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.
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.
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
Insurance and Accessorials
Packing
Rates
Other
Similar to the rating rules engine, the shipping policy actions are extensive, allowing you to accurately generate nuanced actions. The total list includes:
Carriers
Insurance and Accessorials
Rates
Packing
Other
While these lists are already expansive, ShipHawk is continuously improving and adding more actions for ever-evolving business needs as well!
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:
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!