Trade theme - is there a way to bulk-edit all products to track inventory?

Store Design

Topic summary

A user manually entered products without enabling the “track inventory” option and sought a way to fix this in bulk rather than re-entering each product individually.

Three solutions were provided:

  • Built-in bulk editor: Use Shopify’s native spreadsheet-like interface to add the ‘Track quantity’ column and check boxes for each product, then save changes. Best for smaller product catalogs.

  • CSV export/import: Export products to CSV, set ‘Variant Inventory Tracker’ to ‘shopify’ for all items, then re-import. Faster for large catalogs but requires careful handling to avoid accidentally overwriting data. Testing with a few products first is recommended.

  • Third-party app (Ablestar Bulk Product Editor): Offers a few-click solution with preview, undo/cancel capabilities, and real-time visibility of changes being made.

The discussion reached resolution with the original poster confirming the suggestions were helpful.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I have manually entered a few products but didn’t tick the “track inventory” box.

Is there a way to fix this in bulk, or will I have to delete each one and re-enter ?

Thank you

1 Like
2

Look at https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/productivity-tools/bulk-editing to start with

Probably this discussion too https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/what-is-the-latest-method-for-bulk-editing-product-variants/m-p/1784355

3

Hey @VV21 ,

There’s three ways that you can make these updates for tracking inventory/quantity:

Use the built-in bulk editor
If you don’t have a too many products you can use the bulk editor that’s built-in to the Shopify admin. This bulk editor gives you a spreadsheet-like interface with all your products, then you can add the ‘Track quantity’ column to that spreadsheet and go through and check the box for each one. Then hit ‘Save’ at the top of the page and your products will be updated.

Using the built-in CSV export/import

You could also export you products to a CSV file from the Shopify admin, set the ‘Variant Inventory Tracker’ all to ‘shopify’, and then re-upload the CSV to updates that value. The advantages to this is that it’s faster if you have a lot of products (no checking the box 100s of times) but the down side is that you need to be careful with the CSV re-imports. I would test it out with a few products first and make sure it’s exactly what you want as it’s easy to accidentally overwrite data.

Ablestar Bulk Product Editor
If you’re open to using a third-part app, our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor app can do this in a few clicks:

set track inventory.gif

A few other advantages are:

  • You can cancel or undo any changes if you need to
  • You can preview your changes
  • When the products are being updated you see exactly what’s being changed

Hopefully one of those work for you, happy to answer any follow up questions you might have.

Best,

Daniel

4

Thank you

5

Thanks so much, this was very useful !