How to Bulk Edit Sale Prices in WooCommerce (And Schedule Sale Dates)

Let’s explore how to easily bulk edit sale prices in WooCommerce. Unlike the tedious default method of editing promotional prices for products and variations one by one, we will use a powerful product spreadsheet bulk editor. This approach allows you to bulk manage regular prices, discounts, and sale schedules using an Excel-like spreadsheet directly inside WordPress, saving you countless hours of administrative work.

Related pricing tutorials:

• How to bulk edit product prices (regular price)
• How to bulk edit variation prices

Adding sale prices or heavily discounting WooCommerce products is absolutely necessary for seasonal marketing campaigns like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or end-of-season clearance events.

For example, you may need to liquidate your entire inventory of snowshoes at the end of winter. But how do you put them all on a 30% discount if you have hundreds or thousands of products and variations to edit?

The native WordPress process to add sale prices to your WooCommerce products looks something like this:

1. Open an individual product page.
2. Scroll down to the Product Data box.
3. Calculate and type in the Sale Price.
4. Click “Schedule” to add the sale start and end dates.
5. Save or Update the product.
6. Go back to your catalog, open the next product, and repeat the process endlessly.

Assuming it takes you a full minute to accurately calculate and edit each product non-stop, updating a catalog of 1,000 items would take you over 16 hours. Do you have two entire workdays to waste editing sale prices one by one?

What if you could reduce those 16 hours to just 5 minutes?

What if you could mass update sale prices on thousands of products with a few simple clicks, decreasing prices by a flat amount or a specific percentage? Let’s show you how.

The Best Bulk Editor for WooCommerce Sale Pricing

Bulk applying discounts is the only scalable option for growing stores. To achieve this, we will use the WP Sheet Editor plugin.

WP Sheet Editor drastically improves your workflow and productivity with its powerful, time-saving tools:

• Product spreadsheet editor: View all your products in a clean table format within wp-admin and easily modify regular and sale prices using a fast spreadsheet interface.
• Advanced Search: Utilize any database field as a search filter, making it effortless to find targeted products based on criteria such as current price, category, tag, custom attribute, and more.
• Bulk editing: Edit any field for thousands of products at once, enabling you to mass update WooCommerce pricing, apply percentage discounts, or schedule promotional campaigns with just a few clicks.
• Advanced variation management: Display and edit variations directly within the spreadsheet. Bulk update prices for specific variation sizes or colors effortlessly.
• User-friendly export and import: A highly simplified export and import process that is fully compatible with CSV editors like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

After installing and activating the plugin, follow the steps in the sections below to bulk update your WooCommerce sale pricing.

How to Open the Spreadsheet to Bulk Manage Sale Pricing

Navigate to WP Sheet Editor > Edit products in your WordPress dashboard.

You’ll immediately see a spreadsheet displaying all your products alongside their detailed information, including pricing, stock, and categories.

Option 1: Update Sale Prices Manually Using the Spreadsheet

If you only want to put a handful of individual products on sale, or if you need to apply highly specific, custom pricing to a few items, you can type directly into the spreadsheet cells.

You will need to locate and use the following columns in the spreadsheet:

• Sale price: Type your discounted price here.
• Sale start date: Double-click to select the exact date your promotional sale begins.
• Sale end date: Double-click to select the date the sale automatically expires.
• Note: Defining sale start and end dates is completely optional. If left blank, the sale price will remain active indefinitely until you remove it.

Once you have added the required sale prices and dates into the cells, click on the Save button on the top toolbar to push the changes to your live store.

Editing sale prices directly in the spreadsheet is a fantastic way to save time. You can view your regular prices right next to your sale prices to ensure your profit margins are correct, all without ever opening a single product page.

Option 2: Mass Update WooCommerce Sale Prices with the Bulk Edit Tool

If you do not want to update prices cell-by-cell, you can use the powerful Bulk Edit tool. This feature allows you to apply mathematical formulas to thousands of products simultaneously.

