How to use the Rules System?

The rules system in Shopblocks simplifies creating dynamic groups, special delivery offers, discounts, and more within your Shopblocks admin system. While it may seem overwhelming at first, we have made using and creating rules straightforward. Once you grasp the concept, you will see how beneficial and practical they can be!

You can locate the rules in the Deliveries, Tax, Groups, and Discounts sections of your Shopblocks admin. They are always positioned at the bottom of the screen while you are editing.

Upon first encountering the rules, you may notice them initially hidden, with an active 'Applies to all products' checkbox indicating that all products in the system are considered for the specific discount, delivery, tax rate, or group you are working on.

 

At times, you may come across it already expanded, with the 'Applies to all products' checkbox turned off, displaying choices to either 'Include' or 'Exclude' products.

How do Shopblocks Rules work?

The purpose of creating rules is to end up with a dynamic list of products, deliveries or discounts, that you can use in other parts of your shop.

Say if you wanted to create a product group that contained only ‘red’ products. In other software you would have to manually add each red product into that group after it was created, but in Shopblocks, you can use rules to add each new red product to the red product group as soon as it is created.

Here’s another example. If you wanted a group of products called “Cheap T-Shirts” that contain all the t-shirts in your shop that cost less than £5 then you would create two rules for this:

1. Include all the T-Shirts
2. Exclude all T-Shirts that are more expensive than £5

This would create a dynamic group of all your t-shirts that are less than £5. The best part is that every time you add another t-shirt that is less than £5 or change the price of a current t-shirt to less than £5, they will be added into this group automatically. You can then use product group blocks (via BlockLab) on different pages on your shop website without having to worry about keeping the set of products up to date.

Rules can be created to either ‘Include’ or ‘Exclude’ certain products, categories, order amounts and so on. The ‘Include’ section is where you specify which items should be included in this rule set, while ‘Exclude’ does the opposite.

Include

Rules added into this section define which items to include in the group.

Exclude

Rules added into this section define which items to exclude from the group.

Anything rule available to include a product in a group is also available to exclude. Examples of rules you can include and exclude of are as follows.

Using the above options allow you to creatively use rules to create dynamic groupings of products.

Want to make a local delivery option only available in your postcode? Easy. Use the 'Delivery Postcode' rule and set it to your local area.

Want to group all products tagged as 'New In'? Not a problem. Use the 'Product Tag' option and enter the tag you want the group to collect.

‘Products must match’ option

This is only used when there is more than one rule in Include to decide how you want your rules to work together. There are two options from which to choose here, ‘Any Rules’ and ‘All Rules’. On an exclude, the system is automatically set to 'All Rules', to exclude everything in the list.

You can think of it like this: ALL RULES means AND, ANY RULES means OR.

Let’s say we’re creating a product group called ‘Niepoort Red Wines’.

Let’s create two ‘Include’ rules: