One of the nice things about Shopify is its powerful admin section. You can manage your store, see reports and even use keyboard shortcuts all within a single, well-designed, interface. Unfortunately sometimes there’s tasks that can still take too long to do. One of these is bulk editing products in Shopify.
If you just have a couple products on your store, it’s not much of a problem. You, or an assistant, can go through edit them one-by-one. This gets harder though as you add more products or variants. In this post, we’ll cover three different ways where you can save time by editing multiple products in one go:
- Shopify’s Bulk Editor
- Shopify’s Product CSV Export/Import
- Bulk Product Editor by Ablestar
Shopify’s Bulk Editor
Shopify has tried to address this problem by adding a limited bulk product editor to the admin section. To access the edit, select all your products and then click on the Edit Products button:
Once you’ve opened up the editor you’ll see what looks like a spreadsheet with all your products. You can then go down row-by-row and edit the values you need:
This method is faster than going to individual product pages but it can still be slow if you have lots of products you need to update.
Shopify’s Product CSV Export/Import
Another alternative in the Shopify admin is to use the CSV export and import tool. This will give you a spreadsheet of all the data in your Shopify store. To create a CSV export click on the Export button on the Product admin page:
You can then open it up in Excel or Google Drive and make the edits you need. Once you’ve saved the output CSV file, you can re-import it and Shopify will update your products.
This method is useful if you have a lot of products to update but there’s also some drawbacks:
- Any changes to products that occur while your editing the spreadsheet will be overwritten. This can easily happen someone buys you product and the stock level changes. Then, when you re-import the products the old stock level will be re-added.
- You can’t update just a single field, you need to reimport the entire product data
Bulk Product Editor by Ablestar
In light of these problems with the admin section we built the Bulk Product Editor app for Shopify. It was designed from the ground up to save store owners time by allowing you to edit multiple products at once.
The Bulk Product Editor app lets you create a rules for an edit that get applied to your products. For example, instead of going through each product and setting the price, you can use the app to increase all price by 10% and then round the final value to 95 cents.
This is just scratching surface, you can edit almost every aspect of a product including:
- Doing a search/replace in product descriptions
- Adding or removing tags
- Adjusting inventory levels
Additionally can also perform edits by uploading a CSV file with the just the field you want to change. This is especially helpful for store owners who need to keep data synchronized between Shopify and some other inventory or drop shipping system. Check out our knowledge base for more information on editing Shopify products with a CSV file.
Finally, we’re always looking for ways to improve our app to save Shopify users more time. We’ve already added multiple suggestions and if you have any ideas please let us know.