Bulk Editing Individual Variants in Shopify

If your products have multiple variants, you may need to edit the individual variants in bulk from time to time.  This is something that is easily accomplished using the Bulk Editor app.  The trick is filtering for the correct variants.

In this article we'll take you through the steps of editing individual variants in bulk. We'll cover:

• Product level fields vs variant level fields.
• Filtering for the variants you want to edit in an in-app edit
• Identifying the correct variants in a spreadsheet edit

What is the difference between product and variant fields on Shopify?

In order to follow along you should have:

• One or more products on your Shopify store, with multiple variants
• The Bulk Product Editor app installed

In Shopify, all variants for a given product will share the same 'Handle', this is what ties them together. 'Handle' is considered a 'product level' field because all the variants for any given product will share the same 'handle'.

The 'Option Name' fields hold the labels for the variants (like 'size' or 'color'), and the 'Option Value' fields hold the data (like 'small', 'medium', 'large' or 'red', 'green', 'blue'). There are three option spaces:

Option 1 Name/Option 1 Value, Option 2 Name/Option 2 Value, Option 3 Name/Option 3 Value

The example spreadsheet below shows an export of one Shopify product with two 'options', 'Size' and 'Color'. 

You can edit Shopify variants in bulk with either an in-app edit, or a spreadsheet edit. 

Editing variants in bulk with a spreadsheet

When you run a spreadsheet edit with the Bulk Product Editor, the first column is always the match field. This is the field the app will use to identify the products or variants to edit.  When bulk editing variants with a spreadsheet, you need to make sure the first column is a 'variant level' field.  Fields like 'variant id',  'sku', and 'barcode' are all variant level, and will work as a match field (assuming they are unique).

If you use the Ablestar Bulk Product Editor to generate a spreadsheet, you have the option to include the 'variant id' field.  For the edit, make sure that column is in the first column position.

Check out our article for more information on spreadsheet edits in Shopify.

Bulk editing variants in the app

You can also edit individual variants with an in-app edit, the trick is filtering for the correct variants to edit. If you filter on a product level field, it will update all the variants at once to the same value. 

To filter for all the 'Small' variants with an in-app edit, you would filter for 'option 1 value = Small'.

To filter for all the 'Small' variants that are also 'Red' with an in-app edit, you would filter for 'option 1 value = Small', and also for 'option 2 value = Red'