How to Use WooCommerce Bulk Edit to Update Products & Prices (2024)

Last updated - July 25, 2024

As the business grows, so does the list of products enlisted in your ecommerce site. This brings in the need to add and update your product catalog at frequent intervals. It’s cumbersome to do it one by one, hence the need to get your hands on the Bulk Edit feature by WooCommerce. With WooCommerce Bulk Edit up your sleeve, the process becomes way easier and handy.

In this blog, we will understand the meaning of Bulk Edit, how WooCommerce Bulk Edit works, and all the plugins that can aid in the seamless process of WooCommerce Bulk Edit.

What is WooCommerce Bulk Edit?

An updated product list or catalog probably will be the main factor that helps you lead your business. The customers or users need to understand your brand and its adjacent products to help with a great business flow. The updates are not possible when done individually, hence the need for WooCommerce Bulk Edit.

Users can perform WooCommerce Bulk Edit in multiple ways, either through the default option or by exporting products and editing them in a spreadsheet. Alternatively, they can use an equipped plugin from WordPress that makes the job easy.

Benefits of Using WooCommerce Bulk Edit

If you are an ecommerce owner yourself, you will certainly know the plight of managing a store in its entirety, and here are the benefits that come to you if you start with WooCommerce Bulk Edit:

Save the Effort

Product update is not the only thing that concerns WooCommerce store management, it just forms one part. Therefore, it wouldn’t be ideal to put too much emphasis on bulk edit WooCommerce products. Adopting WooCommerce Bulk Edit saves you a lot of time and effort.

Improves Efficiency

When owning and conducting a business, the first thing that should stand out is the efficiency of managing things. By getting bulk edit WooCommerce, you are bringing that efficiency into the picture. Manually entering individual details of the products results in errors. Streamlining workflows in times of seasonal sales and product launches becomes easier.

Quick Inventory Management

Managing product edits is a very time-consuming process, and it is not very much appreciated to invest a lot of hours in it. You can easily manage inventory by using WooCommerce Bulk Edit. Also, you can set them up in such a way that they reflect on the exact stock levels in your warehouse.

Promotes Scalability

As the business grows, so does the number of products it deals with. Individual editing can be tiring and hinder scalability and also affect productivity. It also helps in focusing on many important things that contribute to the growth of your business.

How to WooCommerce Bulk Edit with Default WooCommerce Setting?

Default Method for WooCommerce Bulk Edit

By default, you will find a WordPress functionality to bulk edit products on your site. On your product page, you can select the products and choose the bulk edit option.

Let’s take a look at how to manage this:

Go to WooCommerce > Products.

Select the products you want to edit, if you want to edit the entire list, click right below “Bulk Action”.

Courtesy: WooCommerce

You can also choose “product categories” as well to perform the bulk edit.

Also, there are options to filter the product list according to stock status and product type.

To edit the select products, click on “Bulk Action “ and then on “Edit”

Now, you will see a bulk edit screen where you can make changes to the selected products.

You will see the selected products that are going to be updated, along with the different product properties that you can change.

You can assign new categories and tags to the products, allow comments to the product listing, or change the Publish status of the product.

Here, you will also be able to make changes to several product data fields.

The changes you can make to the product data fields include the following:

Product Price (Regular and Sale price)
Weight and dimensions of the products
Shipping class
Catalog visibility
Enable or disable the featured product option
Modify stock information
Allow or disallow back orders
Enable to sell individually

Let’s understand it a little better:

Example scenario

Increase the Regular Price of multiple products by 10%

We will first select 4 products. Please note the existing price for these products.

To increase the price of the above 4 selected products, you can select the option “Increase existing price by (fixed amount or %)” from the Price drop-down field. Enter “10%” and click update.

You can see the Regular Price of the selected products is increased by 10%.

However, you might have noticed that the price has not changed for the second product. That is because it is a grouped product, and you need to change the price of individual products in a group separately.

Please note: With the default bulk edit option, you won’t be able to make price changes to grouped products or variable products. These changes need to be made at individual or variation levels.

Next, we will take a look at how different “filters” work:

Example scenario

Now, let’s look at another example. You want to set up a 5% sale price to all your In-Stock products. How will you manage this? Let’s see step by step.

First, you will have to filter the in-stock products. Select In-stock from the Filter by Stock status drop-down and choose In-stock. All your in-stock products will be listed.

