How to bulk edit Shopify products

Even some of the most successful Shopify stores operate with small teams. Earlier this year, we interviewed Knowhere Comics, a 50,000-product online store managed entirely by one couple. Their time-saving secret? Bulk editing products.

If you struggle with the time it takes to update your products on Shopify, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’ll cover how to bulk edit products in Shopify, including descriptions, tags, descriptions, and variants, plus how to bulk delete products.

Why do you need a Shopify bulk edit?

Before jumping into mechanics, let’s go over why you need a bulk edit in the first place. There are endless use cases for Shopify bulk editing, but here are a few of our favorites.

1. Perform a Shopify bulk price change

To compete with retail giants with dynamic pricing that changes every three minutes, you need to be able to make price changes often—even daily—without eating up all of your time. You also need to change prices to perform one of the most basic ecommerce functions: running a sale. Rather than changing product prices one by one, you can bulk edit your entire store or mark down specific brands or collections.

2. Bulk edit product descriptions on Shopify

Great product descriptions inform but also sell—connecting readers to emotions and desires that make them click “Add to cart”. Whether you’ve revamped your descriptions yourself or asked AI to do it for you, you should be able to batch-update your descriptions all in one go.

3. Add or edit Google Shopping fields

Publishing your store to Google Shopping gives you greater visibility and discoverability on search engines. However, it can be tricky to maintain all of the data you need for Google to publish your items. To add or edit Google Shopping fields, you need a bulk editor.

4. Bulk edit Shopify tags and metafields

Tags and metafields are useful to classify products with extra information such as material, season, or shipping information. You can also use metafields to add front-end filtering options to your store such as gender, style, or color. As your inventory changes, don’t get stuck updating these manually. Instead, bulk edit or bulk delete tags and metafields.

5. Bulk edit variants in Shopify

Need to delete or change a color or size across your store? When a variant is applied to many products, you can edit the variant across your entire store or collection instead of item by item.

Three ways to bulk edit products on Shopify: A step-by-step guide

As a Shopify store owner, you should already be familiar with how to add or edit a product. Making edits in bulk is a different process—and a much quicker one. There are multiple ways to do this, both inside of Shopify and with a third-party app. Here are the three ways you can bulk edit Shopify products with the pros and cons of each.

Bulk edit products in Shopify admin

The first way that you can bulk edit products is through your Shopify admin. Through this option, you can edit up to 100 products or product variants at a time without opening each product page. This simple product editor works to update at least one product field in a table view, but it has some limitations.

Pros

• You can use the familiar Shopify admin dashboard for edits

Cons

• Your edit is limited to 100 products and you can easily lose data if you navigate away from the page before pressing “Save”
• Limited visibility to see when the updates are published and no ability to preview, cancel, or undo edits once they’ve been done
• The bulk editor doesn’t support all of the features available in Shopify, such as rich text metafields

Step-by-step guide

1. Log into Shopify and access the “Products” page in Shopify admin
2. Select the products or variants you want to edit. First filter products as needed, then click the checkboxes next to the ones you want to edit. You can also select the checkbox at the top of the rows to select all.
3. Click “Bulk edit” in the black navigation bar that pops up
4. The bulk editor will open a table listing the products and several fields such as price. If needed, you can change the properties displayed.
5. Click and type within a field in the table to enter a new value
6. Use tab or arrow keys to navigate to the next row or column
7. Click “Save”

Bulk edit products with a CSV import

Another way to bulk edit products using the Shopify admin is to upload a spreadsheet with new product data. With this method, you edit your data in a CSV file and effectively override your previous product data.

