How to Bulk Edit WooCommerce Products
Editing products can get quite overwhelming, regardless of the kind of WooCommerce store you have. The reason for this is simple – rarely does an online store have only a few products to sell, and editing each one of them individually can take a long time. And naturally, the more products you have, the more time you will need to properly edit them.
Fortunately, there is a way to bulk edit your WooCommerce products. This means you will be able to edit all (or some) of your existing products fast – without having to go to every product page and edit it separately.
We will present you two ways in which you can bulk edit products in WooCommerce. The first one is using the default WooCommerce bulk editing option, and the second method will be done with the help of a plugin.
We will cover:
Presenting your products online requires a lot of work. There’s all sorts of information you can (and should) share with your potential customers in order to present each of your products in the best possible way. This includes product title and description, pricing, stock quantity, size, color… and the list goes on.
Now, imagine if many (or all) of these products have some mutual characteristics that would be valuable to your customers. It’s needless to say it would be a waste of time to edit each shirt that has the same price, color, and material individually.
For this reason, we highly recommend that you use the bulk editing option when managing your WooCommerce products. Stay tuned as we show you two different ways in which you can do this.
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The default WooCommerce bulk editing option works similarly to the default WordPress editing option (that you use for bulk editing posts or pages, for example). It’s relatively simple to use and should work well for you if you own a smaller online store, or simply don’t require too many advanced bulk editing options in general.
To use this option, simply go to your WordPress dashboard and access the Products >> All Products page. Then mark all the products you want to bulk edit.
Click on the Bulk Actions dropdown and choose Edit.
After hitting the Apply button, you will get access to the bulk edit window.
Here you will be able to bulk add various product categories, change the product status (Published, Private, Draft, etc.), allow or disallow comments, increase or decrease the existing price, change weight, “in stock” options, and more.
Once you’re done bulk editing your products, hit the Update button and you’re all done.
While this method can work well for smaller stores with simple products, it can be a bit tricky if you have a bunch of products to sell. Namely, you can only edit products one page at a time, so if you have multiple product list pages, you will need to bulk edit each page individually.
In short, if you have hundreds of products and/or simply need more advanced bulk editing options, we recommend that you use a suitable bulk editing WordPress plugin instead.
First things first, install and activate a WooCommerce plugin called BEAR – Bulk Editor and Products Manager. Of course, keep in mind that you need to have WooCommerce installed first.
Aside from bulk editing your products, with this plugin you will also be able to use options such as product filtering, product exporting, price calculator, and binded editing, among others.
Head to Products >> BEAR Bulk Editor.
Make sure to select the tab named “Show: Filters/Bulk Edit/Export”.
Once you do this, you will be able to see three different tabs – Filters, Bulk Edit, and Export.
The Filters tab is particularly useful as it allows you to select your products and group them by different taxonomies and meta fields, like product title, product content, and so on.
To start bulk editing your products, you should choose the Bulk Edit tab.
Here you will find the fields that allow you to change elements such as text, numbers, taxonomies, and so on.
To bulk edit a specific field, simply select the checkbox next to it. For example, if you want to bulk edit your product titles, you should mark the field next to “title”. You will also be able to choose your variable (Title, SKU, ID, and so on).
Of course, you most likely don’t want all your products to have the same name, but you can choose to prepend or append the specific product title. You can also make an entirely new title or replace the existing elements within the original title with a new one.
If you select Append, this means your edit will appear at the end of all product titles, while choosing the Prepend option means your edit will be placed at the beginning.
Here is a simple example – if you want to let your customers know that all your clothes are made of 100% organic cotton, you can simply mark the Append option and add something like “ – 100% Organic Cotton” into your “title” field.
Click the Do Bulk Edit button and go check out your products list.
You will see that each product now has “ – 100% Organic Cotton” at the end. Just make sure to carefully add your description so that it looks nice and readable as an end result (by making spaces where necessary, adding punctuation, etc.).
If you want, you can also bulk edit your product description. This could be a certain product feature that your potential customers would appreciate knowing about, but that would work better if it was part of the description instead of the title (like the “100% Organic Cotton” example we mentioned above).
In these cases, you can mark the Description field and insert your description there.
Let’s say that you want to let your customers know that each one of your products is vegan and cruelty-free. You can easily do that by inserting this information into the Description field:
Or, if you want, you can also change your variable to {TITLE} (using the variable dropdown) to display titles of individual products in each product description. This tag will use the information from the existing product title and add it to the description accordingly. Like this:
Once again, you can choose whether you want to append, prepend your product description, and so on. We recommend selecting the Append option as this will insert your description at the end of any preexisting product description (that is if you have already inserted a separate description for each one of your products).
After hitting the Do Bulk Edit button, you should go ahead and click the Content button next to your product (under the Description column) to see what your bulk description looks like:
In case you want to change the pricing for all products, you can easily do this by marking the regular price option and then choosing your value from the dropdown. By clicking on this dropdown, you will be able to increase the desired amount, decrease it, use the percentage, etc.
You can simply type in your number in the “regular price” field and then choose the desired option from the dropdown.
Once you are done, hit the Do Bulk Edit button.
Aside from bulk editing your product title, description, and price, you can also bulk change other product elements. The Basic tab also allows you to edit your sale price, “in stock” quantity, statuses, and types, as well as taxonomies.
In the Additional tab, you can also edit things like publishing date, weight, length, width, and so on.
We should also mention that some fields are marked red (both in the Basic and Additional tab). This means that you need to upgrade your plugin to the premium version in order to use these fields. These include product slug, download limit, download expiry, and more.
Wrapping Up
Every WooCommerce-powered store out there could make a good use of the bulk editing option – regardless of its size, type, or specialty. By performing bulk edits on your products, you will save your much valuable time and run and manage your store in a more organized and efficient manner. And whether you require more advanced options to bulk edit your WooCommerce products or you feel that the default WordPress functionality works just fine for you, our guide should be able to assist you.
