Shipping Rules - Overview

Overview

Shipping Rules are records you create in the control panel. The are used to offer manually created shipping rates that will only be offered to the customer when certain conditions are met. These conditions are defined using Squirrelcart's Rule System. If more than one shipping rule applies to a given order, Squirrelcart will only offer the rates for the rules that have the largest priority number.

Here is an example scenario:

In this example, let's assume that you have 5 shipping rules created in your control panel.

These 3 rules are assigned a priority of 1:

Offer free shipping for orders over $30 via USPS Priority when the Weight Total of the order is greater than 0
Offer USPS OverNight for $15.00 when the Weight Total of the order is greater than 0
Offer FedEx Ground for $8.00 when the Weight Total of the order is greater than 0

These 2 rules are assigned a priority of 2:

Offer USPS Global for $25.00 when the Weight Total of the order is greater than 0
Offer FedEx International for $32.00 when the Weight Total of the order is greater than 0

Now, if the Weight Total of the order is 20lbs, then all 5 of these rules apply to the order. Only the last 2 rules are actually used to offer rates to the customer, because they have a larger priority number (2) then the other 3 rules, and therefore take precedence.

Creating a Shipping Rule

Open the control panel
Click the Shipping Rules menu link
Fill out the form, and Click . Use the Record Overview below as a guide.

Record Overview

Name
This is for your use only. The customer does not see this.

Shipping Cost
This is the amount to charge for shipping if the condition is met. You may enter either a decimal only in this field. If you wish the amount to be an actual currency value, set the 2nd field to your currency symbol. If you wish to charge a percentage, set it to a % sign. The 3rd field is described below:

Shipping Cost Is (not labeled)
This field controls how the shipping cost will be applied.
Possible Values:

per order - if set to per order, the shipping cost will be applied once, for the entire order
per item - if set to per item, the shipping cost will be applied once for every item in the order

Shipping Method
This field controls the shipping method that the rate will be offered for

Priority
This field controls the priority that the shipping rule will have. The larger the number, the more priority it will have.

Enabled
This field controls whether or not the rule will be enabled, and can be unchecked to temporarily disable a shipping rule.

Rules
The rules section allows you to specify when this shipping rate will be offered. If there are no rules assigned, the rate will be offered at all times (provided there isn't an applicable shipping rule with a larger priority number). You can offer rules based on just about any criteria you can think of. The rules use Squirrelcart's Rule System, which is described in detail in the Managing Your Store > Rule System section of the documentation.

If you create rules that are based on address information, don't forget that the Customer rule type only applies to the information in an actual Customer account. If you want a shipping rule to apply based on address information regardless of whether or not the customer has an account, you should use the Order (in progress) rule type.