Shiptheory offers two categories of shipping rules that can be created and used to determine how your orders are processed. These are regular shipping rules, and rates rules. Both of these function off the same selectable criteria, however provide a different option of carrier and service selection.
Before reading this article, it is worth understanding the basic shipping rule functionality and how to create them. You can find more information on that here.
Rates rules are currently specific and only eligible to UPS and FedEx services. This will allow you to construct a new type of shipping rule that can contain one or more shipping services where we fetch available shipping rates for the shipment before automatically booking with the cheapest rate.
Creating a New Rates Rule
Begin by heading to the shipping rules page on your Shiptheory account. Select "Add New Rates Rule":
To create a new rates rule, define the basic rule conditions first, and save. You will then notice the option provided at the top of the screen "Add New Service Option":
From here, you will want to select all of the service options you wish to be available for selection for orders matching this shipping rule. Note again that all of these services will be checked for live rates when an order is being booked, and the one with the cheapest value will be automatically selected.
Once you have added all of your service options and rule criteria, simply save the rule. Once the rule has been created, it will appear under your shipping rules tab with all other rules, and will appear similar to the following:
Advanced Settings
You will notice a new option "What should happen if a Service Options Fails?". For this, you need to answer what should happen if one of the service options selected above fails when fetching shipping rates for your shipment. You can select to continue to book your shipments, or stop them from processing.
Another option, which you'll recognise from standard rules is the ability to "Mark Shipments for Approval"
However, selecting this allows some extra functionality within rates rules; when a shipment marks for approval from a rates rule, you can view the shipment from the dashboard and see all retrieved rates from that rule pre-populated:
The cheapest option will still have been autoselected, but you can view all the other services available in your rule and select a different one if required.
Apart from the above, all advanced settings will remain the same as regular shipping rules.
Additional Notes:
When rates rules are run on shipments, the results of all rates will appear in each orders shipment history messages, detailing which methods returned which costs, and which method was selected to book the shipment. If none of the services selected have rates available for the order, the order will fail and return the following message:
