How to Use the Shopify Bulk Editor to Manage Multiple Products

There’s a reason that Shopify has nearly 29% of the total ecommerce market share. It’s affordable, user-friendly, and comes with built-in marketing tools. It also has a powerful admin dashboard that enables you to manage your store within a single interface. 

However, Shopify isn’t perfect. Some things still require manual effort—and time—to accomplish. Using the Shopify Bulk Editor to manage multiple products is one of those things. The editor doesn’t present much of a problem if you only have a few products on your store. Yet, as you add thousands of products and variants, it becomes harder to keep up.

That said, keep reading as we guide you through the process of using Shopify’s Bulk Editor to manage your products and what you can do to speed up the process.

What Is the Shopify Bulk Editor?

The Shopify Bulk Editor is found within your admin section. While the functionality is limited, it allows you to edit multiple product details at once, such as price, category, weight, tag, and more.

Similar to a spreadsheet, the Bulk Editor lets you update multiple products (including their variants) within Shopify admin. And it exists for more than just editing products—you can also edit customers, collections, inventory, pages, and blog posts.

The Bulk Editor accomplishes all of this by adding parameters to URLs, so using Safari, Chrome, or Firefox is recommended. Internet Explorer has a maximum URL length, so it’s not ideal for this process.

How to Use the Shopify Bulk Editor

Now, let’s get into how to use Shopify’s Bulk Editor to edit multiple products. 

1. Select the Products You Want to Edit in Bulk

Navigate to your Products section, and Shopify will present you with a complete list of your store’s products. Then, select which products you’d like to edit. To make this easier, you can click the checkbox to select and edit all products at once.

2. Click Edit Products

Next to the checkbox you’ve ticked,  you’ll see a number showing how many products you have selected. Beside this field, you’ll see “Edit products.” Choosing this option leads to the Bulk Editor.

3. Edit Products in Bulk

Now it’s time to customize your items in terms of their sizes, prices, colors, weights, and more. You can accomplish this by clicking on each product’s corresponding textbox and entering your desired edits.

Add a Property

If you don’t see a field you’d like to edit, you can add fields by clicking “Add fields” at the top of the Bulk Editor. To add the property to the table for editing, click it.

You can repeat this procedure as many times as necessary to add multiple properties.

Remove a Property

To remove and stop editing a property, click the “x” next to that property.

Bulk Editing in Shopify via CSV Export or Import

An alternative to the Bulk Editor is using the CSV export and import tool to edit product data. Exporting your data will give you a spreadsheet of all of the products in your store. To export this data, click on the “Export” button while in Product admin.

To make edits, you can open the file in Google Spreadsheet or Excel. When you’re done, save it as a CSV file and re-import it into Shopify. This will update your products. 

While this method is easy and helpful if you’re updating many products at once, but there are some shortcomings:

• If product changes occur while you edit the spreadsheet, you will overwrite your data. If someone buys a product and the stock level changes, this could easily happen. The old stock level will be added when you re-import your product CSV.
• It’s impossible to update a single field or product this way. You must re-import all product data for changes to take effect. 

Bulk Editing Shopify Metafields

When using Shopify admin to bulk edit products, you can only access specific metafields—and there isn’t an option to add custom fields.

You can access the product metafields using a direct URL which allows you to create new metadata. See the URL below for an example:

https://my-shop.myshopify.com/admin/bulk?resource_name=Product&edit=metafields.global.style,metafields.global.nutrition_fats

To use this method effectively, let’s break the URL down to understand how it works:

• My-shop = Your Shopify shop name
• .myshopify.com/admin  = Access the Shopify Admin Dashboard (remember to log in first)
• /bulk? = Access the bulk editor and pull variables
• resource_name=Product = The variable you’re pulling
• &edit = Allows you to edit the variable
• metafields  = What you wish to edit, which is product metafields
• .global = Selects all products for editing
• .style =  Name of the metafield to be created or edited
• , = Comma if you’re adding multiple metafields 

Once you enter the URL you’ve created, you’ll see a bulk editor with all of your products shown. While this is an effective way to save information about each product, it’s obviously time-consuming and leaves a lot of room for error. 

Bulk Product Editing in Flxpoint

To save time when editing multiple products at once, consider an ecommerce operations platform like Flxpoint. Flxpoint allows you to easily create rules that apply to your products. 

For example, let’s say you want to change your pricing. Instead of working through each product listing and setting the price or going through a spreadsheet, you can set a rule to increase all pricing by 20% and round the final value to 99 cents. 

Creating rules is only scratching the surface of what Flxpoint can do as a product information management system. You can edit nearly every aspect of your products, including adding or removing product tags, adjusting inventory levels, adding, removing, or replacing words in product titles, and more.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Flxpoint can help you save time and streamline your ecommerce operations, talk with an expert today.