Every time you trade on Adwuma — every order completed, every dispute, every payout, every promotion paid for — we record signals that combine into what we call your Behavioural Reputation Score (BRS). It runs from 0 to 100. Below 40 you won't see credit offers; above 80 we start handing your file to partner lenders for serious financing. Most sellers don't realise it exists. This article tells you what moves it.
What the score measures (and what it ignores)
BRS is built from five families of signals. They roughly weight as follows:
- Reliability (35%) — dispute rate, refund rate, payout reversals. The biggest single factor.
- Volume & growth (25%) — 90-day order count, GMV trend, basket-size growth.
- Repeat-buyer ratio (15%) — what % of your buyers came back. The strongest predictor that you actually deliver.
- Maintenance (15%) — active listings, response latency to buyer messages, last-login recency.
- Tenure & willingness-to-pay (10%) — account age, KYC level, subscription history, on-time promotion-budget recharges.
BRS deliberately does NOT include rating alone (too easy to game), follower count, or any social-media presence. It's built on actions, not appearances.
The seven behaviours that move BRS up fastest
- Resolve disputes inside 24 hours, even if you take a small loss. The dispute counts whether you win or lose; how fast you resolved it doesn't.
- Refund on the same day rather than the same week.
- Reply to buyer messages within 2 hours during your trading hours. Adwuma measures response latency automatically.
- Keep at least 3 active listings, refreshed (edited or restocked) every 14 days.
- Buy the cheapest promotion tier and pay for it on time every month. Steady GH₵50/month for 6 months counts more than one GH₵1,000 splash.
- Upgrade KYC level when prompted. Going from LEVEL_1 to LEVEL_2 alone adds ~8 points.
- Bring in one good referral every quarter. The credit-worthiness of the people you refer rubs off on yours, and vice versa.
Three things that quietly drag your score down
- Going dark — no logins for 14+ days. Even one login a week is fine; total silence reads as abandonment.
- Cancelling orders after acceptance. A cancellation costs you more than a small refund would.
- Letting your listings expire without renewing. Sold-out listings should be marked PAUSED, not left to die.
Don't try to game it
BRS includes anomaly detection — sudden surges in completed orders from the same buyer phone, or fake five-star reviews from new accounts, get filtered. The fastest way to a high BRS is also the most boring: deliver well, reliably, for six months straight.
The layers above BRS
BRS is the foundation. For larger credit you can voluntarily unlock two more layers:
- Verified Cash-Flow Score — link your MTN MoMo or bank via Mono. We analyse 90 days of inflow stability and add up to +20 to your effective lending score.
- Identity Anchor — verified GRA TIN, RGD status, social vouching by 3+ verified sellers in your vertical (the Adwuma "susu circle" — modelled on how Ghanaian rotating-savings groups have underwritten informal credit for a century). This doesn't directly score, but it unlocks the GH₵50k+ tier.
When you'll see the offer
BRS recomputes every 24 hours. Once you cross 40, micro-credit offers start appearing in your dashboard inbox. Once you cross 60, small-business loans appear. Above 80, our partner lenders see your file for working-capital and term-loan offers. You always opt in to share — we never push your data to a lender without your explicit consent.