Shipment settings

Intro

Shipments → Settings holds the store-wide behavior behind your queues: when merges are suggested, how shipments are created and synced, which orders are kept out of the queue entirely, and what counts as local pickup. Most merchants set these once and revisit rarely.

Carriers in this menu opens Integration → Carriers — account credentials live there.

Merge Rules

Purpose: define when StoresBoost should suggest combining shipments (feeds Merge Suggestions → Suggested by Rule). Rules are conditions only — they say which shipments may be merged together; the merge itself is the same for every rule. Merge rules are a plan feature: on a plan without it, Suggested by Rule shows an Upgrade badge and the AI assistant's merge-rule tools are unavailable.

1. Open Merge Rules and click New Merge Rule.
2. Fill in Rule Name, Description, Priority, Match Mode (All conditions must pass / Any condition must pass), and Status.
3. Add Condition rows. Each picks an entity, a field, and a comparison:

All comparisons ignore case and surrounding spaces.

4. Save. Start conservative — Same Customer Same Address — and expand once trusted.

Typical live-goods rule: product types all in Livestock / Live Food / Add-On, Order Shipment → Local Pickup same, the five Shipping Address fields same, and Order → Delivery Date same, so two orders booked for different delivery days stay in separate boxes.

With no active rules, shipments for the same customer are eligible to merge by default. Suggestions are recalculated every minute in the background for Awaiting shipments that still have items and share a customer.

How rules sort shipments into categories

Before any pair is compared, each shipment is put into one rule = one category: the highest-priority rule whose bucket conditions it satisfies. Only same-customer shipments in the same category are compared against each other — a livestock box and a dry-goods box never merge, however similar their addresses. Bucket conditions are Product Item rows on Type, Shipping Group (checkout) or a Meta Field with All must be in allowed set, None can be in excluded set or At least one must be outside the set; a rule without such a row is a general category that takes every shipment.

Bucket matching is stricter than pairwise matching: with Type / Shipping Group and All must be in allowed set, a shipment with no product types (or a line with no checkout group) never enters the category; with a Meta Field, lines missing the key are ignored — except under At least one must be outside the set, where a missing key counts as outside. Shipping groups match by slug (supplies) or display name (Supplies).

The Automation Rules Tester shows this end to end: add up to four extra orders and it reports each shipment's category and every condition's pass or fail.

Merge Settings

Purpose: global merge behavior — one page that affects every suggestion and auto-merge.

Merge Conflict Tags

Purpose: catch the "these two should have gone in one box" cases before they ship separately — two orders from the same customer, same product category, that did not merge only because the address or the delivery date differs.

1. Turn on Tag Shipments That Should Have Merged.
2. Add a row per mismatch you want flagged: an entity, a field (or Any field for the whole entity), and the tag name to apply. Tag names are yours; a tag that does not exist yet is created in the library the first time it is used.
3. Save.

How it decides, every time the merge sweep runs (about once a minute):

• Only same-customer shipments that landed in the same merge-rule category and got as far as rule evaluation are compared — different categories, pickup vs parcel, split-family guardrails, a shipment already in another pending suggestion, or a non-modifiable status are not conflicts and are never tagged. The failed conditions are taken from the category's rule.
• Tags that do not exist yet are created red and active in the tag library. The switch is off by default; with it on and no rows, nothing is tagged. The Tags column on both Merge Suggestions lists is where the dots show up.
• Every condition the pair failed is looked up in your rows. A row with the exact field wins over the entity-wide Any field row.
• If every failed condition has a row, both shipments get those tags (address and date differ → both tags). If even one failed condition has no row, nothing is tagged — the pair was not "supposed to merge" by your definition.
• The tags are managed for you: they disappear as soon as the pair merges, the mismatch is corrected, or one shipment ships, is cancelled or merged. A tag with the same name that a person or an automation rule applied is never removed by this.

Build a View on the tags to give CS a daily list to fix addresses or call the customer. The Order → Delivery Date row only does something if your merge rules actually contain a delivery-date condition.

Shipment Settings

Purpose: how shipments are created and synced for this store, and how the lists open.

• Shipments per page — how many rows Awaiting, On Hold, Shipped, All Shipments and Local Pickup open with (15, 25, 30, 50, 80, 100, 150 or 200; default 25). Changing Per page in a table footer lasts for that visit; the next visit uses this number again
• Import Fulfilled Items — bring already-fulfilled items into local records
• Sync Pending Shipments To Provider — push queues to a connected fulfillment provider
• Re-appear Dismissed Shipments When Updated — resurface dismissed work after changes
• Hold Shipments Until Paid — on by default. Awaiting shipments whose order still owes money are parked On Hold (reason Payment pending) so they cannot be packed or labelled, and released automatically the moment the store marks the order paid. Hold when payment status is picks which statuses count: Pending (no payment captured yet — invoices, manual payment, draft orders sent for payment) and/or Partially paid (the order was edited after checkout and the customer still owes the difference). A merged shipment stays held while any of its orders owes money. Shopify fulfillment holds still take precedence, and holds you set by hand are never touched. Turn it off to ship regardless of payment
• Create Shipments For Shipped Order — when a shipped shipment's fulfillment is cancelled on Shopify, build a new Awaiting shipment for it — but only for shipments (or Shopify orders) carrying the Required shipment tag (default unfulfill-reopen; blank creates none). Works after splits and merges and for Shopify Collective orders
• Delete Existing Shipment When Filter Applied — what to do when a shipment filter matches an order that already has a shipment: None, Delete Items If Merged, Delete Whole Shipment Even Contains Other Shipments, Delete Items If Contains Other Shipments, or Create Order Alert

Save, then verify behavior on the next synced order.

Shipment Filters

Purpose: keep certain orders or items out of the packing queue when shipments are built — different from the Filter button on lists and from Views.

1. Open Shipment Filters → Add Filter.
2. Give it a Name and Description, then pick a Condition from Advanced → Conditions (for example product type = Digital).
3. Add an action: Skip Shipment (no shipment for matching orders) or Skip Item (drop only the matching lines).
4. Save. All active filters run, in creation order, every time a shipment is created from an order.

Use them for digital goods, internal SKUs, gift cards, or anything that should never appear at the bench. To keep orders out of StoresBoost entirely, use Store Filters instead — they run at import.

Local Pickup rules

Purpose: decide which shipments are local pickup so they land in the pickup queues instead of the parcel bench. The same page opens from Advanced → Local Pickup.

See Local Pickup for the workflow once shipments are flagged.

Related

• Split & merge — where merge rules surface
• Labels & rates — carrier / warehouse prerequisites
• Advanced → Conditions — the logic shipment filters reuse
• Integration → Carriers / Warehouses — connections these settings rely on