What a rule is
Settings › Rules. Each rule has three parts:
- When - the thing that happens: an order arriving, a sync failing, stock crossing a number.
- If - conditions on what happened, combined with all of these are true or any of these is true. A rule with no conditions acts every time, and the editor warns you before saving one.
- Then - what to do. Several actions can be added, and they run in order.
Rules run within about a minute of what set them off. Events keep being collected whether or not the rules are running, so nothing is lost while they are off.
Starting from a template
Start from one of these holds the ten things merchants set up most: hold a large order for a look, flag an order that cannot be filled, pause a channel whose syncs keep failing, hold stock back on a line selling faster than it is arriving. Press Use this, change anything you like, and save.
A saved rule is off until you turn it on. That is true of templates too.
Writing one
- Press New rule.
- Name it for what it does - "Hold big eBay orders" - because that is what the history will be read by.
- Choose When.
- Add conditions: what to check, how to compare it and what to compare it with.
- Add actions.
- Press Save rule, then Turn on when you are ready.
A rule that changes orders or stops a store is flagged before it saves, with a suggestion to try it against a real record first. That is the next section.
Trying it first
Try it takes the id of a real order or product and reports what the rule would do to it, changing nothing. It says whether it would match, what it would do, and what it looked at - and for a rule that would not match, which condition failed and what it saw against what it wanted.
What it did
What happened lists every run: did not match, preview, done, partly done or failed, with the record it was about. A rule's card carries how often it has matched out of how many times it has run, and when it last acted.
Deal with what is waiting runs the rules against everything queued immediately rather than waiting the minute.
Events the rules could not be run against - after four attempts - are listed under Given up on. The rules themselves are unaffected and keep running for everything else.
Turning things off
Each rule has Turn on and Turn off. Stop every rule halts all of them at once for the whole organisation; events keep being collected, so starting again picks up where it left off and nothing is thrown away.
Delete this rule removes it and its history together.