Editing and adding product variations in bulk on WooCommerce: Complete guide (2023)

Editing and adding product variations in bulk on WooCommerce: Complete guide (2022)

Are you looking for the best way to bulk edit variation prices in WooCommerce? Editing product variations in bulk allows you to select multiple products and change their prices, images, and other data at once. Doing this can save you a lot of time and help you manage your WooCommerce product variations better.

Setting up a new WooCommerce store is quite fun. But as your store continues to grow, managing your products becomes quite hectic. As a WooCommerce store owner, you might have a lot of variable products. Editing each of these products and their variations manually can take ages.

For example, you may have an online store with 300 different shirt designs. Each of these designs also has different variations of color and size. You may then need to add images to multiple variations or edit their prices.

By default, WooCommerce requires you to edit each variation individually to do this. This method can be extremely time-consuming and even frustrating. Fortunately, there's a better alternative to bulk edit your WooCommerce product variations.

In this article, we'll show you how to use a WordPress plugin to select multiple product variations, set their prices, add or remove images, and make other quick changes in bulk. You can make all these changes on the same page and manage your store more easily.

Why does WooCommerce make it so difficult to edit product variation prices?

WooCommerce ships out of the box with a feature that allows you to add multiple attributes to one product. The platform also allows you to create variations from these attributes automatically. While creating these variations, you can set individual prices and add images to each variation. But that's all you get.

create woocommerce product variations from product attributes.png

If you want to edit any product variation's data, you have to update each one manually. This makes sense if you only want to edit a few products or product variations.

But what if you're a wholesale store owner or your store has tons of variable products? Imagine having to set the prices, images, stock, and other attributes of each product variation manually. For example, you may want to:

  • Set a unique price of $100 for all t-shirt variations in a size 'L'.
  • Add the same image for all product variations with the 'Blue' attribute storewide.
  • Put all size 'L' variations of a specific product on sale.
  • Make all the variations of a particular product virtual and downloadable.
  • Disable a couple of product variations that are currently out of stock.

In any of these cases, being restricted to WooCommerce default options can be really frustrating. Having to edit dozens or hundreds of product variations individually could mean hours or even days of repetitive work.

Fortunately, you don't need to go through all that stress. In the next section, we'll show you a really handy plugin you can use to manage your WooCommerce product variations in bulk.

Introducing WBV - the quick way to bulk edit product variations

Ready to bulk edit variation prices and other data? The best plugin to help you with this is WooCommerce Bulk Variations. This WordPress plugin makes managing WooCommerce product variations easy and efficient!

Bulk Variations is a powerful WooCommerce plugin that helps both store owners and shoppers to interact with product variations. Whenever you need to edit your variable products, you can save a lot of time by using the plugin to update a lot of product variations at the same time.

Here are some of the most important features you get to enjoy:

  • Apply changes to multiple product variations at onceBulk Variations allows you to select multiple variations of a specific product and quickly apply the same changes to them. To make things easier, you can filter product variations based on data like product attributes, regular and sale prices, and stock status. After selecting the variations you want, you can now apply bulk edits to them. For example, you can enable or disable them, add shipping information, set regular or sale prices, and even change the prices by a percentage or fixed amount.
  • Attach the same image to multiple variationsSet variation images in bulk. All you need to do is click 'Set thumbnails' after selecting the necessary product variations. Then you'll be able to add the same image to all the selected variations. This is a very handy upgrade from the editing features the default WooCommerce offers.
  • Display variations in a grid layout that's easy to navigate (optional)Help your customers choose multiple variations on the product page and enter the quantity they need faster. This feature can be very useful for wholesale stores that require bulk ordering. But if you just need to edit your variations on the backend, you can overlook it completely.
WooCommerce Bulk Variations grid with quantity boxes purchasing

In general, WooCommerce Bulk Variations adds all the functionality you need to edit specific variations of your products without affecting other variations.

Before we show you how the plugin works, let's first add product variations to WooCommerce in bulk.

How to add WooCommerce product variations in bulk

WooCommerce allows you to automatically add product variations in bulk to your store. The process is quick and easy.

