How to bulk edit products in Shopify: A complete guide

You don’t need a large team to manage an ecommerce business efficiently— just the right tools. We recently interviewed Incredible Pets, which manages 6,000 SKUs at any time on its online store. 

Their secret that cut three hours of product edits down to 30 minutes? Bulk editing products in Shopify. 

If you struggle with the hassle of updating large inventories in Shopify, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’ll cover the top three ways to bulk edit products in Shopify with pros and cons, plus the best bulk editing apps to manage your store. Learn step-by-step how to bulk edit prices for a sale, schedule bulk edits, undo product edits, and more.

Why do you need a Shopify bulk edit? 

Before jumping into how to edit multiple products, let’s go over why you need a bulk update in the first place. There are endless use cases, but here are a few of our favorites. 

1. Bulk edit prices in Shopify

To compete with retail giants with dynamic pricing that changes every three minutes, you need to be able to make price changes often—even daily—without up all of your time.  You also need to change prices to perform one of the most basic ecommerce functions: running a sale. Rather than changing product prices one by one, you can bulk edit your entire store, change product details, or mark down specific brands or collections. 

2. Bulk edit product descriptions in Shopify

Great Shopify product descriptions inform but also sell—connecting readers to emotions and desires that make them click “Add to cart”. Bulk editing product descriptions all in one go saves you time and makes it easier to optimize your products page. 

3. Create a Google Shopping feed

Publishing your store to Google Shopping gives you greater visibility and discoverability on search engines. However, it can be tricky to maintain all of the data you need for Google to publish your items. To add or edit Google Shopping fields, you need a bulk editor.

4. Bulk edit Shopify metafields and tags

Tags and metafields are useful to classify products with extra information such as material, season, or shipping information. You can also use metafields to add front-end filtering options to your store such as gender, style, or color. As your inventory or supplier information changes, don’t get stuck updating these manually. Instead, bulk edit metafields and tags for easy updates. 

5. Bulk edit variants in Shopify

Need to delete or change a color or size across your store? When many products contain a similar variant, you can edit the variant across your entire store or collection instead of item by item.

3 ways to bulk edit products in Shopify: A step-by-step guide

As a Shopify merchant, you should already be familiar with how to add, edit, or delete a single product. Making edits in bulk is a different process. There are multiple ways to do this, both inside Shopify and with a third-party bulk editor app. When evaluating different options, here’s what it comes down to:

• Visibility. Can you preview edits before they publish and see the upload status of a bulk edit? 
• Minimizing errors. Can you avoid frustrating errors like upload fails or making unintended store edits?
• Confidence and control. Can you schedule edits to run in advance and undo them to end a sale or to reverse a mistake? 

With that in mind, here are the three ways you can bulk edit Shopify products with the pros and cons of each. 

1. Bulk edit products with Shopify’s bulk editor

The first way to bulk edit products is with Shopify’s native bulk editor. Through this option, you can edit up to 100 products or product variants at a time without opening each product page. This simple bulk edit option works to update at least one product field in a table view, but it has some cons and limitations. 

Pros

• You can use the familiar Shopify Admin dashboard for edits. 

Cons

• Your edit is limited to 100 products and you can easily lose data if you navigate away from the page before pressing “Save”. 
• Limited visibility to see when the updates are published and no ability to preview, cancel, or undo edits once they’ve been done. 
• The bulk editor doesn’t support all of the features available in Shopify, such as rich text metafields. 
• No ability to schedule or undo edits. 

Step-by-step guide

1. Log into Shopify and access the “Products” page in Shopify Admin. 
2. Select the products or variants you want to edit. First filter products as needed, then click the checkboxes next to the ones you want to edit. You can also select the checkbox at the top of the rows to select all. 
3. After you’ve selected products, click the bulk edit option in the bar that pops up. 
4. The bulk editor will open a table listing the products and several fields such as price. If needed, you can change the properties displayed. 
5. Click and type within a field in the table to enter a new value. 
6. Use tab or arrow keys to navigate to the next row or column. 
7. Click “Save”. 

2. Bulk edit products with a CSV import

Another way to bulk update products using the Shopify CSV importer is to upload a spreadsheet with new product data. With this method, you edit your data in a CSV file and effectively override your previous product data. 

Pros

• CSV imports offer unlimited product edits and have more customization than Shopify’s native bulk editor. For instance, you can use handy features like find and replace. 
• If you have product information already in spreadsheet form from a supplier, it’s easy to transfer this over. 

