Picture a Monday morning. Forty orders waiting to pack. Your packer opens the dashboard, and the orders are already sorted: the wholesale express order at the top in Urgent red, a fragile-product order next in High orange, then a cluster in Elevated yellow, the bulk of the queue in Normal grey. They pick up the red one first, work through the orange ones, then down. The orders most likely to matter today are the ones they touch first.
Priority Rules is how your packing dashboard sorts itself, so the right order goes out first without anyone having to remember why.
The four levels
Every order gets one:
- Urgent (red): ship today, no exceptions.
- High (orange): needs attention, likely today.
- Elevated (yellow): move it up the queue.
- Normal (grey): the default for every order until a rule or escalation changes it.
Colours are visible at a glance on every packing card. The to-pack queue sorts by level, then by order date, so the most time-sensitive work is always at the top.
How an order gets a level
You write rules that match a pattern and assign a level when they match. A few examples:
> When an order uses express shipping > set priority to Urgent.
> When the customer has a VIP tag > set priority to High.
> When the order contains a product tagged “fragile” > set priority to High.
> When an order ships to a remote postcode > set priority to Elevated.
Match conditions cover customers (tags, status, order count), orders (total, shipping method, coupon, date), products (category, tag, attribute), and shipping (zone, method, country). When more than one rule matches, the highest level wins.
Auto-escalation keeps things moving
An order sitting too long climbs the queue on its own:
- Normal bumps to Elevated after 24 hours.
- Elevated bumps to High after 36 hours.
- High bumps to Urgent after 48 hours.
You can pause the clock outside business hours, so a Friday afternoon order doesn’t wake up as Urgent on Monday. The timing is adjustable to match how fast your shop moves.
The payoff: an order that’s been quietly waiting catches your team’s attention before it becomes a late-shipping apology email.
Where priority shows up
On the packing dashboard. Every order card colour-coded by level. The to-pack queue sorts urgent work to the top.
On the order card. A priority badge sits alongside customer status and tags, so the level is visible even when you’ve already opened an order.
On the WooCommerce admin order list. A priority column, filterable and sortable, so you can see at a glance whether anything urgent is outstanding.
On the dashboard warning tile. When more than a handful of orders hit Urgent, a warning surfaces so the owner knows it’s time to rally the team.
Built-in notifications
Opt in to an email when an order hits Urgent, and a dashboard warning when the Urgent queue grows beyond a threshold you set. Quiet signal when things are fine; louder one when they need you.
Why it earns its keep
Priority Rules helps you stay in control of what ships when, without anyone having to hold the shipping calendar in their head. The express order doesn’t wait behind standard-shipping orders. The VIP’s order gets packed with the care that level of priority warrants. The order that’s been sitting too long doesn’t slip quietly through the cracks.
Your team packs in the order you’d want them to, every day, on their own.