Rules Engine

ShipHawk TMS provides a powerful rules engine to facilitate automated shipping and rating decisions for your organization. A rules engine is a software system that executes one or more commands in a sequence based on conditions set by the user. Once configured, rules eliminate the need for decision-making by warehouse associates and streamlines item fulfillment. 

The ShipHawk TMS rules engine is actually a combination of two separate rules engines: the rating rules engine and the shipping policy rules engine.

Rating Rules

The rating rules engine enacts rules that determine the rate that you see when rating a proposed shipment. This primarily concerns the rates that are shown to end-customers with in-cart rating. These rules only influence what rates are seen and concern factors such as carrier, service, method, or masked version of these factors. Using rating rules, you can control what prices you charge customers of your organization. 

Rating rules can be configured to support your organization’s shipping strategy. For eCommerce businesses who wish to simplify their shipping process as much as possible, rating rules can be created to override negotiated rates with things like table rates, for example. A table rate is a simplified and standardized set of shipping rates from which a customer may choose at checkout.

Other customers, in contrast, may wish to show real-time rates based on their organization’s negotiated carrier rates in order to transparently pass on the cost of delivery. In this case, the rating rules engine can be configured to retrieve and display services such as Ground, Next-Day, or 2-Day delivery. Some organizations that rely on shipping as a source of profit can use ShipHawk’s rules engine to mark up the shipping rates displayed to customers or mark down the shipping rates in certain circumstances to increase conversion. ShipHawk’s rules engine provides the ability to finely tune your in-cart rating in response to your organization’s overall strategy.

Shipping Policies

The shipping policy rules engine determines how ShipHawk consumes orders from an external source (do or do not import certain kinds of orders from an integration) and specifies fulfillment methods for a shipment. These rules govern how users in your organization interact with the fulfillment experience in ShipHawk. Shipping policy rules determine how ShipHawk generates the proposed shipments inside of each order, which eliminates the need for decision-making in the warehouse. Using the ShipHawk shipping policy rules engine, you can make decisions on factors such as:

• carrier, 

• service, 

• carrier account used, 

• origin warehouse, 

• which items go in each package, 

• which document templates to use,

• third-party billing, and more.

Shipping policy rules determine how we define and present proposed shipments to warehouse associates inside ShipHawk. 

For example, 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 then optimizes shipment costs by selecting the cheapest possible rate regardless of shipping speed. Or, in other cases, your organization can create shipping policies that give preferential treatment to certain VIP-tier customers by always offering them 2-day delivery services. 

Using ShipHawk’s rules engine, you can easily create rules based on your known needs at any time. You can route shipping volume to carriers and respond to real-time circumstances using ShipHawk’s on-demand rules. This functionality is available within ShipHawk’s settings and does not require additional IT configuration to manage. These rules can be enabled and disabled at any time of day, resulting in immediate changes to ShipHawk’s rating and fulfillment behavior.

Limitations

Before using ShipHawk’s rules engines, it is important to note the most important limitation. Rules do not apply retroactively to open orders. Rules only apply to new rates and rules from the time that the rule was enabled.