How to bulk edit products

I’ve seen both on the WooThemes Help Desk and on some Facebook groups that customers need to edit many of their products, or even all of them, all together.
In example, you may need to discount all the products for a special offer.

Everybody knows that there are plugins for this, like Dynamic Pricing or Bulk Stock Management, but not everybody knows about a neat feature that WooCommerce includes in its core by default, which allows you to do the same, maybe with more steps.

It’s the Bulk Actions feature, already available by default in WordPress for its default post types, and extended for Products in WooCommerce.

The Bulk Actions it’s a dropdown menu you have in the Products page, on the top left of the table.

product-bulk-actions

To use it, select one or more products in the table, then choose what to do with the Bulk Actions dropdown, so choose Edit or Move to Trash. It’s obvious what would happen if you choose Move to Trash.

If you choose instead to Edit the selected products you will be able to edit a lot of options for those products.
Here is how it looks when you try to edit products in bulk:

bulk-edit-products

As you can see you can choose the categories of the products, change the comments status and the products status, add tags, and change a lot of product data.

In example, if you want to discount all the products in the shop just select all of them, then click on Bulk Actions > Edit and in the PRODUCT DATA section choose how to edit the Price, increasing/decreasing it by X%. This would edit the product regular price by X%.

In the same way, you can bulk edit the stock (if the stock is the same for all products) or allow backorders and a lot of other things.


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42 responses to “How to bulk edit products”

  1. […] Certains gestionnaire de sites WordPress/WooCommerce ont recours à des extensions pour modifier plusieurs produits à la fois. Saviez-vous que ces tâches peuvent s’exécuter presque aussi efficacement avec des fonctions intégrées au noyau (Core) de WordPress ? Cet article vous explique comment. […]

  2. […] this week: How to move product attributes to after the “add to cart” button, and how to bulk edit products from the “Products” […]

  3. Hello,
    Very interesting post!!
    I’m using WooCommerce on my website, but I can not bulk edit the categories of products, I can only add categories but I can not change them. Do you know why this happens?
    Thanks

    1. Hi Xavi,
      thanks!

      You can’t bulk edit categories, but only products.
      To edit a singular category instead you have to go to Products > Categories and click on its name (or the edit link that appears hovering over it).

      Have a good day

  4. Hello,
    I’m having a problem with the bulk edit feature. When I try to change the category of multiple products, it does not allow me to reassign the category of a product, rather I am only able to add an additional category to a product. The end result is that the product appears in both categories (the original category and the modified category).

    For example, I have 3 products in the table (mesas) category (seen in img 1) and I would like to be able to remove them from their current category and add them to a different category such as chairs (sillas), as seen in img 2. What’s happening is that I am only allowed to add the products to the chairs category and cannot delete them from the table category (demonstrated in img 3).

    img1:
https://immograf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1.jpg
    img2:
https://immograf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2.jpg
    img3:
https://immograf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/3.jpg

    Any suggestions to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    1. Hi Xavi,
      This is a limitation from WordPress because categories for multiple items can be different, therefore you can’t remove them because you may want to remove only one of the products from a category, but not the others.

      I’d suggest you to write on the WordPress.org support forum for this.

      You will see the same behaviour for WordPress post, it’s not limited to products from WooCommerce only.

  5. Thank you so much. Your article saved me a lot of time !

    1. You’re welcome Benedicte!

  6. How can I bulk edit the product type? I imported hundreds of products from a csv, and although it saved all the variations and variant pricing correctly, it saved every products as a simple product. I don’t want to have to manually go through and open, edit, save each product – I don’t see a way of doing this. Help!

    1. Hello Angela,
      The easiest way to bulk edit the product type would be to delete the imported products and import them again specifying the product type in your CSV.

      Otherwise, if the plugin you are using has a Merge feature for existing products you can specify the product type in the CSV and merge it.

  7. Hi! Is there a way to bulk edit the image associated with a group of products? i.e. I want to update the image for all products in a certain category. (It’s really the category image I want to update). Make sense?

