You want your website visitors to checkout fast, pay you faster and receive their item quickly. However, speed matters for us WooCommerce store owners as well.
By looking at this year’s time-sheets for my own business, about 50% of the time was spent between marketing and admin – and the “admin” part is the one we’re tackling today.
If you run a busy WooCommerce shop with hundreds of products, you probably noticed how annoying it is to edit products one by one.
Yes, the WooCommerce admin dashboard allows us to do certain bulk edits a la WordPress, however you must play with the “screen options” and also the filtering is not good enough.
On the other end, as WooCommerce managers we’re probably more familiar with Excel-alike spreadsheets where all our products are editable with a single click in a specific cell.
Good news is there are plugins that can make your life easier, your admin time more efficient and your product management simpler. And today we’re taking a look at the best options.
1) Default WooCommerce Bulk Product Editing
I’d be surprised if you never used this before. The default WooCommerce bulk editing is actually a WordPress functionality. You probably bulk assigned a category to multiple posts before – or maybe bulk edited posts to draft.
Many WooCommerce entrepreneurs completely underestimate this tool. So, let’s make a little reminder here so that at least you know what you can and cannot do.
a) Go to WP Dashboard > Products and check the products you want to edit. Then, from the “Bulk Actions” drop-down, select “Edit”
b) Click on “Apply”. A bulk edit window appears. Now use the appropriate areas to bulk add a product category, change the status, increase/decrease prices, feature, manage inventory… Then click on the blue button “Update”
That’s it – you’ve now bulk edited a bunch of products 🙂
However, while this system works like a charm, it doesn’t really have the best UX. You cannot select multiple products across multiple admin dashboard pages (you’ll need to edit them 1 page at a time, mostly if you have hundreds of items), it doesn’t really give you enough filters to select only the products you want to edit (it only works by category, stock status and product type) and does not work for complex product types such as variable and grouped.
If you only have simple products and need to bulk edit simple fields, this is probably sufficient. But if your management and marketing require more advanced stuff and a handy tool to bulk edit products, then you’ll need a reliable plugin.
2) YITH WooCommerce Bulk Product Editing Plugin
Here comes YITH again. Surely, they know what the biggest WooCommerce weaknesses are and of course they have a plugin for bulk editing products as well.
With this plugin you can easily filter the products you want to bulk edit, and then modify any information: prices, description, custom fields, basically anything. You can even add products and export and import data 🙂
YITH WooCommerce Bulk Product Editing comes as a freemium model, therefore there is a free version you can happily test on your development website before committing to the premium plugin.
The main features of YITH WooCommerce Bulk Product Editing premium, in my opinion, are the following:
- Bulk edit any default product field
- Filter by category, title, date, SKU, tag, price and attributes
- Bulk edit variable products
- Create new products
- Import/export XML data
- Bulk edit custom fields
- Add prefix/suffix to any text/description
As usual make sure to ask all your questions to the pre-sales team in case you require specific functionalities, compatibilities or are not sure about something. YITH has a great support team, usually replies quickly and it’s often very open to implement new features if you request so.
So, let’s take a few screenshots to learn more.
a) Go to WP Dashboard > YITH > Bulk product editing and select your criteria for filtering products. Click on “Get Products”
b) Your products now appear in an Excel-alike table. Each cell is editable
c) Use the Show/Hide button to display/hide the product fields you want to edit
d) Edit products in the table. Each edit will get a red background so that you know what you’ve changed. Then click “Save”. That’s it!
You can even Undo, import/export, create a new product and manage variations. It’s awesome and you’ll thank me for this.
Price point: approx $75/€65. If YITH WooCommerce Bulk Product Editing saves you at least 60 minutes of work this week (which it will), then you’d pay back your investment in 7 days.
3) WooCommerce CSV Import/Export
Another way to bulk edit products is by using Excel spreadsheets (CSV is just an Excel format) and a reliable Import/Export plugin for WooCommerce products.
Because there are hundreds of import/export plugins it’s hard to say which one works best. I used WP All Import + WooCommerce Add-on in the past and never had to look for an alternative.