How to Create a Shipping Rule for Carrier Selection

Create Shipping Rules for Carrier Selection

Users may choose which carriers or carrier services are offered for selection based on rules or conditions set at the company level.

Info
For users to access this feature, make sure the permission set is enabled for the user role. For Shipping Rules this permission is called Manage Shipping Rules and sits within the Broker permission set.




How to access Shipping Rules screen

Navigate to Admin then Shipping Rules.


Note: ensure you are in the correct Parent or Child account when creating or making edits to the Shipping Rules. Any changes will only apply to the opened account. 

You will be presented with a list of current rules and their status. You can modify a rule by clicking on the  button and choosing Edit, Clone or Enable/Disable.

You can create a Shipping Rule by clicking the Create Shipping Rule button.


First time users will be presented with a guided tour of the interface.

When creating a Shipping Rule users will be presented with three options for building a rule.
  1. Use the AI tool in plain language to describe a rule
  2. Select from a list of commonly used templates
  3. Manually create the rule.

AI Rule Creation

  1. Simply type a rule in plain language in the text box or use a pre-canned text template.
  2. Once done press Generate rule for the AI tool to return the proposed rule, based on the text.
  3. Click Add This Rule if you are happy with it, or you can regenerate the rule, if its not what you were after.
  4. Add This Rule will create the rule  in the rule builder for you to review.
    2. The rule will show when this rule will apply in natural language and you can modify or change the rule at any section and it will automatically update.
  5. The name of the rule will automatically generate based off the AI rule.
  6. To complete creation, choose if this rule is to be enabled or disabled on creation (Default is Yes) and select Create Shipping Rule
Note: using the AI builder natural language you can only choose the carrier in the text, if you want to go down to the carrier service level you will need to manually select it in the Action box.

Template Rule Creation


  1. Choose from the top four templates or click the Show All Templates chevron to display all available templates
  2. Click the template box and it will display in the builder below.
  3. This will create the rule automatically in the rule builder for you to review.
    1. The rule will always display when this rule will apply in natural language and you can modify or change the rule at any section and it will automatically update.
  4. The name of the rule will automatically generate based off the template rule
  5. To complete creation, choose if this rule will be enabled on creation (Yes by default) and select Create Shipping Rule

Manual Rule Creation

  1. You can manually add conditions and actions by selecting the options withing the Conditions and Action boxes
  2. Use the drop down menus to customise your rule and carrier/service/account selection
  3. You will need to type your own rule name, check enable setting and select Create Rule.

Advanced Settings

There are some advanced settings which are available to provide more flexibility for power users. To access them, go to the Show Advanced button at the top right side of your screen.
  

There are three settings that you can access under Advanced Settings:
  1. Deny / Allow selection
  2. Despatch Options
  3. Company rules apply to

Deny / Allow

Controls what this rule does when a shipment matches its conditions.
  1. Yes (Deny) - removes the selected carriers and services from selection (this creates a "deny" list). This is the default setting.
  2. No (Allow) - keeps the selected carriers and services available only for shipments that match. Everything else is removed (this creates an "allow" list).

Despatch Options

This setting controls how much a matching rule removes.

A carrier or service can offer several despatch options for a route — the individual despatch dates and ETAs a customer can choose from. This toggle decides whether the rule strips out just those options, or the carrier/service entirely.

  • Yes — Removes only the despatch options that match the rule. The carrier or service stays available as long as at least one despatch option remains. Use this when you want to trim specific dates or ETAs without taking the carrier off the table.
  • No — Removes the entire carrier or service whenever the rule matches, regardless of how many despatch options it has.

Example: A carrier offers three despatch dates for a route. A rule matches one of them.

  • With Yes, that one date is removed and the other two stay selectable.
  • With No, the carrier is removed completely and none of the three dates are offered.

Company

This option allows you to choose the company that the rule applies to. Useful if you have child companies that you may want to build the rule for rather than the parent company.

As always, if you need help or have any queries regarding this, please reach out to our Support team.