Have you ever needed to build a set of rules based on package dimensions, weight, or shipping rates? Or maybe you’d like to set rules where you can use packing slip A for X criteria while using packing slip B if Y criteria is involved. Managing these complicated scenarios can be difficult, and not to mention time-consuming, but with ShipHawk’s powerful rules engine, you can do it all.
With ShipHawk’s rules engine functionality, you can facilitate automated shipping and rating decisions for your organization. By executing one or more commands set by the conditions you create, these rules streamline item fulfillment and eliminate the need for slow manual decision-making that could result in a multitude of errors.
Through ShipHawk, you can build these shipping rules by setting your own set of criteria and actions surrounding factors like package dimensions, address types, order values, and more. This allows you to meticulously craft a nuanced shipping strategy that runs efficiently. By trusting ShipHawk for your item fulfillment through our rules engine, you can boost operational productivity and put your organization ahead.
Understanding The Components That Make Up ShipHawk’s Rules Engine
To better comprehend how ShipHawk’s rule engine works, the rules engine is a combination of two separate rule parts: the rating rules engine and the shipping policy rules engine.
The rating rules engine enacts rules that determine the rate you see when rating a proposed shipment. Primarily, this concerns the rates that are displayed for end-customers with in-cart rating. These rules only influence the visible rates displayed, and the only concern factors such as carrier, service, method, or a masked version of these factors. By utilizing rating rules, the user can control how customers are charged.
ShipHawk’s rating rules can be tailored to your organization’s shipping strategy with ease. For eCommerce businesses who especially want to simplify their shipping process, these rating rules can override negotiated rates with abilities like table rates, which is a simplified set of shipping rates that a customer may choose at checkout.
Contrastingly, if customers are interested in real-time rates based on their organization’s negotiated carrier rates to transparently pass on the cost of delivery. To create this case, the rating rules engine can be configured to both retrieve and display services such as Ground, Next-Day, or 2-Day delivery. The rules engine can also mark up the shipping rates displayed to customers or mark down the shipping rates in specific circumstances to increase conversion.
As for configuring the shipping policy rules within ShipHawk’s rule engine, this component is responsible for consuming orders from an external source and specifying fulfillment methods for shipments. These rules control how users in your organization interact with the fulfillment experience within ShipHawk, as these shipping policy rules determine how ShipHawk generates the proposed shipments within each order.
This process successfully eliminates the need for manual decision-making in the warehouse, resulting in an efficient fulfilment process. While using this engine, you can also make decisions on factors like carrier, service, carrier account used, and more. Shipping policy rules determine how we define and present proposed shipments to warehouse associates inside ShipHawk.
For instance, if an eCommerce organization offers free shipping on orders over a certain price total to increase conversion, they can complement that strategy with a shipping policy that optimizes shipment costs by selecting the cheapest possible rate. This functionality is meant to make your operations easier and more efficient, as ShipHawk’s rules engine can vastly improve your rating and fulfillment behavior for the better.
Configuring Your Set of Rules
To compose rating and shipping policy rules, you’ll have to work with two essential processes: criteria and actions. Criteria are the conditions that must be met in order to trigger the rule. You can specify multiple criteria per rule in order to automate fulfillment behavior for specific cases by using “and/or” logic to specify nested criteria with precision. By default, rules apply to all orders, which will apply to all orders moving forward.
Once triggered by a set of criteria, actions are the changes made by ShipHawk based on the instructions you configured in your set of rules. For instance, you can create actions set to provide free shipping for orders exceeding a certain price threshold or you can use a specific carrier for all qualifying orders. The list of action options are especially broad, granting you total freedom to impose your own set of rules.
