, waiting time and cancellation rates, will be ranked higher in the wall.” The wall is Glovo’s term for the store list a customer scrolls. So a rating drop on Glovo has a documented placement consequence, unlike on Bolt Food where the published account of search does not mention ratings at all. Source: sell.glovoapp.com.
Why does a Glovo rating drop cost more than the rating itself?
Because it sits in a loop with conversion. Conversion Rate is a separate ranking factor, and a store’s rating is one of the most visible things a customer weighs before tapping a listing. A rating fall therefore hurts twice: directly, through Partner Performance, and indirectly, by reducing the conversion that is measured as its own factor.
Newness and Fairness works against the recovering store as well. Glovo names it as a factor that gives newer partners a chance to be seen, which is sensible for the marketplace and unhelpful for an established store trying to climb back. An operator planning a Glovo recovery should assume the placement recovers more slowly than the rating does, because two of the four factors have to catch up rather than one.
What are the three things inside Glovo’s Partner Performance?
Ratings, waiting time and cancellation rates, and each is a different behaviour on the floor. Ratings, by Glovo’s own definition, are about missing or wrong products and about food quality. Waiting time is about how long the customer or the courier stands there, which is why Glovo explicitly mentions when the order ready button is pressed. Cancellation rates are about orders the store did not fulfil at all.
Pressing order ready early is the failure that operators most often create for themselves, because it looks like an improvement to the waiting time metric and is not. A dish marked ready before it is ready shortens the recorded preparation time and lengthens the courier’s actual wait, and it also increases the chance of the order leaving incomplete, which is precisely the thing Glovo names as a cause of bad ratings. The two metrics are connected through a single button.
How does a Glovo store fall into a bad rating spiral?
Through missing items, more often than through cooking. Glovo’s definition puts “missing or wrong products” first, and missing items have a compounding property that bad taste does not: they usually mean the store was busy, understocked or working from a menu that no longer matches the shelf. All three of those recur, so the same cause produces a run of bad ratings rather than an isolated one.
Menu accuracy is therefore the highest leverage fix available. An item that is listed while unavailable will either be substituted, refunded or silently omitted, and each of those reaches the customer as the restaurant’s failure. On a platform that names missing products as the first cause of low ratings, keeping the catalogue honest is not administration, it is the rating work.
Does a Glovo cancellation hurt the rating or a different metric?
A different one, and the distinction is useful. Cancellation rates sit alongside ratings inside Partner Performance rather than inside the rating itself, so a cancelled Glovo order damages placement through its own channel. What it does not do is give the customer an order to rate, which means a store with a high cancellation rate is publishing a rating built only from the orders it managed to complete.
That produces a misleading pair of numbers. A store can hold a respectable rating while cancelling a tenth of its demand, and a manager reading only the rating will conclude the store is performing. Glovo’s ranking sees both, and the store drops down the wall anyway. Any honest read of Glovo performance has to put the cancellation rate next to the rating rather than under it.
Can a Glovo partner dispute a customer rating?
We found no published dispute or removal route for a store rating in Glovo’s partner materials. Glovo documents an Excellence Score for courier partners in detail, including how positive and negative customer reviews are counted against orders delivered, but that is a courier mechanism, not a merchant one, and it should not be read across to stores.
Glovo also does not publish, for stores, an averaging window, a minimum number of rated orders before a score is displayed, or a threshold at which the platform restricts something. We are not going to invent those. What is documented is the causal definition and the ranking placement, and both are actionable without knowing the arithmetic.
One practical note on timing. Glovo’s ranking factors are continuous rather than assessed on a monthly date, unlike Deliveroo’s Marketer check or Wolt’s Best of Wolt reassessment, so there is no cliff edge to prepare for and no single day when a store’s position is decided. That sounds gentler and is not, because it removes the deadline that would otherwise force a chain to look. A store slides gradually, and nothing on the calendar makes anybody check.
What should a multi city Glovo chain actually watch?
The rating per store, the waiting time per store, and the gap between them. Because Glovo bundles three metrics into one ranking factor, a store can be losing placement for a reason its rating does not show, and a store with a healthy rating and a long waiting time will look fine on a reputation report and still be sinking down the wall.
The other thing worth watching is the spread across a city. Glovo’s Distance Factor means a customer’s results are local, so two branches of the same brand compete against different neighbours, and a rating that is adequate in one district is uncompetitive in another. Glovo puts the rating inside a ranking factor rather than treating it as a standalone score, so the useful comparison is a store against the stores near it rather than against a company average. Kitchain (kitchain.co) records each Glovo store rating daily, which shows a chain which branches are drifting and how fast.
Glovo as a platform, its partner tools and the ways a store stops appearing are covered at kitchain.co/aggregators/glovo/.