Four figures that decide who gets offered your job
Structural filters that are non-negotiable
Before any of the fairness mechanics fire, every lead passes through these.
Verification
Only verified traders are eligible. We check identity, qualifications, and public liability insurance.
Capacity caps
If a trader is already at their self-set daily or active-job limit, they're skipped, even if they'd be the natural next pick.
Service area
A trader has to cover the lead's postcode area. We band postcodes into primary, expansion, and outside-area: primary always wins over expansion, expansion always wins over none.
Queue mode
A trader who's flagged themselves as unavailable (call queue mode = away, on holiday, etc.) is skipped.
Round-robin
Among eligible traders, we rotate the queue position so the same trader doesn't hoover up every lead.
Quality floor
A trader whose verified Tradelynx ratings fall below the floor is paused from new offers while a person reviews it. Details under customer ratings, below.
And it is all auditable
Every routing decision is written to an audit row with the full mechanics state. Traders see their own slice.
Fair distribution is built into the engine, not claimed on a page
Under free pricing, perceived unfairness is the single biggest retention risk. Every one of these is in code, and auditable per decision.
Value-aware round-robin
The classic round-robin equalises on lead count. That's fine when every lead is similar, but our leads vary in value: insurance jobs are worth more to a trader than a quick reactive callout. So we also equalise on the value we've offered you in the last 30 days, scoped to your trade. If you and another plumber are tied on the round-robin, the one we've offered less plumber-value to recently sorts ahead.
What "value" means here: we use the Tradelynx-fee proxy for each lead, the price we would charge the trader for the lead under the paid model. It's not the same as the homeowner's job value (we don't have a reliable estimate of that), but it's a defensible signal of how rich each lead is. When the homeowner-job-value data improves, we'll switch.
Newcomer ramp
A newly-verified trader with no Tradelynx track record sits behind every established trader on review count, response time, and reliability score. That's a chicken-and-egg problem.
For your first 30 days as a verified trader, you get a priority boost on a share of eligible leads. The share starts at 30% on day 1 and tapers linearly to 0% by day 30. When the boost fires on a lead, you float to the front of your round-robin band. The boost is deterministic (we hash the lead id), so a missed lead isn't bad luck, it's the same as if every newcomer rolled the same fair dice.
The boost only affects ordering. It never bypasses verification, capacity, service area, or any other filter.
Transparency
Every routing decision is auditable to the traders who were in the eligible set for it:
- Per-lead view at
/t/lead-history/[leadId]: your position in the queue, the lead's outcome, how long it took to be accepted, and the display name of the trader who won (no contact details, we never share other traders' PII). - Weekly stats at /t/fairness: leads offered, leads accepted, value offered, value won, average queue position, compared against the median trader in your trade. Only the median; we never compare against individual traders.
- This page, so traders and prospective traders can see exactly what the engine does before they sign up.
Capacity mode
Different traders run different shops. A sole-trader plumber doing two boilers a week wants different leads to a small firm running a three-van crew. So you can opt into one of three modes:
- Small jobs. Prefer leads up to £500. Bigger leads are still offered to you if no large-mode trader is available; you just sort later on those.
- All jobs (default). No preference. Existing traders stay on this until they explicitly opt in.
- Large jobs. Prefer leads of £2,000 or more. Same principle in reverse.
Capacity mode is opt-in, not enforced. You stay eligible for every lead in your area; the mode only nudges priority. There's a 7-day cooldown between changes so the mechanic can't be gamed per-lead.
Customer ratings: a tiebreak, and a floor
Only the ratings customers give on completed Tradelynx jobs count here. Ratings from other websites show on your profile and help customers who ask for you by name, but they never change the order jobs are offered in, and they can never pause you.
The tiebreak. If your verified ratings average 9.2 out of 10 or better across at least five jobs, then on about one lead in ten you sort ahead of traders you are otherwise tied with. It is the last thing the engine looks at before round-robin position, so it never takes you past a trader in a better-matched area, a trader we have offered less work to recently, a better capacity fit, or a newcomer on their ramp. Win a lead this way and you go to the back of the queue like anyone else: a small nudge, not a fast lane.
The floor. If the average of your last 10 rated Tradelynx jobs falls below 6 out of 10, or you receive three ratings of 2 out of 10 or lower within 90 days, new job offers pause automatically. Your dashboard tells you why, the jobs you already have carry on, and a person on our team reviews it and decides whether to restart your offers. The pause is a hold, not a suspension: nobody is suspended or removed from Tradelynx without a person deciding. If your offers restart, only ratings from then on count towards the floor.
The four things this engine will not do
No paid priority
No review-count gate for newcomers
No PII leakage between traders
No silent overrides
Three places to look if a decision feels wrong
- Your fairness summary shows your stats versus the median for your trade.
- The per-lead history page (link from the lead detail) shows the decision for that specific lead.
- Email support@tradelynx.co.uk and we'll pull the audit row. We never claim the engine is perfect: if it's misbehaving for you, we want to know.