Forty-nine five-star ratings and one 1-star with no comment. That's a 4.92.
Annoying, but fine. The trouble starts when it isn't just one.
The number you're protecting
Shipt wants an average of 4.70 or higher across your last 50 ratings. Anything from 1.00 to 4.69 shows as "At risk" on the Stats screen, and 4.7 sits on Shipt's deactivation page right next to the 90% on-time and 90% reliability minimums.
Think of it as points. Fifty perfect ratings is 250. A 4.70 needs 235. So across the whole window you've got 15 points to lose, a 4-star costs you one, and a 1-star costs you four.
Four 1-stars spend sixteen. That's a 4.68 even if every other member in the window loved you.
Four stars is the one that gets you
Everybody panics about the 1-star. Wrong rating to lose sleep over.
Plenty of members treat four stars as a good grade. Nothing went wrong, they just don't give fives to anybody, and Shipt's own forgiveness page says it will honor a member's rating "even if you don't agree with it," because members rate by their own standards.
Run the numbers. Fifteen 4-stars in your last fifty, every other rating a five, and you're sitting at exactly 4.70. The sixteenth puts you at 4.68. No complaint, no missing item, no angry text. Roughly one member in three being stingy with a star.
Hold onto that for the rest of this, because nearly everything Shipt forgives is aimed at the dramatic rating, not the drizzle. It's also the best argument for paying attention to which members reliably hand out fives, since those are the people worth building a preferred list around.
What Shipt forgives without you asking
There's a pattern filter running in the background. If a member "has consistently given poor ratings across the platform," their below-five ratings get pulled from your stats. That's the member who gives every shopper a 2 regardless, and Shipt announced the feature in November 2022. You won't see it happen. You'll just notice a rating you expected to hurt didn't.
Severe weather and app outages also get rating and late forgiveness automatically.
And once you've received at least 50 ratings, your single lowest rating stops counting toward your Last 50 average.
The automatic drop only holds one
People hear "Shipt drops your lowest rating" and assume it's a running eraser. It isn't.
One rating gets dropped at a time. If a lower one comes in later, the new one takes the slot and the old one goes back into your average. Shipt's own example: your lowest is a 3-star, so it's dropped. A month later you get a 2-star. Now the 2 is dropped and the 3 counts again.
So it's a buffer for one bad day. Not two.
Your dropped rating also stays visible in your ratings breakdown, which is why so many shoppers are convinced the drop didn't work. It did. The breakdown just doesn't hide it.
Reliability has its own version of this. Shipt automatically forgives one of your last 50 offers dropped in the hour before or during the delivery window.
Asking for the rest
Past the automatic stuff, it's the Rating Forgiveness form. The link is at the bottom of the Stats screen in the app, and the same form is on the Shopper Hub. What Shipt says about it:
- Any shopper can ask, including new shoppers under 50 orders who don't get the automatic drop yet.
- Shipt says it'll follow up within 72 hours.
- It can accept or deny any request.
- "Excessive requests will not be reviewed." There's no number for what counts as excessive.
- Delivery Only orders don't qualify. DO customers can't rate you in the first place.
That excessive-requests line should decide how you use the form. File on every 4-star and you're asking to get tuned out, with nothing published to tell you where the line is. Save it for the ratings where you can say in two sentences what happened and why it wasn't on you.
Half the list out of stock and every sub approved in chat. A member who knocked you for the price of their groceries. A bag left precisely where the delivery instructions said to leave it. Those are requests worth writing.
A sub you picked without texting first is a different animal. That's a substitution habit to fix, and forgiveness won't fix it for you.
Late forgiveness is a separate form
Late means not delivered before the end of the delivery window. Shipt doesn't mention any grace period.
The Late Forgiveness form works the same way as the rating one, with a link at the bottom of Stats. Shipt expects you to have followed its on-time tips before asking, and weather and outages are forgiven without a request.
People forget this one exists, and it's arguably worth more. Ninety percent of fifty leaves room for five late orders, which is one of the things new shoppers tend to learn the hard way. One store with a broken checkout lane can eat two of those in an afternoon.
Why there's a formal process at all
For years, forgiveness was something you heard about from other shoppers in a Facebook group. Then Minnesota sued.
In a settlement announced September 26, 2025, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison closed out a 2022 lawsuit claiming Shipt misclassified shoppers as independent contractors. Shipt paid the state $800,000. Nothing in the agreement reclassifies anyone.
What it did do was write forgiveness into a court document. Shipt agreed to "institute an electronic process by which Shoppers can request ratings and late forgiveness" and to describe it on the Shopper Hub. Another clause requires Shipt to ask members for a reason whenever they rate below five stars, with an "other" option.
Read the definitions, though. The agreement defines a Shopper as someone working at Shipt retail partners in Minnesota or for Minnesota customers, so the legal obligation is Minnesota's. The two forgiveness pages Shipt posted sit on the same Shopper Hub every shopper uses, both last updated November 26, 2025, and neither one says it's limited to a single state.
Which order was it, though
Most forgiveness requests die right here, before anybody types a word.
Your Stats screen shows how many of each star you've received and which feedback tags members picked. Shipt won't tell you which member rated which order, and says so outright, to protect member anonymity. And members have unlimited time to rate after delivery, so a 2-star that lands tonight could belong to this afternoon or to something you delivered three weeks ago.
A request that says "here's what went wrong on this order and why it wasn't my fault" needs you to know the order. Then it needs you to remember what actually happened on it.
Feedback tags narrow it down, but only against some record of what each order was like. Date, store, address, whether there were subs, whether it ran late, whether the member went quiet on you mid-shop. Most shoppers have their memory and the Shipt app, and the Shipt app keeps less than it used to. It dropped the order total from payment history this summer.
One line of notes per order is enough. It's the difference between a request you can write and a rating you eat.
When your average dips
Check whether there was an outage or a storm that day. If so, give it time, that forgiveness is automatic.
Then check whether the automatic drop is already holding something worse. If your lowest is a 1-star from last month, a new 3-star isn't getting dropped.
Last, ask whether you can name the order and a cause outside your control. Yes means file. No means the fix is the next fifty orders, and a sharper eye on the members who never give fives.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app that saves every order, tip, and address automatically, so when a rating lands days later you can look back and see which orders it could have been.