    Thanks!

    1. Hi Jesse,
      Not that I know, but in that case you should use the category image, not the product image.

  8. hayley fletcher Avatar
    hayley fletcher

    Hi there,
    your article says “In the same way, you can bulk edit the stock (if the stock is the same for all products) or allow backorders and a lot of other things.”

    Allow bulk orders is exactly what I am wanting to do, but I can’t find that option. I thought I had it previously but it doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

    Thanks

  9. Is there a way to bulk edit a line in the text of the product description?

    1. Hello Jasmine,
      I’m sorry but there’s not a way to do that.

  10. Edited by Nicola. This blog is not meant to be used to spam your product. Thanks.

  11. Thank you for this information! I am however only able to decrease or increase by value and not %. How do I change this?

    1. If I try to update the price it says by fixed value or %. The field is the same, but it works for both cases: http://cld.wthms.co/I1nf/5OrPbLlr+

  12. This really helped me over at http://www.merchcandy.com and I appreciate you writing the post. i was about to buy a plugin and you taught me how to do it for free! Thanks so much!

  13. Hey, thanks for the post. Very informative

    However, when I’m viewing the product table, and have filtered it to display only products in a specific category, then select all and use…

    bulk actions > edit > price > increase by (fixed amount or %):

    It doesn’t appear that anything happens, and no price seems to be adjusted.

    What is the acceptable format for entering a percentage increase into the price field?

    Thanks in advance for your consideration

    1. Hello Steve,
      Make sure you are entering just the number, without any sign!

      If that still does not work, I’d suggest you to disable all plugins except WooCommerce and try again, if that still does not fix, try to open an issue on GitHub!

    2. I’m having this same problem. My numbers haven’t changed. I’ll try deactivating all and see if it works.

  14. Does it bulk-update variable products?

    1. Yes, but not everything. It depends on what you want to update exactly!

      1. regular price and sale price?

    2. To bulk edit variable products, one of the solutions is to go for specialized plugins like this one https://elextensions.com/plugin/bulk-edit-products-prices-attributes-for-woocommerce/
      Very good article Nicola. WooCommerce Bulk Edit feature explained in very simple terms.

  15. Hi thanks for this great information, I was wondering, ¿How can i bulk edit product from published status to draft status? Rigth now, I have 3500 products that i need to change to draft status, but right now, I can only do 20 products at a time. Can you guide me about it? Thanks a lot!

  16. For such operations it is better use special plugins like WOOBE – WooCommerce Bulk Editor Professional where it is possible roll back the data is any mistake done

    p.s. link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woo-bulk-editor/

  17. Hello

    I want to know how do we bulk upload (add) products to start with. We have about 1500 SKUs and its very hard to upload them one by one. Is there any way we can bulk upload all the products. Thanks a lot!

    1. Hi Rahul,
      WooCommerce includes a CSV import/export tool. You can use that to bulk import products. You can read how to do it here: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/product-csv-importer-exporter/

  18. Hi!
    It is a great job yours!
    My webpage is http://bolsostock.com and I want to agregate a external product by the code not by backend. Do you can help me or how I can?
    Thanks!

    1. Hello,
      what do you mean by aggregate external products?

  19. Perfect! Exactly what I was looking for…

    1. Great! I’m happy it helps you Nathalie.

  20. Thanks a lot.this article is very useful for me.

  21. This is so useful Nicola, I have wasted days to sort this problem until I stumbled into your blog post. I can’t believe how easy it is to edit product categories. Thank you so much you are a life saver and really a wordpress surgeon.

  22. Thanks for this content. Very useful

  23. […] Có. Làm theo hướng dẫn này: How to Bulk-Edit Products. […]

  24. […] Yes. Refer to Bulk Editing Products. […]

  25. […] Yes. Refer to Bulk Editing Products. […]

  26. […] Yes. Refer to Bulk Editing Products. […]

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