What you need to know about the Shopware Rule Builder

In our everyday lives, rules and conditions are what make our lives orderly and structured. Without rules and conditions, everything would have degenerated into absolute chaos long ago. 

So it's no surprise that it's exactly the same in our online world. Rules and conditions in your Shopware store make your store look orderly and, above all, work properly. For this reason, Shopware 6 has released the Rule Builder. 

Through the Rule Builder you have the possibility to create individual business processes and flexibly adapt them to your needs at any time. In combination with the Flow Builder, your Shopware Shop can no longer be outdone. Learn more about the Flow Builder here. 

Shopware's Rule Builder helps you formulate guiding principles and link them together. How exactly the Rule Builder works, you will learn in this article.

What can the Rule Builder do anyway?

The Rule Builder helps you to define conditions by creating certain rules. This makes it possible, for example, to display individual product prices to customers. But also the adjustment of shipping costs is made possible. All the created rules are only visible in the backend. So you can be sure that your customer (except for the execution of the rule) will not notice anything in the frontend. 

But let's start with the basics first.

How does the Rule Builder work?

You can find the Rule Builder under Settings > Shop > Rule Builder

The Basics

Clicking on the Rule Builder opens an overview with all the rules created so far. 

The columns you see here provide you with a lot of information about these rules, the columns are:

Name of the rule, Description of your rule, Priority, Creation date and Status.  

Now you might ask yourself what this means for one or the other field. For this reason, we will now briefly explain what is meant by these fields.

Name: What did you name your rule?

Description: Your own description. What does this rule do?

Priority: You set when your rule will be applied. The numbers count in ascending order. The higher the number, the sooner the rule will be applied. For example, a rule with priority 5 is executed before a rule with priority 3. If the priority of the other rule is 7, it will be executed afterwards. 

Creation date: the date when the rule was created.

Status: Valid or Invalid. Indicates whether the rule has errors. If so, it is invalid and cannot be executed.  

How to create a rule?

A rule consists of at least one or more AND conditions. Here, very complex rules can be created by AND conditions. With OR conditions, the rule is not as strict and can therefore be implemented in a more diversified manner. In addition, there is also the possibility of subconditions. Here, marked operators can be used, which are dependent on each other. 

To create a new rule, you have to click on "Create rule" in the upper right corner.. 

 Now a mask opens, in which you first enter all general information, such as the name, the description, the priority and the operators for your new rule. Also the type (e.g. price) can be defined.

In the next field the conditions are created and operators are added if necessary. 

Operators that can be added to make a rule effective or ineffective are: Equal, Unequal, Is one of, Is not one of, Greater than, Greater than equal, Less than and Less than equal. 

These can be linked to some conditions, for example: Different addresses, number of orders, number of basket goods, manufacturer, novelties, position of the type. There are several more conditions available. Just click through to the Rule Builder to see all the possibilities.. 

Explanation of AND OR conditions

If you want to create your own rule, you should know how the AND OR conditions behave. Because if an AND is set incorrectly, the rule will not work. For this reason, you will find here, a small explanation of this procedure. 

AND: An And condition, always requires the knowledge that all conditions are met. So if the first condition does not match, the next one is not even checked and the rule is not executed. 

OR: With an OR condition, it is sufficient if one of the conditions is met. For example, if there are three OR conditions in a rule and only one agrees, the one agreeing condition is executed. The rule remains active. 

An example

To complain you the Rule Builder the best, we have made a little example for you.

1. You add a new rule. We build the rule for free shipping, with an order value over 50$. The condition for this rule is, that the total order value is greater than or equal to 50$.
   
2. If you saved this rule there appears a new column named "assignments". There you can add special assignments, like the payment method (the second picture).
   
3. If you are ready with this, you can see the rule in the overview.
   

Conclusion

After you've had a look around the world of rules and conditions, the Rule Builder shouldn't be too much of a challenge for you. It is relatively easy to use. 

But the most important thing is: The Rule Builder saves you work and in combination with the Shopware Flow Builder you have the possibility to create workflows and automate always consistent processes.