Mark one Variant out of stock across 1800+ products

[ACKPerfume]

Hello,

We have roughly 1800 products that we sell in three size variants. We need to mark one of the sizes temporarily unavailable, but not delete it altogether. It is the same size variant across all the products that needs this edit. This edit also needs to be reversible when the variant is available again. Is there any way to do this via bulk editing? If downloading a CSV, which fields would need to be changed? 

Thank you!

EDIT: I think I've figured it out using the quantity and track quantity fields which *seems* like it would be easiest to do via csv rather than manually via the bulk editor. Still working on it if you have anything to add to this investigation. Thanks again

[PaulNewton · Accepted solution]

At a higher level you'd want to see if the business SKU format can be utilized for this instead which can make it more trivial to filter out  the specific variants inside spreadsheets in excel, gsheets, etc.

Publishing is only at the product level, to make a variant unavailable means either deleting it or setting inventory to zero and turning on inventory mgmt for it.

The shopify bulk editor doesn't work in this case as you can't readily select all the individual internal variants from the /products list. The products list admin only shows/selects the top level containing products and not each variant within for each product. Though it may be possible to edit the bulk-editors url to insert all the ID's of the relevant variants if you have that data prepared, i'm just not sure of the upper limit for the length of url the shopify admin will accept if you have to add hunders/thousands of ids so would probably have to do them in batches.

Nor does admin search syntax really apply.

If this is a frequent process you'd want to build an automation for this, off the top of my head IDK if shopify-flow can do this. Meanwhile automation apps like usemechanic can be scripted to search through all the variant options, or skus, or metafields, and turn on inventory-mgmt & zero out the quantities.

An appless advanced alternative for published products relevant to the online-sales channel is customizing an unpublished theme as a utility to generate the CSV using the frontend filtered system(variant-option values) , and the ajax api to fetch through the pagination as a client-side process.

[ACKPerfume]

Thank you. Terrific guidance

Additionally, then, how do SKUs make filtering and editing simpler? 

Much obliged

[PaulNewton]

If skus follow a strict convention then in tools like spreadsheet software you can use wildcards, or regex, etc to filter only.

And on platforms like shopify it's base apis allow querying product-variants based on sku;  but not on suboptions.

https://shopify.dev/api/admin-graphql/2022-07/objects/productvariant#query-productvariants 

Which also means hypothetically if a some sort of bulk variant selection (*)was ever a native feature in the admin this posts problem would be obsoleted as long as the search syntax query allowed wildcards for variants.

For example, in a very naïve sku scheme ,  skus start with a color letter for the color option. 

Blue products variant skus start with b.

And there is a size option too so some skus have an affix "-xs" to signify extra small garments.

So in the products admin is use the search syntax:

1. Find all blue skus with starting letter b using a prefix query
   • sku:b*
   • There is no affix or  pure wildcard search, or regex search.
2. Find all skus that contain the letters xs 
   • sku:xs

Combine the above two queries(connective)

• sku:b* AND sku:xs

Example url https://store.myshopify.com/admin/products?selectedView=all&query=sku%3Ab%2A%20and%20sku%3Axs

What currently doesn't work in the admin search is searching by other variant properties like options or the variant.title .

So potion:small,  option1:small or title:small,etc  does not work.

But the product admin search is promiscuous for some things.

So it will match all products that have the string "small" somewhere in it's data, or something as simple as 12 if i'm searching shoe sizes but I'll only get good results if 12 isn't in product descriptions,titles,etc. So it's easy to get false positives and false negatives.

There's more to it but it's just poorly documented for merchant use so can require experimentation to tell if a sku convention will work in the admin product search.

[ACKPerfume]

Again, terrific info & instruction. Thank you. 

[Alison_Ablestar]

Hello,

My name is Alison, I'm the Customer Success Specialist for Ablestar apps.  We have an app called the Ablestar Bulk Product Editor.  Using the app, you can not only modify all the size XL(or any other size) variants at once, you can also 'undo' the edit at a later date. You can read more about undos here, https://support.ablestar.com/article/39-undoing-a-product-edit.  

The app can't make individually variants unavailable, but it could set their inventory to zero, or adjust the inventory options.

The app also has a free version available that allows for 5 edits in any 30 day period, and each edit can consist of up to all the products on the store, so you can try it out without incurring any costs.  If you have any questions or need help setting up an edit you can reach us directly at support@ablestar.com.

Best,