Hi David,

I'm curious about your process. Do you create a shipping label on the date the shipment needs to go out, searching on the Orders page, or do you advance date the labels and need to sift through them on the Shipping History screen? If the latter, what you could do is advance date the label to a date you know it will ship on (if you know the date) and on the Shipping History screen, sort by ascending or descending ship dates in the "Shipped" column. To do this, you would need to click on the column's name. An arrow will appear after you click on it showing that it is in ascending or descending. Will this help?

Hi Rachael, No… I print everything the same day I ship.

The problem is… Sometimes I run out of a product so I take pre-orders on Amazon and our choppily site. So, While I have orders that ship everyday I also have orders mixed in that might not be due to ship for 3-5 weeks. So it would be helpful to include or exclude shipment based on the day they are supposed to ship.

I hope I’m explaining this right :)

Have A Nice Day!
David C. Johnson
Web Equations, LLC

Hi David - This is an interesting situation and I have some ideas that I think might help you better organize your orders now.

Do you use the Product Catalog? This allows you to save your Products by SKU, which in turn can be used with Product Categories and Order Categories to set up Shipping Rules that will organize your orders based on their contents. There are quite a few pieces here, but once they're set up, most of the process will be completely automated.

Product Catalog:

We currently add in products as we find them in your Amazon orders; however, you can update this data and even add in more data. These articles will help you get started with the Product Catalog:

• FAQs: Product Catalog
• How to: Export my product data from Amazon
• How to: Add items to my Product Catalog

Product Category:

Once you have your products current, especially those that are frequently on back order, I recommend creating a Product Category. It's a master SKU that can group a number of individual items together; title it "Backordered" or something similar. Then move any items currently on Backorder into this Category. This will help us streamline your Shipping Rules and make it easier to manage changes to your Backordered items going forward. These articles will help you navigate Product Categories:

• What is a Product Category?
• How to: Create a Product Category
• How to: Assign a product to a Product Category

Order Category:

When we go to set up a rule, our goal is to automatically categorize the orders using Order Categories. These will color code your orders on the Orders page, as well as allow you to filter for just the flagged orders. I recommend that you add a new Order Category titled "Pre-order" or something similar. I see that you've used Order Categories some, but here are a few articles that are helpful to setting up this part of the solution:

• How to: Add a new Order Category
• What happens to a category tag when an order is split or combined?
• How to: Remove an Order from a Category

Shipping Rules:

Now it's time to put the pieces together. Shipping Rules will let us fully utilize the Product Catalog and Categories that we've set up. Here's an overview:

1. The Product Catalog stores your individual product data, by SKU.
2. The Product Category is use to create a "master sku" that groups all orders you assign to it. Our rule is going to use the Product Category to determine if an order qualifies for the rule. With a single SKU in the rule, you will not need to update your rules when your Backorders items change. Rather you will just update the Product Category (ie: which items are assigned to it).
3. The Order Category is used to identify orders with Backordered items from the Orders page. Our rule is going to set an action to apply the Order Category.
4. The rule (which I outline below) will apply to orders as they sync from your store.
5. You'll be able to filter your unshipped Orders to exclude or only find the Pre-orders which contain Backordered items.
   
6. As the Backordered status of individual product SKUs changes, just re-categorize the items in your Product Categories.

So, the last step in automating this it to create the Shipping Rule. I see that you have a Shipping Rule, but here are a few resources that you might find helpful:

• How to: Create a Shipping Rule
• FAQs: Shipping Rules / Mapping
• What Shipping Rules are available for set-up?
• How does the Product Category rule work?

To get into specifics, I envision a rule that looks like this:

IF: Product category | Is equal to | Backordered

THEN: Assign to a category | Pre-order

There are other conditions that you might want to consider, such as the quantity of items in the order. In this case, you might want something that contains multiple SKUs to go into a different Order category in case some of the items are ready to ship now.

I know that this is a lot of information. I'd be happy to clarify or expand on anything! Just let me know if you have any questions.