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.
Create the rule
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:
Automatic to apply the rule automatically when orders are imported.
Manual to apply the rule only when you choose to run it.
For a new Automatic rule, leave Active turned off while you set up and test the rule.
Set the Trigger
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.
Select the cheapest rate
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.
Compare rates from selected carriers only
If you don't want to compare rates from every carrier, you can use the Carriers field to limit which carriers are included.
Only quoted rates from the selected carriers will then be considered when choosing the cheapest rate.
If you leave the field empty, ReadyToShip compares rates across every carrier.
Save and test the rule
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.
Other ways to use this rule
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.
Check the priority of your rule
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.