The Connecteed rule manager is a very powerful tool that allows you, starting from your product database fed by your imports, to apply a series of sequential rules with which you can alter your database in an extremely precise way.

What are rules and how do they interact with the database?

Your database, appropriately populated every day by your import processes will not be altered by the rules. You will always have a photograph available, by clicking on the appropriate icon, of your imported database.

The rules that you define in the rule manager will not apply to your database, which will therefore always be consultable, returning the list of products exactly as they were following the import.

The rules actually generate a secondary copy of your database, altered compared to your main database, which will always remain healthy and unchanged.

A simple example to understand the result of a rule is the following.

Original post-import database:

Rule applied => IF the price is greater than 45.00, THEN top up the price by 10%

Secondary database, resulting from the application of the applied rule:

As can be seen from the second table, the products in bold have undergone a price recalculation of 10%.

How sequential rules work

In the rule manager interface you can insert an unlimited number of rules in an orderly and therefore sequential manner. Each specific rule (which you can name as you wish) will be included in a list of rules of the project, or of the single export channel.

The ordering in this list will determine the sequence in which Connecteed runs them on your database. This concept is fundamental since reversing the ordering of the rules can radically change the outcome of your database export.

Let's delve deeper into this concept starting from the following database.

Using the above database, we simulate the following three rules:

• IF the price is greater than 45 THEN exclude the product;

• IF the price is less than or equal to 30 THEN operate a markup of 100%

• IF the price is greater than 30 THEN apply a 30% mark-up

Connecteed will process the rules one at a time, thus generating a list of results at each step. In fact, with three active rules, 2 intermediate versions of the database will be generated and 1 final output version, which can then be exported in various formats or sent to marketplaces for online sale.

In particular, the first rule will alter the database as below, eliminating the third product from the list:

The second rule will apply a 100% markup on products with a price less than or equal to 30:

The third rule will apply a 30% mark-up in case of a price greater than 30, thus generating the definitive database processed by all three rules:

By changing the order of the rules, moving rule 1 to the end of the other two, the system will exclude the products ONLY once the mark-ups have been applied.

In this specific case, all the products would first undergo a price increase, exceeding the value of 45.00, and then they would all be excluded due to the rule that excludes products with a price greater than 45.00.

Changing the order of the rules can therefore lead to a very different result from that obtained with the first ordering of the rules.