WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products and Prices – A Step by Step Guide

Editing product features frequently is a big task if you are a WooCommerce shop owner. Product prices may change, so does product images, and descriptions as well. Maybe you need to offer some special prices or offers for a particular time, or some recurring changes should be done on some products. Doing these changes individually on each and every product is time-consuming. And it is not convenient to spend more time on editing simple and variable products. This article focuses on WooCommerce bulk edit variable products and prices.

If the price of some product changes, or a particular percentage of price has increased on all the products under a specific category, it is inconvenient to go to each and every product page to update the details. So here, in this case, let us think about a robust and efficient plugin to make this task easy. First, let us check the basic way to edit products in bulk with WooCommerce itself. 

How To Bulk Edit Products With WooCommerce?

You can do some basic bulk edits with the default WooCommerce settings itself unless you need more advanced features. You can go to your WooCommerce dashboard and go to Products -> All Products.

There you can see Bulk Actions.

You can apply some basic filters here, such as choosing particular categories, choosing the product type, and filter by stock status. Choose on which categories you want to apply the bulk edit, and you can choose the product type such as simple product (downloadable & virtual products), grouped product, external/ affiliate product, and variable products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Filter Products for Bulk Edit

You can also sort products by their stock status such as, in stock, out of stock as well as on backorder.

Now let us check how this will work on the simple products. And enable the checkboxes of the products on which you want to apply the edit and click on the Apply button. A tab to do the bulk edit will appear.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Bulk Edit of Simple Product With WooCommerce

There you can choose the product categories or you can apply to all products without choosing one product. Using this method, you can bulk edit the selected products’ :

  • Comments: Allow or Do not allow comments.
  • Status: Set the status of the product page to published, private, pending review, or draft.
  • Product Tags: Add the tags you want to all the filtered products.
  • Price: Change the price of the products by increasing or decreasing a fixed amount or particular percentage from the actual price of the products.
  • Sale: Change the sale price of the products by increasing or decreasing a fixed amount or particular percentage from the sale price as well as set to regular price decreased by a fixed price or a percentage.
  • Weight: Change the selected products’ weight to another weight.
  • L/W/H: Change the height, width, and length of the selected products.
  • Shipping Class: Choose the shipping class you have already set on your WooCommerce store for the selected products.
  • Visibility: Set the visibility of the products to catalog & search, catalog, search, and hidden.
  • Featured: To set the products as featured or set the feature products to not featured.
  • In Stock?: Set the selected products to In stock, Out of stock, or On backorder.
  • Manage Stock?: Set it to yes or no if you want to manage the stock or not.
  • Stock qty: Increase or decrease the stock quantity by entering the number.
  • Backorders: Set it as Do not allow, Allow, but notify the customer or Allow according to your need.
  • Sold individually?: Set it to yes or no to all products set to be sold individually or not.

These are the default bulk edit options available with WooCommerce. Now let us come to variable products. As I mentioned earlier, there you can choose  ‘Variable product’ from the filter option and choose the variable products, which you want to apply the changes.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Bulk Edit Variable Products

When you choose to edit after selecting the products, you will be directed to the tab where all the edit options are available for the simple products. There you can set the data accordingly to do the edit on the variable products. Set the Comments, Status, Product Tags, Price, Sale Price, Weight, Length, Width, Height, Shipping Class, Visibility of the products, products to be featured or not, Stock status, Manage stock, Set a stock quantity, set the Backorder details, set products to be sold individually or not for the variable products in bulk.

Using WooCommerce, you can only filter the products based on their categories. And what if you need to exclude some products from the selected categories or apply the bulk edit on the products that have a particular product tag or variable products by a specific attribute value? In such cases, you need some external help to do that. There are many bulk edit plugins available to do this task perfectly and quickly without taking too much time. Before choosing a plugin, make sure it works with all your requirements and the editing options. Maybe your products may have exclusive product properties not available default on the plugin by default. In such cases, you should be able to create the new attribute values and apply the edit on that attribute for all the selected products.

ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes

ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes is a top-notch and handy bulk edit premium plugin to do the bulk edit task with simple clicks. Its easy navigating tabs one by another will help you to do the entire process without any difficulties. The main advantage of ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes plugin is, you can use varieties of filtering options especially favoring variable products and its attributes and offering many product editing options. If you do not find the required product properties to be edited on your products, you can go to its ‘Settings’ tab and add the exclusive properties of your products. And maybe after applying the edits, you may need to revert and undo the changes you have done previously. There is a possibility to include some other products you do not need to edit if you have used so many filters. In such cases, you need to go back and edit it. In a simple click, you can go back to the previous edit and do the changes accordingly.

You can do bulk edit to three types of products such as simple, variable(Parent, Variation), and External products. Check the features for WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products as well as simple products.

First, let us check how we can apply the bulk edit to the simple products.

Bulk Edit of Simple Products

Simple products are unique, stand-alone, physical products in your WooCommerce store without any variations such as size or color. There are several options to filter the simple products while applying bulk edits in your store. Before that, download ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes plugin, and activate it.

Go to WooCommerce -> Bulk Edit Products.

The first tab that will appear is ‘Filter’ for filtering the products. Here, you can filter the products based on the product title, product tags, product type, product categories, and product regular price and an option to exclude some products will come in the sorted list.

  • Product Title: Filter the products based on their title such as ‘Starts With, Ends With, Contains and Regex Match’. If you want to filter the products which start, end, or contain a particular text, you can use this feature. Besides these three options, ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes plugin offers Regex (Regular Expression) match to sort the products. The regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. It uses string searching algorithms for “find” or “find and replace” operations on strings, or for input validation. Here if you have to search for product titles containing numbers, then your search pattern should be [0-9].
  • Product Tags: You can choose a product tag or tags to filter the products which contain the particular tag or tags.
  • Product Type: Here, you can choose the product type as ‘Simple’ for applying the edits to simple products only.
  • Product Categories: You can select the product categories by enabling the respective checkboxes. If your products have any subcategories, you can enable the ‘Include Subcategories’. If you do not choose any product categories, the edit will be applied to all the products in your shop.
  • Product Regular Price: Filter the products based on their regular price. If you simply leave it as ‘All’, it will include all the products. There are 4 conditions you can apply for sorting the products which satisfy the condition of price. They are,
  1. >= – Includes products with value, greater than or equal to the entered price.
  2. <= – Includes products with value, lesser than or equal to the entered price.
  3. == – Includes products with the value exactly equal to the entered price.
  4. || Between – Enter the minimum and maximum regular price value to filter the products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Filter Products for Bulk-Edit

Enable the ‘Exclusions’ and exclude required categories or individual products by entering their product ID. Also, you can exclude subcategories of a particular category.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Bulk Edit Exclusions

After setting these filters, you can click on the preview button to see the products sorted. You can reset the filters as well in a single click.

The preview page will display all the filtered products and details. If you find these are the product list you need to do an edit, you can proceed with that. Otherwise, you can go back to the filter page and change the settings accordingly.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Bulk Edit Simple Product PreviewYou can also search for the products to check if they are included or not. The preview page will display the product image, product title with ID, categories, and the product type, Stock details such as SKU, status and quantity, sale & regular price, and the published date.

You can click on to Continue if all the products are included, else can go back and reset the filters.

Bulk Edit Product Properties

After sorting the products to be edited, you will be navigated to the next tab for editing the product properties. You can find many default product properties on this tab. They are, Title, SKU, Product Visibility, Featured Product, Shipping Class, Description action, Short Description Action, Product Image, Product Gallery Image Action, Regular Price & Sale Price, Manage Stock, Stock Quantity, Allow Backorders, Stock Status, Dimensions such as Length, Width, Height and Weight, Tax Status & Tax Class, Category Actions and Delete Actions. Check it out one by one.