The complete list of all the rating rule actions you can implement include:
Carriers
- Combine USPS Priority Mail Types
- Do Not Use this Carrier
- Do Not Use This Carrier Service
- Do Not Use This Kind of Carrier
- Do Not Use This Service
- Mask Carrier and Service
- Use Cheapest Service that Meets Delivery Promise (in Days)
- Use One of These Carrier Services
- Use One of These Carriers or 3PL Accounts
- Use One of These Kinds of Carrier
- Use One of These Services
- Use This Carrier Service
Insurance and Accessorials
- Add insurance for Declared Value
- Add This Accessorial for This Carrier
- Apply This Upfront Accessorial for Rating
Packing
- Add Package or Handling Unit Material’s Weight
- Set Maximum Package Value
- Set Maximum Weight for Multi-item Packages
- Set Smart Packing Configuration
- Use This Packing Material
Rates
- Create Table Rate
- Fixed Price for All Rates
- Fixed Ship Rate for SKU
- Free shipping for Cheapest Rate
- Free Shipping for This Product Category/Subcategory
- Free Shipping for This SKU
- Markdown Total Rate by this Percent
- Markup Rate by This Amount per Package
- Markup Rate by This Amount per Unique SKU
- Markup Total Rate by This Percent
- Markup/markdown Rate by This Amount
- Markup/Markdown Rate by This Amount per Pound
- Return List Rates from Carrier
- Return Only the Cheapest Basic, Preferred, and Premium
- Return Standard In-Cart Rates for Hazmat Orders
- Return This Many of the Cheapest Rates
- Round Up Rates to Cents
- Set Packing Markup Based on Estimated Material and Labor Cost
- Use closest Warehouse for Rating
- Use the 'Fastest Rate’
- Use the Best Ground Rate, excluding Flat Rate Services
Other
- Use This Warehouse for Rating
Similar to the rating rules engine, the shipping policy actions are extensive, allowing you to accurately generate nuanced actions. The total list includes:
Carriers
- Do Not Use This Carrier
- Do Not Use This Carrier Service
- Do Not Use This Service
- Set a 3rd Party Carrier Account
- Use Carrier Container
- Use Cheapest Service that Meets Delivery Promise (in Days)
- Use one of These Carrier Services
- Use one of These Carriers or 381 accounts
- Use one of These Kinds of Carrier
- Use one of These Services
- Use This Carrier
- Use This Carrier or 3PL account
- Use This Carrier Service
- Use This Kind of Carrier
- Use This Service
Insurance and Accessorials
- Add Insurance for Declared Value
- Add This Accessorial
- Add This Accessorial for This Carrier
Rates
- Set Duties and Taxes billing
- Set Shipment Billing Details
- Use the Best Ground Rate, excluding Flat Rate Services
Packing
- Set Dimensions and Weight
- Set Maximum Package Value
- Set Maximum Weight for Multi-Item Packages
- Set Smart Packing Configuration
- Use Material Container
- Use Package Preset
- Use this Packing Material
Other
- Add tags
- Assign This Warehouse to Order Line item
- Assign This Warehouse to Process Orders
- Do Not Autogenerate SPS ASN
- Do Not autoprint these documents
- Do Not Import This Order
- Exclude This SKU from Order
- Include a Return Label
- Prevent User from Booking Shipment
- Put This SKUs into New Order
- Set Destination Address Type
- Set External Shipment Fields
- Use Alternate Return Address
- Use EEI Exemption Code
- Use Specific Packing Slip
- Use Specific Packing Slip only for Proposed Shipment
- Use This Carton Label
- Use This Pallet Label
While these lists are already expansive, ShipHawk is continuously improving and adding more actions for ever-evolving business needs as well!
Go Above And Beyond With ShipHawk
Utilizing ShipHawk’s rules engine means that you can easily create your own set of rating and shipping policy rules based on your known needs at any given time. You’re capable of setting a multitude of actions, such as responding to real-time circumstances through on-demand rules or even routing shipping volume to specific carriers: the opportunities are vast.
Alongside having ShipHawk’s rules engine at your fingertips, you can also incorporate ShipHawk’s dimensioner to accurately set rules based on package dimensions and weight. By using our dimensioner, you can streamline how you capture weights and dimensions with a modern, time efficient, and cost-effective solution that writes the data back to your ERP. Available for both parcel-sized items and pallets, the dimensioner allows you to remove the time-intensive burden of collecting information manually, which results in more efficient and accurate measurements.
Some additional benefits that come with the ShipHawk Dimensioner include:
- Significant reduction in shipping costs due to the ability to know item dimensions for cartonization functionality
- Save thousands of labor hours due to the rapid weight, dimension, and image capture. When products change from the manufacturer or supplier, refresh or capture updated master data with new weights, dimensions, and product images
- Optimize storage, putaway, slotting and cube utilization in the warehouse
ShipHawk has all of the tools that your organization can rely on. Whether it’s our Warehouse Management System (WMS), the Transportation Management System (TMS), or even our dimensioner, these tools will allow you to streamline your fulfillment with the utmost level of efficiency. When it comes to pairing these tools with ShipHawk’s incredible rules engine, that’s when you can really enhance your rating and shipping policy operations in no time. If you’re interested in learning more, please give us a call today!