The copy and paste with commas used to work, it no longer does, and they are forcing me to enter each one by one, Im opening a ticket with shopify, this is too time consuming. I think probably at this point the only way round it is to create ONE color variant, export the product, add the others into the csv and re-import. This is a terrible change.
Topic summary
Goal: reuse and maintain large variant sets (e.g., 30+ scents/colors) across many products, ideally updating once and propagating to all.
What works/when:
- Duplicate product: Use Shopify’s Duplicate on an existing “master” to create new products and then adjust variants. Useful for new products; not helpful for adding variants to many existing, already-synced products. A question about whether deleting variants on the duplicate affects the original was asked; no confirmation in-thread (typically duplicates are independent).
- Comma-paste trick (historical): Paste a comma-separated list of option values into the option field to bulk add. Reported as helpful, but later a user says it no longer works and now requires entering values one-by-one; they’re opening a Shopify ticket.
- CSV workaround: Create one variant, export products to CSV, add the remaining variants in the CSV, and re-import. Proposed as a current workaround.
Other notes:
- A community member started a free app for this use-case but later dropped the project.
Status: No built-in way to propagate variant changes across products; bulk editing of existing products remains a pain point. Discussion remains open/unresolved.