Pros

• CSV imports are free, offer unlimited product edits, and have more customization than Shopify’s native bulk editor. For instance, you can use handy features like find and replace.
• If you have product information already in spreadsheet form from a supplier, it’s easy to transfer this over

Cons

• CSV imports often encounter error messages requiring multiple attempts
• Your spreadsheet needs to meet Shopify’s exact formatting requirements, and a mistake will lead to duplicate products or deleted data
• Another word of caution: it’s easy to accidentally change data you didn’t mean to change. For instance, if you leave a column blank in the CSV file, Shopify will override that field (such as vendor) as blank on your store.
• Any live changes that occur between when you export the spreadsheet and import it again won’t be accounted for
• Like on Shopify admin, you can’t undo edits, preview them, or see if they’ve been published

Step-by-step guide

1. Export a CSV file with the product data you need
2. Edit the CSV file with your updated data (Shopify recommends Google Sheets for this task)
3. From Shopify admin, go to “Products”
4. Click “Import,” then “Add file” and select your updated CSV file
5. Be sure to select “Overwrite any current products that have the same handle”. If you don’t select this, it will add new products but won’t edit existing ones.
6. Click “Upload and continue”
7. Review import details, then click “Import products” to finalize the upload

Use a Shopify bulk editor app

Finally, an alternative to bulk editing your products in the Shopify admin is using a third-party app. We created Ablestar Bulk Product Editor to alleviate the headaches and time spent on product editing.

With that in mind, we created a user-friendly interface giving store owners complete control and visibility over their edits. Like Shopify admin, there are two options: an in-app edit and a spreadsheet edit. Unlike Shopify admin, you have added confidence when updating your entire catalog– a scary proposition for most store owners.

Pros

• The ability to preview and undo edits and see the status of your spreadsheet edits
• Instead of calculating sale prices manually, you can use rules like updating new prices to be 25% below the field price and rounded
• You can perform other dynamic edits, like setting a product title as vendor + product type
• Formatting flexibility for the spreadsheet option
• Features like product rules let you work smarter by specifying an action based on triggers. For example, you can add a tag to on-sale products or hide out-of-stock products.
• The ability to clone edits to save even more time

Cons

• Bulk product editing apps have a small monthly cost, but you can complete limited edits on the app for free
• Unlike some bulk editing apps, Bulk Product Editor lets you edit unlimited products on the free version

Once you’ve installed the app and linked your store, here are the two ways you can complete a bulk edit.

In-app instructions for Bulk Product Editor

1. Choose which products to edit by using the “Filters” drop-down or typing in the search box
2. Once you have your products, click on “Edit products” on the top right
3. Select which fields you want to edit and how you want to edit them (eg. decrease price by percent)
4. Once you’ve entered your changes, choose between “Run edit,” “Schedule edit,” or “Recurring edit” depending on when you want the change to run
5. Once the edit runs, you can monitor the status of the edit in your dashboard. You can also view your edit history and undo past edits.

Spreadsheet instructions for Bulk Product Editor

1. Select “Spreadsheet edit” from the left-hand navigation bar
2. Follow the on-screen prompt to select your Excel or CSV file
3. Bulk Product Editor will process your files and show your fields on the screen so you can verify they’re mapped correctly
4. Once everything looks good, click “Run edit”
5. Once the edit runs, you can monitor the status of the edit in your dashboard. You can also view your edit history and undo past edits.

Clearing the clutter: How to bulk delete in Shopify

Besides a bulk edit, there are also times when you will need to bulk delete items. Imagine that you’re discontinuing a brand on your site, for example, and want to remove all products for that vendor. Within Shopify admin, you can use the same steps as bulk editing above to complete a bulk action. Bulk actions include making products unavailable, deleting or archiving select products, removing tags, or removing products from collections.

With Ablestar Bulk Product Editor, you can bulk delete products as well to clean up shop. Use advanced search filtering with “handle starts with” or search for products with specific criteria like “has duplicate SKU” or “doesn’t have images”. You can either delete items entirely or move them to your product archives.

A better alternative: Archiving products on Shopify

As an alternative to deleting items on Shopify, consider archiving them. Deleting products in Shopify removes them forever, while archiving them removes them from your storefront while keeping a record of them. Unless you’re close to your 10,000-variant limit on Shopify, archiving is a better choice to be able to see or duplicate past products and avoid deleting the wrong items.

You can archive products using any one of the three methods above: Shopify admin, uploading a spreadsheet, or with a bulk editing app.

Manage your online store with bulk editing

When it comes to managing your store, time is money. Bulk editing isn’t just a time-saving hack—it’s a complete system for managing your store. By following best practices for managing your product data, you can keep your data clean in a way that makes editing a snap.