One thing to notice here the Number of items displayed per page. In this example, we have over 700 in-stock products in our demo store. And only 20 products are displayed on one page. So, we have to change the display option.

For this, click the arrow for Screen Options on the top right of your screen. Here, you can change the number of items displayed per page. Change it to a higher number than the products you want to edit (in this example, we are making it to 800).

Now all your in-stock products will be displayed on a single page.

Please note: The maximum number of products you can display on a single page is 999. So if you have less than 999 products on your store, you can use this option effectively.

Select all the products and choose Edit from the Bulk Actions drop-down. On the Sale field, choose “Set to regular price decreased by fixed amount or %”. This will help you set up a sale price based on the regular price of the products.

Enter the value you want to change (for this example, 5%), and click the Update button.

Now you can see a sale price has been set up for all your In-stock products.

Please note: You will have to manually change the price for individual variations of your variable products as the bulk edit operation won’t change them.

To get a better idea you can also follow this video:

Bulk Edit WooCommerce Products using Spreadsheets

This is a long way to do the update of the product list in your WooCommerce store. Take the entire data of products from the store and upload it in Google Sheets or Excel. The import and export of product data can be made easy with the help of this WooCommerce extension, Import Export Suite for WooCommerce.

Plugins that help with WooCommerce Bulk Edit

If you have less than 999 products in your store, and you have mostly simple products, then WooCommerce’s in-built bulk edit option can be enough for you.

However, if you have numerous products and quite a high number of variable products, you can use some of the third-party plugins.

They will be quite helpful when you want to bulk update variable products and individual variations.

Some of these plugins even have an undo option that can be quite handy when you make mistakes while editing.

Here is a list of premium WooCommerce Bulk Edit plugins:

ELEX Advanced WooCommerce Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes

This plugin will help you bulk edit WooCommerce product fields such as SKU, Catalog Visibility, Stock, Quantity, Regular Price, Sale Price, Shipping Class, Weight, Dimensions, Attributes, and even product meta fields. Let’s take a quick look at some of the advantages of using this plugin over the default bulk edit option of WooCommerce.

With Elex’s plugin, you can get yourself:

To do bulk edit of 5 different product variations.
To preview the filtered options set for bulk edit
To bulk edit global attribute values
Undo the last operation
Exclude products from bulk edit

Pricing: $79

YITH WooCommerce Bulk Product Editing

Your choice to WooCommerce Bulk Edit to save time and effort in the best possible way. The plugin comes with an array of features:

One can enable fields of choice for bulk editing
Create and save views to filter products effectively
Edit multiple products simultaneously to save time, instead of individually opening, editing, and saving each one.
Create and Delete products
Export and Import Data

Pricing: $79.99

WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit

This one is equally comfortable whether you want to edit individual fields, or bulk update several ones at a time. It even helps you to edit product images.

Let’s take a look at the features of WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Plugin:

Bulk edit in 44 different fields
Edit multiple products at once
Create product variations
Custom meta fields
Set new sales for products with just a few clicks

Pricing: $49

BEAR – WooCommerce Bulk Edit and Products Manager Professional – Products bulk edit

This plugin is another popular and user-friendly option to bulk edit products for WooCommerce. If you make any mistakes while editing, the plugin offers a rollback option as well.

Here is a look at some of the unique features of this plugin:

Binded editing
Calculator for decimal fields
Export and import options
Roll-back option
Meta field bulk editing
Instant saving of data by AJAX

Pricing: $34

PW Bulk Edit

This plugin offers a very simple layout and is intuitive and quite fast. You can create new variations in your store using this plugin.

The features of this plugin are:

Ability to handle variations easily
Convenient operations
Bulk change sale price based on product price
Set or clear product images in bulk

Pricing: $59

Final Wrap

Using WooCommerce Bulk Edit is the best way to save time and effort and also invest the saved time into managing your booming ecommerce business. If you are starting, the best choice for you is to go with the default WooCommerce settings. But to avail of much more advanced features, you can choose any other plugins listed above.

FAQs

Is bulk editing a safe option?

Yes, when done right, it is the best option to update products. But, ideally, it will be good to take a backup. Also, make the changes on a staging site before reflecting them to the original site.

Can I bulk-edit product variations?

Yes, using different available bulk edit plugins.

Where can I find help with bulk editing in WooCommerce?

The information regarding the working of WooCommerce Bulk Edit is available under WooCommerce Documentation.
Understanding different plugins, the documentation is available under the respective websites. To understand different plugins, the documentation is available on the respective websites.