If you’re running an eCommerce store on BigCommerce and have products set up to use complex rules, you’ve likely experienced how powerful they can be. Complex rules let you dynamically adjust product attributes—like price, weight or availability—based on option selections or specific SKU combinations that you can’t do inside BigCommerce natively. In the previous v2 product experience you could create them, but moving to v3 that ability was lost, or really just hidden in the background. Now, with our new tools, you can use them again.
In the v3 product experience, modifiers (options that do not create variant SKUs) can only have rules that interact with themselves. But complex rules, allow modifiers to interact with other modifiers or other variant SKUs.
As an example, if you have a T-shirt that comes in a mix of sizes and colors, and you also want people to be able to add personalization on it, but some combinations you can’t allow, or want to change the price on, you can do that. So a red shirt you could disallow them choosing a red font for the text color. Or adding a logo in the sleeve costs more on a large shirt than a small. You can do that.
That’s where Your Store Wizards and our Your Store Tools suite steps in. We bring back the lost functionality, and let you do things you have no way of handling in the BigCommerce admin. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months building two new tools: our Export Complex Rules tool and our Import Complex Rules tool. Our goal? To give you the flexibility to do what you need, and no longer be limited by the v3 limitations.
Export Custom Rules Tool: Your Rules in One Download
Need to review, audit, or overhaul your store’s existing complex rules? The Export Custom Rules Tool is your starting point. From the Your Store Tools dashboard, simply launch the tool and choose exactly which products you’d like to export—filterable by SKU, category, brand, availability, product condition, visibility, shipping type, and stock status.
Once you’ve selected your items, you download an Excel or CSV file containing every current rule. This allows you to:
- Review rule details easily across products
- Edit existing rules offline (e.g., tweak pricing adjustments or enable/disable flags)
- Delete rules by marking them appropriately in the file, or
- Create brand new rules using the same format
And if you’d rather start from scratch, we make that easy too: a blank template (in a convenient ZIP file) is available so you can define your rules from a clean slate.
Import Custom Rules Tool: Bulk Updates Made Easy
Once your CSV (or Excel) file is ready—whether it’s the one you exported or a fresh template—you’re ready to reapply, refine, or add complex rules in bulk. That’s all handled by our Import Custom Rules Tool.
Here’s the beauty:
- Upload your file—simple as that.
- The tool uses your product’s base SKU as the identifier (no need to hunt down product IDs)
- If the file includes a rule_id, the tool updates that specific rule.
- If you omit a rule_id, the tool creates a brand-new rule on that SKU.
- The CSV supports optional flags like sort_order, enabled, stop, delete, purchasing_disabled, purchase-blocking messages, price and weight adjusters, and more
This means you can update dozens—or thousands—of products in one go, rather than wasting time editing each product individually in the BigCommerce UI.
Why These Tools Matter
Put simply: complex rules let you do things you can’t do in the v3 BigCommerce admin at all, adding new flexibility to how you set up products. With our Export and Import tools, store owners finally have an easy-to-use way to create/edit/add product rules.
We understand that your time is precious. That’s why:
- These tools are available a la carte in the Your Store Tools suite.
- You can grab both tools for just $25/month, with a five-day free trial and unlimited technical support.
- Plus, every plan includes our scheduling feature—you can schedule exports or imports to run in advance, or even recur daily, weekly, or monthly—at no additional cost.
Imagine the time you’re going to save by using these tools. You tweak your pricing rules once, upload, and let the system do the work while you focus on marketing, product strategy, or fulfilling orders. With the busy holiday season right around the corner, our Complex Rules tools can be the holiday helper you wish you had year round.
To see how these two tools work together and simplify what is—by BigCommerce’s own design—an unweidly and time-consuming task, check out our YouTube video below. It walks through the entire workflow: exporting complex rules, editing your file, and reimporting seamlessly.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.