It’s a daunting task when you have to start editing WooCommerce products in a store with hundreds or thousands of products. Luckily, there’s a solution to bulk edit WooCommerce products, cutting out the need to go into each product page individually and waste hours of time.
A bulk edit in WooCommerce also comes in handy for smaller eCommerce shops. Every bit of time matters, so the idea of bulk editing a list of product titles or shipping classes makes for a wonderful opportunity to speed up the process and spend your time on other parts of your business.
Which product details can you bulk edit?
With the right plugin, you can bulk edit just about every aspect of your product details.
Here’s a list of the more common bulk edits you can make:
- Product titles
- Stock quantities
- Stock statuses
- Product fields
- Backorder statuses
- Product images
- SKUs
- Product variations
- Catalog visibility
- Shipping classes
- Regular and sale pricing
- Product dimensions
And that’s only a small selection of the possibilities for bulk editing. Keep reading to learn more about your options and the steps required to bulk edit a large collection of products in your WooCommerce shop.
The best way to bulk edit WooCommerce products
Quite a few plugins exist for bulk editing your products on WooCommerce. We’ll walk through the steps with our favorite solution (BEAR Bulk Editor for WooCommerce) and then outline alternative plugins that offer similar features but interfaces that you may personally enjoy better.
Install the plugin
To begin, install the BEAR Bulk Editor for WooCommerce plugin. This is a reputable plugin that also provides other features for product filtering, price calculating, and product exporting, just to name a few.
Note: We’ll assume you already have WooCommerce installed.
After you’ve installed and activated the plugin, open your WordPress dashboard and go to Products > BEAR Bulk Editor.
This brings you to the main BEAR Bulk Editor page where you can edit products in a grid and adjust settings and meta fields.
Start bulk editing
Select the tab that says Show: Filters/Bulk Edit/Export at the top of the window.
You should now see three tabs, one for filters, the other for Buk Edits, and the final one for Exports.
Click on the Bulk Edit tab.
This section displays various fields for text, numbers, and more.
Each field is well marked to indicate what edit it makes to your products.
To select a field to include with your bulk edit, mark its checkbox.
For this example, we’ll adjust the regular pricing for all products in the store. We want each price to be increased by $5.
Therefore, type in the number in which you wish to increase the price by, and click on the dropdown menu to the right of the field to decide how you would like to modify the current value of your products.
Each field type has different modification options. The pricing module allows you to increase all prices by a certain value, decrease by a value, increase/decrease by a percentage, add a value to the sale price, or set an entirely new price.
For this instance, we’ll increase the current values by $5 for all products.
Here’s a view of product pricing prior to completing the bulk edit.
To implement the edit, click on the Do Bulk Edit button.
Now each product has a price that’s $5 more than what it was before.
Example: Adding content to product titles
The plugin gives you a number of other options for making bulk edits, including the option to change your product titles.
Assuming most stores wouldn’t want to name each product the same thing, you can select to “Append” or “Prepend” the title. There are also settings to make a completely new title or replace certain text elements in that previous title. These are all called “behaviors,” since they tell the new value how to insert itself into your product details.
Choosing to Append the title places your suggested edit at the end of each product title.
Using the Prepend behavior places the new edit at the beginning of all product titles.
Let’s say we want to ensure that every title explains that our products are 100% wool. You would choose to append the title, then type in something like “- 100% Wool” with a hyphen so it looks nice in the title.
Using the append option states that the new value (- 100% wool) will get inserted at the end of every product title in the store.
After clicking the Do Bulk Edit button you can see that every item in the online shop has that little bit of text that we typed in the field.
Example: Adding content to product descriptions
Going into another example, let’s say that your store already has product descriptions for every item. However, you just released the fact that they’re made in the USA holds some value to many customers. It would be great to have that listed in each product description, yet it’s rather tedious to go in and make the edits one-by-one.
That’s where the Description field comes in.
Furthermore, we can demonstrate how to utilize what is called a variable tag to make this work out well. Variable tags pull information from other parts of your store. For instance, the {TITLE} tag, when placed into the editing field, takes the current product title and uses it for that bulk edit.
To begin, check the box for the Description. Select the Variable dropdown to see which options are available.
I’d like all product descriptions to remain as they are, but with a mention about the USA at the end. I figure a line like “Our {TITLE} is Made in the USA,” where the title of each product will also show up in that description sentence.
Therefore, choose the {TITLE} variable tag to go in the description field.
You can then write whatever else might go around that variable tag. In this situation, the title tag goes nicely in the sentence about being made in the USA.
Select the Append behavior so the new edit gets inserted at the end of each product description.
Note: The fields are sensitive to the exact information you type in. So you might find that things like spaces and punctuation at the beginning or end of the edit are important for making the new product value look good.
Run the bulk edit.
To see a product description click the Content button under the Description table header.
A new popup window appears to display the description after the bulk edit.
Our test was successful, putting a simple sentence at the end of the description while also utilizing the title variable tag to pull the right title for that product.
Additional product details to bulk edit
The plugin provides many fields that target the most important parts of WooCommerce products. You can edit things like download limits, sale pricing, in-stock quantities, and dimensions.
You’ll notice that some fields are highlighted in red. Those are the ones that require a premium subscription to the BEAR Bulk Editor plugin.
Make sure you click on the Additional tab to see more editable product elements. This page reveals that you can bulk edit product dimensions, sale times, and shipping classes, along with a wide range of other fields.
Other plugins to bulk edit WooCommerce products
The BEAR Bulk Editor isn’t the only plugin that helps with the bulk modifications of WooCommerce products. It’s one of our favorites in terms of free features and its ease-of-use, but the following plugins get the job done as well:
- PW WooCommerce Bulk Edit – A plugin that uses inline editing to bulk edit, along with quick safety net tools to ensure you don’t get too aggressive with edits.
- Smart Manager For WooCommerce – This plugin provides tools for stock management, advanced searching, and bulk editing.
- WooCommerce Bulk Edit Products – WP Sheet Editor – Organize products in a spreadsheet and use that sheet to bulk edit, rapidly edit individual items, or to copy settings from one product to another.
- ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit – The FLEX plugin offers options for bulk editing details like product variations, images, and even gallery images.
Start bulk editing WooCommerce products today
A bulk edit in WooCommerce may mean the difference between a store owner spending all day adjusting products or completing the task in seconds. The good news is that most bulk editing plugins work rather well and include free features. The not-so-bad news is you may end up paying a small fee to unlock more advanced features.
For some other ways to improve your store, check out our full collection of the best must-have WooCommerce plugins.
If you have questions about how to bulk edit WooCommerce products, share your thoughts in the comments.
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