If your orders have shipping rates quoted from multiple carriers or services, you can create an Automation Rule to automatically select the cheapest option.

For example, you can compare all quoted rates for an order and automatically assign the carrier and service with the cheapest rate.

⚠️ Important: Once an Automation Rule has run against an order, the changes cannot be undone through Automation.

We recommend creating new Automatic rules as Inactive, then using Dry run to check which orders will match before making the rule Active.

Go to Settings > Automation and click New Rule.

Enter a Title that makes it easy to identify what the rule does.

For example:

Select cheapest shipping rate

For Type, select:

For a new Automatic rule, leave Active turned off while you set up and test the rule.

Click Add Condition Group.

For this example, we want ReadyToShip to select the cheapest quoted rate for all orders imported from a particular store.

Select Store.Store Name as the Trigger and set the condition to match the required store. This would be the Name you have called your store in your ReadyToShip store settings.

When an order is imported from this store, it will match the rule.

Click Add Action and select:

Select Cheapest Rate

ReadyToShip will compare the shipping rates already quoted for the order and assign the carrier and service with the cheapest rate.

For this example, leave Carriers set to:

All carriers

This allows ReadyToShip to compare the quoted rates across every carrier.

Note: This action only compares rates that have already been quoted for the order. If an order has no quoted rates, the order is skipped.

⚠️ Important: Select Cheapest Rate selects the cheapest rate quoted for the order. You cannot use this action to find the cheapest rate for a particular service type, such as Express.

For example, if an order has these quoted rates:

Select Cheapest Rate will select the $8.50 Standard Shipping rate. It cannot be configured to ignore Standard services and select the $12.00 cheapest Express rate instead.

You can limit the comparison to particular carriers, but not to particular service types.

Use the Carriers field to select the carriers you want included in the comparison.

ReadyToShip will then select the cheapest quoted rate from those carriers.

If you leave the Carriers field empty, ReadyToShip compares the quoted rates across all carriers.

Click Save, then use Dry run to check which orders match.

Check that the rule is identifying only the orders where you want the cheapest quoted rate selected.

If the correct orders are returned, set the rule to Active.

ReadyToShip will now automatically select the carrier and service with the cheapest eligible quoted rate when a matching order is imported.

You don't have to apply the cheapest rate to every order. You can use other Triggers to control which orders the rule applies to.

For example, you could use Shipping.Selected Carrier & Service if you only want to select the cheapest rate when the customer chooses a particular shipping method at checkout.

If you have other Automatic rules that assign or change carriers and services, the position of this rule is important.

Make sure any rules you want applied before the cheapest rate is selected are positioned above it.

If you don't want another rule to change the carrier and service after the cheapest rate has been selected, turn on:

Stop after this rule — no further rules run when this rule matches

See Set the priority of Automation Rules for more information about rule order and Stop after this rule.