Copying variant values from one product to another? Making a master copy possible?

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.

Summarized with AI on December 21. AI used: gpt-5.

Hi, this sounds like a dream. Mind giving more details about the process?

Thanks!