I am having a very hard time combining orders that were previously split via a rule.  I've tried a bunch of different scenarios and I'm really frustrated because I don't understand if this is a bug or just set up this way by design.   I'm on a free trial and this is the only issue preventing me from upgrading.  I need to know if there's a workaround.

I need to assign SKU's to users so that even if a customer places an order with 2 SKU's in the same order, each user ONLY sees the SKU's assigned to them on their order page.  After testing this for over a week, it seems that this is not possible. 

The next thing I tried was to set up a rule that breaks the order out by SKU, but when I set up this rule, ALL the line items are being broken out by quantity, which is very frustrating.  But if at least I could combine those orders back again, I could live with it.  The problem is that I cannot combine them no matter how many times I try and there's not even an error message to let me know what is going on.    

To make this more clear, here's an example of what I've done and what I need:  

I set up the following rules:

RULE 1

IF "number of line items is greater than" 1

THEN break out and split by SKU AA-123

THEN break out and split by SKU AA-456

{note, those are just examples of the SKU's that I always want broken out from the rest of the SKU's.  This is because I always want SKU's that start wtih DD assigned to another user.  The rest of the SKU's in my store all start with AA and will always be assigned to me.  I only have about 20 SKUs total and the vast majority of them start with DD.  Only about 5 will start with AA.}

RULE 2

IF "Item SKU starts with" DD

THEN "Assign to user" Tina

RULE 3

If "Item SKU does NOT start with" DD

THEN "Assign to user" Cynthia

Now, here is the scenario that I would like to happen, when a customer places an order, compared to what is actually happening when I implement the rules I outlined above.

What I want:

A customer places an order with the following 4 items included in the same order:

1. A quantity of 5 items for SKU AA-123
2. A quantity of 5 items for SKU AA-456
3. A quantity of 5 items for SKU DD-123
4. A quantity of 5 items for SKU DD-456

I want the first two SKU's (AA-123 and AA-456) to be assigned to user Cynthia and the next two SKU's (DD-123 and DD-456) to be assigned to user Tina. I want each user to only see the SKU's that are assigned to them on their respective order pages.  

This is what is currently happening instead:

The items that have SKU's DD-123 and DD-456 are all being assigned to Tina and she only sees those SKU's on her order page (which is exactly what I want.)

However, when user Cynthia logs on to her order page, she sees all the items with SKU's AA-123 and AA-456 split into separate line items by QUANTITY.  So in my example above, the customer ordered 5 items from each sku so User Cynthia is seeing 10 line items!  When Cynthia tries to "combine" those line items into one order, it does not work.  Whether she chooses to combine by "selected" or by "All with same recipient" - it is not working.  What is happening is that only one of the SKU's gets combined.  So for example, the 5 line items in SKU AA-123 get combined into one line item.  But the five items in AA-456 are broken up into 5 line items with a quantity of 1 on each line item.   If I then try to combine the one line item for SKU AA-123 with the other 5 line items in AA-456, everything gets split again so that I have 10 line items again.  

I am on a free trial and I really want to upgrade to a paid plan but this is a huge issue for me and I need to know that there's a solution to this issue before I move forward.  I need someone to let me know if I'm doing something wrong here or if this is a known issue.