  • Title: There are 5 options to update the filtered products’ product title.
  1. Set New – Set a new product title for the filtered products.
  2. Append – Add custom text at the end of the existing product title.
  3. Prepend – Add custom text at the beginning of the existing product title.
  4. Replace – Replace some words or full product title with the entered text.
  5. RegEx Replace – Replace the entered regular expression pattern with the entered replacement value using RegEx.
  • SKU: You can edit the SKU of all filtered products with 5 options to edit. They are:
  1. Set New – Set a new product SKU for the filtered products.
  2. Append – Adda custom value at the end of the existing product SKUof all the filtered products.
  3. Prepend – Add custom value at the beginning of the existing product SKU of the filtered products.
  4. Replace – Replace certain words or full product SKU with the entered value of the filtered products.
  5. RegEx Replace – Replace the entered regular expression pattern with the entered replacement value.
  •  Product Visibility: Select the required visibility options for the filtered products, on the Catalog/ Search page. There is anyone among the 4 visibility options you can set for the filtered products. They are:
  1. Shop and Search – You can choose this option for the filtered products to be available in both the shop page and store’s search results.
  2. Shop – Choose this option to make the products available only on the shop page.
  3. Search – Choose this option to make the products available only in the store’s search results.
  4. Hidden – Filtered products will be hidden from the shop completely if you select this option.
  •  Featured Product: Set the filtered products as featured products on your online store as well as set the featured products to not featured.
  • Shipping Class: Select the desired shipping class for the filtered products. The shipping classes already present on your WooCommerce store will be listed here in this drop-down menu. You can choose the shipping class to be assigned for the filtered products.
  • Description & Short description Action: You can edit the description and short description of all the filtered products together using this feature. 3 edit options are available for both description and short description. They are:
  1. Append: Add custom text at the end of the existing product description and short description.
  2. Prepend: Add custom text at the beginning of the existing product description and short description
  3. Set New: Set a new product description and short description for the filtered products.
  • Product Image: Enter an image link to be added as the product image of the filtered products.
  • Product Gallery Image Action: You have three options here to add an image to the filtered products’ image gallery.
  1. Add: Add a new image to the image gallery by dropping the image link for all the sorted products.
  2. Remove: Remove an image by providing its link from all the selected product image gallery.
  3. Replace: Replace an image from the image gallery of the filtered products.
  • Regular Price: Edit the regular price of all the filtered products by
  1. Increase by Percentage (+ %): Increase the regular price by a specific percentage of the existing price.
  2. Decrease by Percentage (- %): Decrease the regular price of the filtered products by a particular percentage of the existing regular price.
  3. Increase by Price (+ $): Increase a fixed amount of price to the existing regular price.
  4. Decrease by Price (- %): Decrease a fixed amount from the existing regular price of all the filtered products.
  5. A Flat Price for All the products: Set a fixed flat price for all the filtered products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | ELEX Bulk Edit Regular Price Edit

In this example, an amount of $30 will be set as the regular price of all the filtered products.

  • Sale Price:  Edit the sale price of all the filtered products by
  1. Increase by Percentage (+ %): Increase the sale price by a specific percentage of the existing price.
  2. Decrease by Percentage (- %): Decrease the sale price of the filtered products by a particular percentage of the existing price.
  3. Increase by Price (+ $): Increase a fixed amount of price to the existing sale price of all the sorted products.
  4. Decrease by Price (- %): Decrease a fixed amount from the existing sale price of all the filtered products.
  5. A Flat Price for All the products: Set a fixed sale flat price for all the filtered products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | ELEX Bulk Edit Sale Pice

In this example, $5 will be added to the sale price of all filtered products.

If you increase or decrease the regular price or sale price, you have an option to round it up or down.

  • Manage Stock: Enable or disable stock management for all the filtered products.
  • Stock Quantity: Bulk edits the stock quantity by increasing, decreasing, or adding a fixed amount of stock by replacing for all the filtered products.
  • Allow Backorders: You can choose from the following options for backorders processing for the products:
    • Do not Allow
    • Allow, but notify the Customer
    • Allow
  • Stock Status: Set the filtered products stock status as In stock, Out of stock, or On Backorder according to your need.
  • Weight & Dimensions: Increase, decrease, or replace with a new value for bulk editing the weight, length, width, and height of the products.
  • Tax Status: Set the tax status to taxable, shipping, or none according to the needs.
  • Tax Class: You can choose No Change, Standard, Reduced rate, and Zero rate as a tax class for all the filtered products.
  • Category Actions: You can bulk update the existing product categories for all the filtered products and choose to add an existing product category, remove a category, or overwrite the selected category to the filtered products.
  • Delete Action: You have 2 options here: Move to the trash and Delete permanently. If you move to trash, you can restore it in the future and find it in the ‘Trash’ on the ‘Products’ tab. If you want to delete an item permanently as you are planning to stop its selling, you can delete the filtered products permanently.

If you want to add custom properties exclusively for your products, you can go to the Settings tab.

