Set up approval rules
Decide which product changes from an AI assistant or API key are approved automatically and which wait for a person, and at what risk level.
Approval rules decide what happens to a new product change: approve it automatically, or put it in Pending changes at a risk level. Without any rule, every change waits for a person at risk High.
Manage rules in Settings → Approval rules. Every member of your organization can create, change, disable and delete rules.
What a rule is made of
- Name: how the rule shows in the list and in a change's history.
- Conditions: all of them must hold. A rule without conditions matches every change of its change types.
- Applies to: the change types the rule covers. All updates is every type except Status and Delete; select Pick single types to choose them one by one.
- Outcome: Auto-approve, Manual · Low, Manual · Medium or Manual · High.
Create a rule
- Open Settings → Approval rules and select Add rule.
- Enter a Name.
- Select Add condition and choose a Field, an Operator and a Value. Add more conditions to narrow the rule.
- Under Applies to, keep All updates or pick single change types.
- Choose the Outcome.
- Read the line below the editor: it says how many of the changes waiting right now the rule matches.
- Select Save rule.
Turn Enabled off to pause a rule without deleting it.
Conditions
| Field | What it compares | Operators |
|---|---|---|
| Orders (total, last 30 days, last 7 days, last 24 hours) | The product's orders in the store of the change | less than, greater than, between, is |
| Revenue (total, last 30 days, last 7 days, last 24 hours) | The product's net revenue in that store, in the store's currency | less than, greater than, between |
| Current price, New price | The variant's price before and after the change | less than, greater than, between, is |
| Price change in % | How far the price moves | less than, greater than, between, is |
| Price direction | Whether the price goes up or down | is |
| Product type, Vendor, Tags | The product's values | is, is not, contains |
| Shopify status | active, draft or archived | is, is not |
| Store | The store the change is for | is, is not |
| API key | The key that proposed the change | is, is not |
| Reason | Whether the assistant gave a reason (given or empty) | is |
Between includes both ends. "Total" orders and revenue reach back only 60 days before CopyHero started reading the store's orders, usually when you connected the store.
Change types
A change can touch several change types at once: Price (price and compare-at price of existing variants), Title, Description, Product type, Vendor, Tags, SEO, Images, Variants, Metafields, Status and Delete.
How rules are applied
- Every enabled rule is checked; rules have no order.
- For each change type of a change, the strictest outcome of the matching rules wins: High, then Medium, then Low, then Auto-approve.
- A change type that no rule covers needs a person, at risk High.
- The change gets the strictest result over all its change types.
So a change to the title and the price is approved automatically only when both change types are. An auto-approve rule never loosens a stricter rule that matches the same change.
For a change to several variants, a price condition of an auto-approve rule must hold for every changed variant; for a manual rule, one variant is enough.
When you create, change or delete a rule, waiting changes are checked again. Their risk level can rise, but a waiting change is never approved automatically afterwards.
Examples
| Goal | Applies to | Conditions | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Let small price changes through on products that barely sell | Price | Price change in % is less than 10; Orders, last 30 days is less than 5 | Auto-approve |
| Look closely at every price rise on a bestseller | Price | Price direction is up; Orders, last 30 days is greater than 50 | Manual · High |
| Let text edits through when the assistant explains them | Description, SEO | Reason is given | Auto-approve |
| Review every delete | Delete | none | Manual · High |
| Trust one bot with tags only | Tags | API key is your bot's key | Auto-approve |
Start narrow. An auto-approve rule lets changes reach your store without a person.
Stores without order data
Some stores give CopyHero no orders. For them, orders and revenue count as 0 in approval rules, and the inbox shows a warning icon instead of numbers. If an auto-approve depends on a rule with an orders or revenue condition, the change waits at risk Low instead.
| Case | Why | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No order data: connect this store with Shopify login | The store was connected with an access key, which cannot read orders. | Select Connect and connect the store again through the Shopify app installation. See reconnect a Shopify store. |
| No order data: grant access to orders | The store is connected without permission to read orders. | Select Grant access, add the orders permission to the CopyHero app in Shopify, then reconnect the store. |
| No order data yet: the order sync for this store has not started | Order access is granted, but reading orders is paused or has not started. | Reconnect the store. If the hint stays, contact support. |
The inbox explains the case of each such store in the warning icon's tooltip and under the product's numbers. The approval rules list and the rule editor name the stores without order data.
Let the Assistant write a rule
The in-app Assistant can read your rules, explain why a change waits or was approved, and create, change, disable or delete a rule for you.
- Describe the rule in your own words, for example "Approve price drops under 10 % automatically for products with fewer than 5 orders in the last 30 days".
- The Assistant reads your current rules, checks its draft and tells you how many waiting changes it matches.
- A card shows the exact rule with Approve and Decline. Nothing is saved until you approve.
The Assistant cannot save a rule while rules cannot be checked; it tells you, and nothing changes.
If something goes wrong
- A change waits although a rule should approve it: another matching rule is stricter, the change touches a change type no rule covers, or the store has no order data. Open the change in Pending changes to see which rule decided each change type.
- "Rules cannot be checked right now": the rule was not saved. Your input is kept; try again in a moment.
- A condition is marked invalid: the operator does not work with the field, or the value is missing.