WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit (WCABE) Getting Started

As you probably already know, editing products in bulk in WooCommerce is a tedious task. It can take literally hours or days to edit a few hundred products.

This is why we’ve created WCABE, to enable you quickly and easily bulk edit thousands of products easily with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Before editing the products it would be nice to first preview it. You can list all products at once or filter it. 

The main panel of the plugin is the products table where the products are listed:

You can load/reload the products at any time by clicking the “Get Products” button:

Each product is represented by a row in the products table:

Variable products looks like this:

As you can see, the main variable product is on the top of all its variations. A cool feature is the ability to auto-generate variations of a variable product. It will be explained in a later article.

By the way, you can toggle the display of the variations of the variable products using the checkbox located next to the “Get Products” button:

By default, in the products table there are some of the most often edited fields displayed. However, you can hide some of them and/or show other fields as you need. To do that, click on the “Columns” button and enable/disable the fields you want to show/hide:

In the “Columns” dialog there are the standard product fields as well the attributes fields.

If you want to add some custom/meta fields, like for example fields added by another plugin, like ACF or Yoast SEO, you can do that from “Find Custom Fields”:

Before moving on the bulk editing part, you will most likely need to filter the products that you’d like to bulk edit. To do that, you can use the filters section located above the products table.

To filter products by title for example, use the “Title” filter and press the “Get Products”:

Yes, I know you are here to edit product in bulk, but please know that bulk editing in WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit is just like editing a single product. Therefore I’ll first explain how to edit a single product and then how to make the changes spread from a single product to multiple.

There are two ways of editing the products. The first and more straight-forward one is by editing the product directly in the grid by clicking inside a cell. It’s similar to editing in Excel:

When you are ready, click the Save Changes button:

That’s it. And by the way, even if it is to use the plugin for just editing single products, it will still be much faster than editing in WooCommerce products editing page.

Edit multiple products at once in the products table is almost the same as editing a single product. The only difference is that you have to enable “Bulk editing mode” and select more than one products. Then just edit any of the products, press Enter or click on any other cell beside the edited one and that’s all. The change from the product you’ve edited will spread automatically to all the other selected products:

The products table allow quick and easy products editing, but when you need some more complex editing like prepending some titles, increasing prices by a percentage, generate SKUs, etc. you can use the Bulk Edit tool:

It provides different operations depending on the specific type of product field.

We’ll use it in the following section to show how to create a scheduled sale for selected products.

To set a scheduled sale all you have to do is select the products you want to put on sale, update the price and start/end date and that’s it:

The top buttons bar provides useful tools for editing the products:

Columns as explained in the beginning of this article, allow you to show/hide fields from the products table.

Add allows you to add new products or generate variations for variable products.

Duplicate as the name says, can duplicate selected products.

Delete let you move selected products to the trash or delete it permanently.

Selection Manager allows fine-tune selection of the products, if the filters can’t help.

Advanced Bulk Edit is the heart of the plugin as it allows to make advanced updating operations on the selected products.

Split Variations will split the variations of the selected products and convert it to simple products.

Quick Settings let you set some useful options to customize the way you edit products.

 

At the bottom of the products table, there are more buttons that lead to more useful tools:

Selected Rows will revert the changes to selected rows (if not saved yet).

All Rows will revert the changes to all changed rows (if not saved yet).

Load/Save View will save the current layout of the products grid, like currently displayed fields and their order.

Custom Fields will let you edit the imported custom/meta fields.

Find Custom/Meta Fields allows importing of custom/meta fields and adding it to the products table for bulk editing.

Plugin Settings provides options for customizing how the plugin works.

Export to CSV will export products in a CSV format. Note that there is also on hidden button called Update via CSV. It will only show when the Debug option is enabled in Product Settings. It will let you upload previously exported and edited CSV file and use it to update the products.

Disclaimer: the CSV functionality has been deprecated in favor of WooCommerce’s own CSV import/export functionality and is not updated anymore. Use it on your own and always test before using it on live site.