Automation rules are very powerful and can help assign shipping services automatically to the orders based on certain criteria of your choosing.
Setting the rules for shipping services will help speed up the dispatch process and ensure that the correct service is selected at the time of shipping but shipping services are not the only use of rules.
You can also apply tags to your orders or enable a printing template to be printed at the time of pressing ship on the order you are dispatching.
In this guide:
When a rule will apply
The IF criteria
Then- the action that needs to be carried out
Setting the carrier and service to ship your order.
Apply printing templates and have them print at the time of shipping
Add internal notes to the order
Create your first rule
Click on Settings and then select Rules
2. Click "+ new rule for"
The first job here is to give your rule a name. This is important to identify the rule for future edits. Good practice would be to give the rule a descriptive name of what the rule is intended to do for example: "Next day delivery" "Apply priority tag" etc.
When
The next section is to decide when the rule will apply to an order.
The options are:
When an order is created - This means that the rule will run against the order upon creation in Veeqo. So that would be when the order arrives in Veeqo or if a manual order is created.
When an order is created or updated - This means that the rule will not just run against created orders, but also orders that have been updated in some way.
When an order is updated - This is useful for orders that were possibly not eligible for the rule to run against it due to not having the correct criteria but after an order update it now has the desired criteria and can now have the rule applied.
IF
Once you have decided on when the rule should run, you can now start building the criteria that are required for the rule to do what you need it to do.
Firstly, there is a dropdown list of options that you can use to build the rule. Take the time to click into each of these options to see what secondary options they give you.
In this example I have chosen for the rule to apply based on the channel the order has come from.
2. Once you select an option, it gives you further options. On the first dropdown, you get the option to choose if the criteria you have chosen is equal to or not equal to.
In this scenario, we will choose equal.
3. The next dropdown is where you select the channel that you want the rule to apply to.
The criteria are: IF the CHANNEL is EQUAL to DeanTestStore.
Additional rule criteria
There may be a requirement to add further criteria that you need the rule to meet. If you do need to add more, follow these steps:
click on the + Add Rule icon at the top right.
Now you can see that an extra part has appeared for you to select another option from the dropdown.
2. At the top left you now have the option to select "AND" or "OR". These options are there to give you the choice to have all of the criteria match which is the AND option. Alternatively, you can use the OR option to have the rule match one or the other criteria. That is useful to combine a few rules together that will have the same action outcome.
3. You can then follow the steps above to add the additional criteria to your rule.
For example, if you select "Allocation weights", "Has one with greater than" and set a weight to identify a product in the order that has a weight higher than what we set as the required weight.
This rule will now catch on an order IF the CHANNEL is DeanTestStore AND the WEIGHT is GREATER than 2000.
Rule groups
Sometimes a little bit more complexity is needed to make a rule work. A Rule group is used when you need to have both an "AND" and an "OR" in a rule.
To add a rule group, follow these steps:
Click on "Add group". You will see a new section appear.
To get the additional "AND" and "OR" options, you should click on the "Add rule" button and you will see the new options appear.
Now you can build the rule to make use of the additional options available
This rule is now set to only act on an order IF the CHANNEL is DeanTestStore, Allocation weights are greater than 2000 and either UK postcode does not begin with IV, BT "OR" ORDER TAG does not contain Second class shipping.
Then
Now that we have the criteria that need to be met, we want the rule to do something.
Setting a carrier
Tick the "Set preferred shipping options" tick box to enable the carrier selection.
On the carrier dropdown select the shipping carrier.
3. Once you have selected the carrier, you can select the preferred shipping service from the dropdown. The dropdown shows the available services to you.
4. There may be more options or enhancements that are available. This will depend on the service chsoen
In this scenario, I have chosen 1st and 2nd class account mail, and the options for this service have now been revealed.
5. Go through the dropdown menus and select all that are required.
6. Now that all the carrier services and options are selected, you can save this rule.
Apply Order tags
You will need to tick the "Apply order tags" tick box.
On the dropdown, you can select the tag that you need the order to have.
Note! The order tags need to be created before they can be added to the rules.
Apply printing templates
Tick the "Apply printing templates" tick box.
Now you have the option to print specific templates.
If you have a specific Invoice template that needs to be printed and auto selected when you print an invoice, you can select that template from the dropdown. This means that when you print an invoice from the orders page it will look at the rule and know what template to use.
If you would like an invoice to only be printed at the time of shipping, you can enable this by selecting "Auto-print at the time of shipping" tick box.
The packing slip dropdown will also allow you to select the desired template that you would like to print at the time of shipping.
Note! Both of the dropdowns will only show you the available templates to you on your account and any templates that you have created yourself.
Add internal notes
There may be a requirement to add internal notes to an order to pass the information on to the picking/packing team or any note that you may need to be added.
Tick the check box to apply an internal note
Enter the note you would like to add to orders that match the criteria you set
The internal note will be added to an order in the Internal note section which you can see by opening up the order on the orders page.
Note! It can be really helpful to add an internal note with the name of the rule. This means you will be able to see which rules have caught on an order and will help you to identify conflicting rules
Save your Rule
Once you have completed your selections and are happy with the new rule you have created you can save the rule by clicking on the "Create Rule" Blue button at the bottom of the page.