Creating smart shipping rules

Shipping rules can help you process your orders faster. If you haven't set any shipping rules, ChannelDock (when processing your orders in bulk) chooses the cheapest possible shipping option for each order. Perhaps you have a different preference and an order should not be assigned the cheapest possible shipping option, but rather a more expensive option (for an express shipment, for example). This article tells you how to set up shipping rules to process your orders faster.

Setting up a shipping rule

1. Navigate to Settings > Shipping rules.
2. In the top left corner, click the green '+ New shipping rule' button.
3. A popup opens to set a new shipping rule:

• Shipping rule name: here you enter the name of your shipping rule so that it can be easily recognized later. In our example, we create a shipping rule for orders to Belgium.
• Shipping rule priority: this is the priority of your shipping rules. You can create multiple shipping rules in ChannelDock, and the priority determines whether one shipping rule is more important than another.

• Requirements: these are the conditions the orders must meet to be covered by this shipping rule. You can base these conditions on different order properties:

  
  With the ‘+ Add extra requirement’ button, you can set multiple conditions that apply to this shipping rule. For example, you can configure that if an order comes from your Belgian bol.com account and contains more than 2 products, the shipping method MyParcel parcel must be selected.
  

• Actions: here you specify which shipping method the order should receive if it meets the 'Requirements' you have set.

Tip: via 'Connections > Carriers' you can also create a custom shipping method. These custom shipping methods can be set as an 'Action' for your shipping rule. This can be useful if you want to group certain orders to be able to quickly export from ChannelDock, for example.

Activating a shipping rule rule 

After creating a shipping rule, you need to activate it by toggling the switch on as shown in the image below. From then on, the dispatch rule is applied to orders being loaded. Orders that have already been loaded by ChannelDock need to be opened (by clicking the order rule). At that point, the correct shipping method will be recalculated.