There you can add all the custom properties of your WooCommerce store that needs to be edited separated by a comma. After setting up this, you can see the custom properties listed on the ‘Edit’ page.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | WooCommerce-Bulk-Edit-Products-Update-Custom-Meta-Fields

You can enter the value to be added to the custom properties of all the filtered products.

All these edits can be done on simple products as well as variable products. And what if you need to apply this on to the variable products too?

Bulk Edit on WooCommerce Variable Products

You can choose the variable products for filtering the variable products too. In this plugin, you can also apply bulk edit on external products same as editing simple products as well as variable products. Check out the features available for WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | WooCommerce-Bulk-Edit-Products-Update-Custom-Meta-Fields | ELEX Bulk Edit Variable Products

In the filtering page, You can use global product attributes to filter the products for editing. Once you have selected an attribute, you can select the desired Product Attribute Values for deeper filtering. Before that, you should create the global attributes in your WooCommerce Attributes Settings.

Grouping Product Attributes

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Attributes Filtering on Bulk Edit

You can group the attributes in OR and AND operations. The OR grouping with filter products that have either of the selected attribute & attribute values, whereas the AND grouping will filter products that have all the selected attribute & attribute values.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Preview of Variable Products

After the preview of the products, you can go to the next window for editing the properties. You can set all the product properties here the same way as in the simple product. You can edit the attributes and interchange attribute values of the filtered products for the WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products.

Editing Variable Product Attributes

Attribute Action: Select the desired action from Add, Remove, or Replace to make changes to do the bulk edit for WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Variable Products Attribute Bulk Edit

Attributes to Update – Once an action is selected in the previous setting, the global product attributes you have already set will be shown here. Tick the desired attribute checkbox to apply changes.

Attributes Values(Existing)- You can choose the values of the attribute to be removed.

Attribute Values(New)-If you wish to add new attribute values for your products, you do not have to go to your WooCommerce Attributes settings tab. Even though you need to add a new Product attribute, you should use the default WooCommerce Attributes settings, with this setting, you can add or replace new attribute values. You can add or replace multiple values by entering one value in each row.

Used for Visible on the product page- You can enable or disable this feature making the variable products with attribute values to be visible on the product page or not.

Used for Variation –  You can choose to enable or disable whether the newly added attributes should be used for variation or not.

Interchange Attribute Values

You can do a bulk edit to the product variations by changing one product attribute value to another value for the filtered variable products in your store. You can enable the product attributes available in your WooCommerce site to interchange its value to another value for the products.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Variations

In this example, it is set so that all the filtered products in Blue color will be changed to the Green color.

Similarly, you can change one attribute value to another for the filtered products.

Schedule the Bulk Edit

After setting up all these things to execute the bulk edit, you can schedule to apply the bulk update operation at a scheduled time. You can also save the job for future use. You can even choose to revert the changes immediately or at a scheduled time as well. You can either perform the bulk edit immediately or schedule it for later. If you are scheduling it for later, you can set the date and time for the bulk update operation. Also, you can revert the changes at a specified date and time. This feature is helpful when you want to apply bulk changes to products for only a specific time period.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | WooCommerce-Bulk-Edit-Products-Schedule-Bulk-Edit-Later

You can also enter a name for identifying the job and create a log file that will contain information related to all the product fields that are updated.

You have an option to undo before proceeding for the update. If you want to go back and change some properties or values to be updated, you can revert back.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | Undo and Continue

If everything is fine and all set, you can click on Continue.

You can view all the jobs in the ‘Jobs’ tab.

WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | jobs

You have 7 buttons here such as editing or copying the job, performing a quick bulk update, reverting back the last update of the respective task, delete or cancel the task, or download the log file.

Finally, if you want to undo the last update, you can go to the first screen used for filtering the products and click on the Undo Last Update button.WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products & Prices - A Step by Step Guide | WooCommerce-Bulk-Edit-Products-Undo-Last-Update-Button

You can do the required changes for the products and save it for the bulk edit.

Conclusion

ELEX WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Products, Prices & Attributes plugin, helps to do the bulk edit job of thousands of products in one click and offers advanced editing options to schedule the jobs. For WooCommerce Bulk Edit Variable Products, this plugin is the right choice. You can also try its free version for basic bulk edit features. Check out its set up document for more details. If you are looking for a bulk edit plugin, which favors product variations also, you can go for this robust and handy plugin without any doubt!

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