Introduction

A high number of orders placed in a short period of time can cause delays in your warehouse and the dispatching of orders, which can lead to increased shipping times for your customers and potentially disappointment when orders are received 'late'. To prevent your customers being presented with shipping estimates that may not be realistic, Aurora allows you to add a 'margin' to your shipping estimates when your order volumes are high, helping to avoid customer disappointment.

This is done using the Aurora SLA system, found in the Aurora Back-end under Orders > Shipping > SLA Rules. You can create as many SLA rule as you wish for any given channel and define the increase, the dispatch, and shipping time respectively.

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You may create as many rules you wish for a given channel, but only the first one that matches will be applied.

In the following example:

Channel	Order Status	Orders Count	Days to add
Website	Placed	100	1
Website	Placed	200	2

If currently in the store there are 150 Orders with status "Placed", 1 day will be added to the dispatch time and the shipping time respectively.

Understanding the 'Current' SLA

Within the SLA Rules, Aurora records which was last used and marks this as the 'current' SLA Rule. Once a rule is marked as 'current' it will then be used even if your actual order volume is lower than it's required margin. What this means is that when your order volume increases and a new SLA Rule is activated, the 'delay' added to your estimates is increased automatically and then remembered until you turn it off again. If your order volume then drops, the SLA will remain at the 'increased' level permanently until you manually turn it off.

The purpose of this 'automatic up' and 'manual down' approach is to prevent the shipping estimates from fluctuating between two SLA rules during the day and causing some customers to receive unrealistic estimates. This being so, once your order volume has triggered a delay in shipping, this delay will remain in place until you decide that the warehouse has recovered and can now ship 'on time' again, and so remove the current SLA rule.

Maintaining SLA rules

To view a list of all SLA rules, navigate to the Orders > Shipping > SLA Rules page.

Adding new rule

To add a new SLA rule, click the "Add new rule" button at the top right.

On the next screen you have to provide the following fields:

• Channel - this is the channel that the order was created. For example - Website or Amazon
• Order Status - orders with the selected status will be counted towards the rule limit
• Orders Count - how many orders with given status will need to be present in order for the rule to apply
• Days To Add - how many days to add to dispatch time when the rule matches

After you click the Save changes button the rule will be created.

Editing a rule

To edit a rule, click the pencil icon in the listing.

Deleting a rule

To delete a rule, click the trash icon in the listing.

Orders

When new order is created the estimated delivery time will be recorded as an additional field, as well as the estimated shipping time.

You can view those fields in Order > Additional Fields tab.