Smart Carrier Rules

PrestaShop's native shipping rules are shallow — zone plus weight / price ranges and group access. The moment you need "hide express for bulky categories", "free shipping over €X only for this postcode", or "add a €5 island surcharge", you reach for a rules module and then fly blind: when a customer says "there's no delivery option", you have no way to see why. Smart Carrier Rules fixes both problems — a powerful conditional rules engine, and a debugger that makes every decision transparent.

See exactly why every carrier appears

The differentiator is the Rule Simulator / Checkout Debugger. Describe a cart and, for every carrier, get a decision card: shown or hidden with the reason, the winning rule by priority, the surcharge breakdown and free-shipping result, the final label and ETA — and a red "NO CARRIER LEFT" banner when a cart would reach checkout with zero options. It runs the exact same engine as live checkout, so it is a source of truth, not a preview — and a support-cost killer that diagnoses a "missing carrier" complaint in seconds.

One engine for every carrier decision

Manage all of your rules in a single prioritised list — active state, priority order, conditions and actions at a glance. Rules run top-down with a documented conflict-resolution algorithm, so the outcome is always predictable. You don't need a module to give a customer group access to a carrier — PrestaShop does that natively. We add the layer PrestaShop is missing: explainable, prioritised, conditional rules with surcharges, labels and ETAs that native access rules can't express.

Build rules visually — conditions and actions

Combine conditions with AND / OR: customer group, category, product, brand / manufacturer, postcode / ZIP pattern, country / zone, cart subtotal, cart weight, total quantity, and a date / day-of-week / time-of-day window. Then attach actions: hide a carrier or show only selected ones, add a fixed or percentage surcharge, apply free shipping above a per-rule threshold, rename or append to a carrier label, or add a per-rule ETA.

Test any cart before your customers do

Enter products or categories, a customer group, country, postcode, subtotal, weight, quantity and date, then run the simulation — validate a new rule, or reproduce a real complaint, without touching a live order.

Condition-level transparency

Every matched rule is broken down condition by condition — the expected value versus the cart's actual value, with a clear match / no-match marker — so you know not just that a carrier was hidden or surcharged, but exactly which condition drove it. Priority order is explicit, and the winning rule is highlighted.

Predictable priority & conflict resolution. Rules run in priority order with a documented algorithm: hide beats show-only; surcharges stack fixed-then-percent; free shipping beats surcharge; the highest-priority rule wins the label and ETA. The Simulator always explains which rule won and why.

Built to be safe at checkout. Works on PrestaShop 1.7, 8 and 9, multishop-aware and multi-language. No core class overrides: availability, labels and ETA are applied through native hooks (actionFilterDeliveryOptionList on 8 / 9) and a theme-agnostic front layer plus a server-side validation guard on 1.7 — so it stays safe on one-page and express checkout themes, and works with custom checkouts too. Surcharge and free-shipping charged cost is enforced natively on PrestaShop 9 (actionCartGetPackageShippingCost); on 1.7 / 8 the surcharge is surfaced and the carrier is validation-gated, and the Simulator labels exactly what is enforced where.

Key benefits

1. Know why a carrier appears: the Simulator turns opaque shipping logic into a clear, per-carrier explanation.
2. Cut support tickets: reproduce and diagnose "no delivery option" complaints in seconds.
3. Flexible targeting: category, brand, postcode, cart, quantity and date conditions native access rules can't express.
4. Safe by design: no core overrides; won't break your one-page or express checkout.
5. Honest about limits: the module tells you exactly what's enforced on each PrestaShop version.

v1 focuses on carrier availability and pricing rules — it does not do label generation, live carrier rates, tracking, or warehouse logic. It is a carrier-availability rules engine with a debugger, and the best one at explaining itself.