Here are some highly effective marketing use cases for the Bulk Edit tool:

• Applying a storewide 20% Black Friday discount to an entire category.
• Editing sale prices only for products containing specific attributes (e.g., discounting all “Summer” or “Small” items).
• Adding aggressive sale prices to low-stock products so they liquidate and sell faster.
• Changing sale prices globally for all downloadable or digital products.
• Applying promotions to products containing a specific keyword or tag.

Executing a mass discount requires just three simple steps.

Step 1: Filter the Products You Want to Put on Sale

The first thing you need to do is tell the plugin exactly which products should receive the discount. You have three options:

First, you can edit all your products storewide. If you choose this route, skip directly to Step 2.

Second, you can manually select the products you want to edit. Just tick the checkbox selector on the left side of the spreadsheet rows for the specific items. Once selected, proceed to Step 2.

Third, you can use the advanced search function to dynamically filter products and bulk edit the search results.

You can search for products by keyword, category, tag, shipping class, attribute, stock status, regular price, item type, and more. To do this, open the Search tool on the top toolbar.

In this example, we want to run a promotion exclusively on our clothing line. We will search for all products within the Dresses category.

Simply enter the product category into the search field and click on Run search.

As you can see in the screenshot below, we have successfully filtered all products within the “Dresses” category, and only those items are now displayed on the spreadsheet.

You can always verify your active search filters by checking the notification bar above the spreadsheet.

Step 2: Apply the Bulk Discount (Percentage or Fixed Amount)

After filtering the exact products you want to update, you can proceed to dynamically generate their sale prices. Open the Bulk Edit tool.

In the Bulk Edit popup, configure the following values to bulk add or modify sale prices:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Choose “Edit all the rows from my current search” (or choose manually selected products if you used the checkboxes).
• What field do you want to edit: Select “Sale price”.
• Select type of edit: You have several powerful mathematical options here:
  • Set value: Applies the exact same flat sale price (e.g., $10.00) to all selected products.
  • Increase by percentage / number: Increases an existing sale price by a specific rate.
  • Decrease by percentage / number: Lowers an existing sale price further.
  • Copy regular price and decrease by number: Pulls the product’s normal price and subtracts a flat dollar amount (e.g., $5 off).
  • Copy regular price and decrease by percentage: Pulls the normal price and calculates a percentage discount automatically (e.g., 20% off).
• Note for our example: We will choose “Copy regular price and decrease by percentage” and enter 8 in the value box to apply an 8% discount to all dresses.
• Optional: You can choose to apply this only to parent products or specifically to product variations.
• Click on Execute Now.

The plugin will calculate the math in the background and update the sale pricing for all your selected products.

Step 3: Schedule the Sale (Bulk Edit Start and End Dates)

Now that your prices are discounted, you likely want to automate when the promotion goes live and when it ends so you don’t have to stay awake until midnight to remove the discounts manually.

a) Bulk update the WooCommerce Sale Start Date

Open the Bulk Edit tool again and select the following values to schedule the beginning of your promotion:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search.
• What field do you want to edit: Sale start date.
• Select type of edit: Set value.
• Replace existing value with this value: Use the calendar picker to select the exact date the sale begins.
• Click on Execute Now.

b) Bulk update the WooCommerce Sale End Date

To ensure the sale prices automatically revert to regular pricing when your campaign is over, open the Bulk Edit tool one last time:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search.
• What field do you want to edit: Sale end date.
• Select type of edit: Set value.
• Replace existing value with this value: Select the date the sale expires.
• Click on Execute Now.

Run Promotions Faster with WP Sheet Editor

With WP Sheet Editor, you can confidently run aggressive, storewide promotional campaigns without the fear of manual data entry. Whether you want to bulk edit sale prices for hundreds of WooCommerce products using a spreadsheet, or mass update percentage discounts and schedule dates using advanced filters, your pricing management will be faster and more accurate than ever before.