You first need to add attributes to the product. To do this, navigate to Products. Hover over the product you want to edit and click Edit.

add edit woocommerce product variation

Next, scroll to the Product data section and go to the Attributes tab. Here you can add custom attributes to the product or select from existing attributes in your store.

add woocommerce product attribute

When you're done, click Add. Make sure you check the 'Used for variations' box, then click Save attributes. Bear in mind that this option will only be available if the product type has been set to 'Variable product'. You can't do this with the default simple products.

use product attributes for variations in woocommerce

If you're creating a new product attribute, make sure you enter the attribute values in the 'Value(s)' field.

Next, go to the Variations tab, select Create variations from all attributes from the dropdown, and click Go.

create variations from product attributes in woocommerce

WooCommerce will automatically add new variations from the attributes you created earlier.

new product variations added to woocommerce in bulk

Hooray! You've just added product variations to WooCommerce in bulk.

How to bulk edit WooCommerce product variation prices

To bulk edit products or WooCommerce variation prices, you need to first get the WooCommerce Bulk Variations plugin.

After getting the plugin;

  1. Upload it to WordPress by going to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
  2. Select the plugin's ZIP file from your local storage, click Install Now, then Activate Plugin.
  3. Finally, enter the license key you received in your email after getting the plugin. Then click Activate.

After setting up Bulk Variations, click Products in the setup wizard to start editing your products immediately.

edit products woocomerce bulk variations setup redirect

Next, select the product you want to edit and scroll to the 'Product data' section. Then go to the 'Variations' tab.

The first thing to do here is to filter the variations displayed on the screen. You'll notice that a new 'Filter' section has been added. You can filter the variations based on any of the main product attributes by selecting the attribute value from the 'Filters' dropdown.

filter woocommerce product variations by main attributes to bulk edit prices

To filter products based on other product data, click Advanced. Now you'll be able to choose from other filters such as regular and sale price, stock status, and Stock Keeping Unit (SKU).

filter product variations with advanced product data

You can add multiple advanced filters to your variations view by clicking Add a new filtering value. Make sure only the variations you want to edit are visible on the screen.

add multiple filters to bulk edit woocommerce variation prices

Since these variations don't have product prices presently, let's bulk edit the WooCommerce variation prices. To do this, select 'Set regular prices' from the 'Add variation' dropdown. Then click Go.

bulk edit woocommerce variation prices with woocommerce bulk variations plugin

You'll get a browser prompt to enter a value. Enter the value for these variations' regular price and click OK.

enter value of regular price of multiple variations

The price will then be automatically applied to all the product variations on the screen. You can click on any of the variations to confirm.

That's it! You've now successfully bulk edited your WooCommerce variation prices.

Apart from prices, you can also bulk edit other product variation attributes following the same procedure.

Similarly, you may want to bulk delete variations from your WooCommerce store. Let's quickly show you how to do this.

How to delete WooCommerce product variations in Bulk

To bulk delete some product variations, simply select Delete filtered variations from the 'Add variation' dropdown and click Go.

bulk delete woocommerce product variations

Make sure to check the 'Apply to filtered variations only' box before opening the dropdown. Otherwise, you'll be deleting all the variations for this product.

apply woocommerce bulk variations plugin actions to filtered variations only

Since this action is irreversible, WooCommerce will show you two warning prompts to ensure you really want to delete the variations.

Can I bulk edit the variations for more than one product at once?

So far, we've learned how Barn2's WooCommerce Bulk Variations plugin is perfect for adding, editing and deleting variations for a specific product. You simply go to the 'Edit Product' screen and use the bulk filters and actions to update your variations. But what if you want to bulk edit variations for multiple WooCommerce products at a time?

To do that, you can use a bulk product editing tool which also supports variations. We recommend Setary, a spreadsheet-style tool for editing products and their variations.

Where to get the plugin

Managing a WooCommerce store with a lot of variable products often requires some hard work. With default WooCommerce, you'll be spending hours updating or editing your product variations.

With WooCommerce Bulk Variations, you can now bulk edit your WooCommerce product variation prices. The plugin lets you:

  • Edit attributes of multiple product variations at the same time
  • Add the same image to multiple variations in one click
  • Optionally display variations to your customers in an easy-to-navigate grid layout

Ready to start editing multiple WooCommerce product variations at the same time? You can start by getting your copy of WooCommerce Bulk Variations.

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