It is possible to add a schedule to shipping rules so that shipments can be sent to carriers at a later date. By default, all shipments that match a rule with a carrier and service on will be booked instantly. However, sometimes you may like to hold orders placed on a certain day, or after a certain time and ship them the next day.
In the advanced settings from the edit/add rule page, you will see the below field...
This field accepts a number of natural language terms as well as other special terms. Supported terms are below.
Supported Shipping Rule Schedule Terms
The following terms are accepted in the shipping schedule field and are all case insensitive.
Supported Terms:
- Next x_day
- Next x_day at x_time
- First x_day of x_month
- First x_day of x_month at x_time
- Last x_day of x_month
- Last x_day of x_month at x_time
- + x_number days
- + x_number days at x_time
- + x_number hours
- + x_number minutes
- tomorrow
- tomorrow at x_time
- next available x_time
- next available at x_time
- today at x_time
- channel ship date (See 'Placeholders Explained' below)
For example, to set up a rule that creates labels on the following Monday when the time the shipment is received by Shiptheory, you would enter "Next Monday":
Or to add a 2-hour delay to shipments matching the rule, you would enter "+ 2 hours":
| Placeholders Explained | |
x_day | Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday |
x_month | January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December |
x_number | Whole number. 1, 10, etc. |
x_time | Time in a 24-hour format, e.g. 13:45 |
| channel ship date | By entering the words "channel ship date" in the schedule field, the schedule will be set by the shipping date the sales channel provides for the order. This is useful for scheduling shipping label creation based on what a customer has selected during checkout, for example. Note: Not all channels or carriers support shipping dates, please refer to this document to see if your channels and carriers are supported. Important: If the shipping date sent by your sales channel is empty or in the past, the schedule will be updated to be 2 minutes into the future. If the shipping date is altogether invalid, the label will not be scheduled and will be marked Failed. |
| next available | Schedules for the next available time. If time selected has already passed for the day it will schedule it for tomorrow. |
| today | Schedules a time for today. If the time selected is already passed the shipment will fail. |
Manually Shipping, Retrying and Cancelling Scheduled Shipments
When a shipment is scheduled. the status of the shipment in Shiptheory will show as "Scheduled" and a note will be added to the shipment history:
There are a number of notes you should be aware of when using shipping rule rescheduling:
- Retrying a shipment that matches a scheduling rule will create multiple schedule notes on in the shipment history, but only 1 event will run for that shipment if multiple events are scheduled to occur at the same time, in which case, a note will appear on the shipment history that reads "Duplicated schedule events skipped".
- Shipping the shipment manually after it has been scheduled will change the status of the shipment in Shiptheory; if the shipment status is not "Scheduled" at the time the event is due to take place, the scheduled event will not take place and a message will show on the shipment history: "Shipment status has changed since being scheduled. Ignoring scheduled events".
- At the time a shipment is scheduled to ship, all channel data will be downloaded again, meaning any changes you may have made to the shipment between the time the shipment was downloaded and the scheduled event is due to take place, will be overwritten.