Rules and Scopes

A rule ties a scope (what to target) to thresholds (when it's at risk) and an action (what to do about it).

Anatomy of a rule

{
  name:        "Winter Coats - Aggressive Clearance"
  scopeType:   "collection"
  scopeValue:  "gid://shopify/Collection/123"
  warningDays: 14
  dangerDays:  30
  deadDays:    45
  autoAction:  "40% Off Clearance"
}

The 8 scope types

Ordered from highest priority (most specific) to lowest:

Product (priority 100)

Target a single product by Shopify GID. Use for one-off treatments — e.g. "always keep this hero product at full price".

Tag (priority 80)

Target every product carrying a specific tag. Powerful for cross-collection campaigns (seasonal, bundle-bait).

Collection (priority 60)

Target every product in a Shopify smart or manual collection. Best for category-wide policies.

Product type (priority 40)

Target by Shopify's built-in productType field. Use for broad categories like Shoes, Outerwear.

Vendor (priority 20)

Target by vendor. Use when a supplier's products consistently sell faster or slower than your average.

Category (priority 15)

Target by Shopify's product taxonomy node (e.g. "Apparel > Tops > T-Shirts"). Hierarchical.

SKU prefix (priority 10)

Target by SKU prefix (everything before the first -). Useful when your SKU encodes the season or product family.

Location (priority 5)

Target by inventory location. Use to clear out a single warehouse or pop-up.

How matching works

When Shelfie analyses a product, it walks every active rule, picks the ones whose scope matches, and applies the highest-priority matching rule. Ties broken by priority field (higher wins), then by createdAt (older wins).

The catch-all rule (no scope) sits at priority 0 — it matches every product and is the fallback.

See Rule Priority for the full resolution algorithm and tie-breaking.

Best practices

• Start with the catch-all — set sensible global defaults before adding specific rules
• Layer specificity — vendor rule for broad coverage, tag rule for campaigns, product rule for exceptions
• Re-use actions — multiple rules can share one action (e.g. "30% Off Markdown" used by 5 rules)
• Name rules clearly — "Nike SS24 Clearance" beats "Rule 7"
• Audit regularly — products move between collections; rules can become stale