Automation Rules (also called Bulk Actions) open the door for extreme creativity and convenience when it comes to make sweeping changes on the catalog. That being said, this is arguably the most powerful tool in Zentail, so make sure you read up on it and test your rule on a few SKUs before making changes across the entire catalog.
Automation Rule format
This is the label of your Automation rule. Make sure your label clearly explains the purpose of the action. That way, you'll be able to remember why it's running later, especially if you plan on making multiple automation rules!
This is the filter. It specifies which products in the catalog will be affected by the action(s) that you're implementing. Remember, you can always copy and paste the filter from QuickEdit rather than typing it out if you're not filter-savvy!
Your actions are the changes that will occur after you run/schedule the automation rule. These can range from simple mathematical functions (such as add, multiply, divide) to other more specific tasks like remove SKU from a channel or update or push to a channel.
Setting your Filter
In this specific example, we're going to choose products we want to discount by adding a label to them. We'll give those SKUs the label "Amazon Sale".
Note: You do not have to use a label to filter your catalog. You can use whatever criteria you want. For example, you could filter for products where MSRP is not blank and Amazon listed is true.
Now that the label has been added to the products we want to discount, we can go ahead and filter down for that label in QuickEdit.
Next, click the drop-down that says "Advanced Filters" and you can copy the filter to paste it back in the Automation suite. You can also click the "Create Bulk Action" button and Zentail will automatically do this for you.
Setting your Action
Using the "+" button, you'll be able to specify the action you want to perform on the filtered set of products. In this example, we'll be discounting the MSRP by 20% and setting that in the "Item Price" attribute (it defaults to Item Price) to send to all channels, so we SET the Item Price to the MSRP multiplied by 0.8.
At this point, you're ready to run this bulk action! You can click "Create" at the bottom right hand corner and this bulk action will run just once.
Scheduling your Action
So now that we have an automation rule ready to discount the narrowed down list of products with the "Amazon Sale" label, we can also schedule this to run periodically for products with that label.
Using the check box that says "Schedule This Bulk Action", you can schedule the rule to run at the beginning, middle, or end of every 4 hour period, day, week, month, or year.
We're going to schedule this to run at the end of every day, so that changes we make to MSRP or new products we're listing with the "Amazon Sale" label throughout the day are accounted for by the end of the day.
Once you hit "Create", you'll be able to see the automation rule under the "Automation Rules" tab and manually run your rule, view the actions, view the products affected in QuickEdit, or delete the action.
And that's it! Now, as we add or remove the "Amazon Sale" label to products they will automatically be added or removed to this automation rule. Pretty neat, right?