Cons

• CSV imports often return error messages, requiring multiple attempts. 
• Your spreadsheet needs to meet Shopify’s exact formatting requirements, and a mistake could lead to duplicate products or deleted data. 
• Another word of caution: it’s easy to accidentally change data you didn’t mean to change. For instance, if you leave a column blank in the CSV file, Shopify will override that field (such as vendor) as blank on your store. 
• No ability to schedule or undo edits. 
• Any live changes that occur between when you export the product list and import it again won’t be accounted for. 
• Like in the Shopify Admin, you can’t undo edits, preview them, or see if they’ve been published. 

Step-by-step guide

1. Export a CSV file with the product data you need. 
2. Edit the exported file with your updated data (Shopify recommends Google Sheets for this task). 
3. From Shopify Admin, go to “Products”. 
4. Click “Import,” then “Add file” and select your updated CSV file. 
5. Be sure to select “Overwrite any current products that have the same handle”. If you don’t select this, it will add new products but won’t edit existing ones.
6. Click “Upload and continue”. 
7. Review import details, then click “Import products” to finalize the upload. 

3. Manage products with Ablestar Bulk Product Editor, a Shopify bulk editor app

Finally, an alternative to bulk editing your products in the Shopify admin is using a third-party app. We created Ablestar Bulk Product Editor to alleviate the headaches and time spent on product editing. 

With that in mind, we created a user-friendly interface giving store owners complete control and visibility over their edits. Like Shopify Admin, there are two options: an in-app edit and a spreadsheet edit. Unlike Shopify Admin, you have added confidence when updating your entire catalog– a scary proposition for most store owners. 

Pros 

• The ability to preview and undo edits and see the status of your spreadsheet edits. 
• The ability to schedule edits and schedule an undo edit in advance. 
• Instead of calculating sale prices manually, you can use rules like updating new prices to be 25% below the field price and rounded. 
• You can perform other dynamic edits, like setting a product title as vendor + product type. 
• Formatting flexibility for the spreadsheet option. 
• Features like product rules let you work smarter by specifying an action based on triggers. For example, you can add a tag to on-sale products or hide out-of-stock products. 
• The ability to clone edits to save even more time. 

Cons

• You need to connect a third-party app, but the app is available within the Shopify Admin. 

Once you’ve installed the app and linked your store, here are the two ways you can complete a bulk edit. 

In-app instructions for Ablestar Bulk Product Editor

1. Choose which products to edit by using the “Filters” drop-down or typing in the search box. 
2. Once you have your products, click on “Edit products” on the top right. 
3. Select which fields you want to edit and how you want to edit them (eg. decrease price by percent). 
4. Once you’ve entered your changes, choose between “Run edit,” “Schedule edit,” or “Recurring edit” depending on when you want the change to run. 
5. Once the edit runs, you can monitor the status of the edit in your dashboard. You can also view your edit history and undo past edits.

Spreadsheet instructions for Ablestar Bulk Product Editor

1. Select “Spreadsheet edit” from the left-hand navigation bar. 
2. Follow the on-screen prompt to select your Excel or CSV file. 
3. Ablestar Bulk Product Editor will process your files and show your fields on the screen so you can verify they’re mapped correctly. 
4. Once everything looks good, click “Run edit”. 
5. Once the edit runs, you can monitor the status of the edit in your dashboard. You can also view your edit history and undo past edits.

Clearing the clutter: How to bulk delete products in Shopify

Besides a bulk edit, there are also times when you will need to bulk delete items. Imagine that you’re discontinuing a brand on your site, for example, and want to remove all products for that vendor. Within Shopify admin, you can use the same steps as bulk editing above to complete a bulk action. Bulk actions include making products unavailable, deleting or archiving select products, removing tags, or removing products from collections.

With Ablestar Bulk Product Editor, you can bulk delete and bulk archive products to clean up shop. Use advanced search filtering with “handle starts with” or search for products with specific criteria like “has duplicate SKU” or “doesn’t have images”. You can either delete items entirely or move them to your product archives (find out the difference and best method here!).

The best Shopify bulk editor for publishing with confidence

When it comes to managing your store, time is money. Bulk editing isn’t just a time-saving hack—it’s a complete system for managing your store. You can add or delete products in bulk, publish a Google Shopping feed, and stay in control of your product descriptions, variants, and metafields with ease. 

The only Shopify bulk editor that lets you manage your products with complete confidence and visibility is Ablestar Bulk Product Editor. The more in control of your products you are, the more you can grow your business with confidence. 

Ready to take the hassle out of product edits? Get started with Ablestar Bulk Product Editor for Shopify stores today.