Our shopify store is linked to our external eBay store and we use an importer to bring items from eBay to shopify. Once the items are imported I manually change the product details in the product bulk editing tool. We have many different kinds of products and many items need to be manually sorted so I have been using mostly manual collections to sort all of our items. In the bulk editor, there is no option to bulk edit each product into a specific manual collection. My solution to this has been to manually enter the collection, click browse, and slowly scroll through ALL unsorted products and having to manually add products one by one which is extremely frustrating. Every other detail is able to be bulk edited besides the collection.
From what research I have done some people can use the importer CSV files to change the collection but this is not available for products that have already be imported. Is there any way to be able to bulk add items in the bulk editor or should I just scrap every manual collection and use automated tags to be able to bulk edit items by tag in the bulk edit tool? Its very much not ideal and we have many products and I would prefer to not have ti start over from scratch basically.
Matrixify can help with this and make the process a lot more simple! The idea would be to Export your Products using Matrixify selecting to Export “Basic Columns”. Then in the Exported file in the “Custom Collections” column you can add the Handle of the Manual Collection you would like to add the Product to. Then you can Import the file back into Matrixify and the Product will be added to that Collection. When you reimport, the only columns you really need in your Import file are - ID, Handle and Custom Collections. The rest can be removed.
If you have any specific questions about the process at all or if anything is unclear, please do not hesitate to reach out to our support, we would be more than happy to help!
Unfortunately, like you mentioned, bulk editing the product collections via the Shopify admin isn’t possible. Another app-based option is our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor. It supports editing the products via spreadsheet but also allows you to do everything through a UI. Here’s a quick video showing how you could search for products that aren’t in a collection, add a few more filters and then add those products to a collection:
All these edits done through the app come with a live preview and one-click undo so you can easily keep track of what’s being modified. If you have any other questions about the app, or trying to find a way to do this through the admin, just let me know.
