How to Bulk Edit WooCommerce Product Status in a Spreadsheet

In this tutorial, we will show you how to easily bulk edit WooCommerce product status.

When you manage a large online store, you might frequently need to change the status of hundreds of items. Whether you are moving seasonal items to “Draft,” hiding out-of-stock items by making them “Private,” or changing hundreds of new products from “Draft” to “Published,” doing this manually is incredibly exhausting and time-consuming.

When you try to change product status manually, you have to open each product individually, update the status dropdown, and click save. Fortunately, there is a much faster way.

We will show you how to bulk update product status using the WP Sheet Editor plugin.

This plugin allows you to view and manage your WooCommerce products in an intuitive spreadsheet. You can do advanced searches, bulk edit any field in thousands of products at once, export products to a CSV file, and import product updates from a CSV file.

Install the WP Sheet Editor Plugin

You can skip this step if you already have the plugin installed and activated.

Go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Products, and you will see a spreadsheet that contains all your products with all their information laid out in rows and columns.

1. How to edit WooCommerce product status directly in the spreadsheet

Editing product status in a spreadsheet allows you to easily make changes to multiple products at once. This can save you a significant amount of time compared to editing each one individually on WooCommerce.

To modify the status individually, you just have to locate the Status column and click the cell to select the status (Draft, Published, Private, etc.) you want to set for each product.

The best thing is that you can select the status, drag it downwards to apply it to multiple rows, or simply copy and paste it like you would in Excel.

After setting all the product statuses, you just need to hit the Save button on the top toolbar, and that’s it.

This is a great option if you only want to edit the status of some specific items, or if you want to assign different statuses to products that do not share any parameters to filter by.

2. Search and filter WooCommerce products by status

If you need to mass-edit all products that currently share the same status (for example, finding all your “Draft” products to publish them), you can quickly filter them using the Search tool.

Once in the Search tool, you’ll see different parameters to make your search. Enable the advanced filters and enter these parameters:

• Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox
• Field: Status (post_status)
• Operator: =
• Value: Select the status you want to look for (e.g., Draft)
• Click on Run search.

After filtering the products by status, you will see the isolated results displayed in the spreadsheet.

3. Publish WooCommerce products in bulk

Now that the WooCommerce products you want to edit have been filtered, let’s change the status of all of them to “Published” in bulk.

To do this, we need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

Now you need to enter these values in order to update the status of the selected products:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (Even non-visible rows).
• What field do you want to update: Status
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Published
• Click on Execute now.

If you have changed the status of previously filtered products from “draft” to “publish”, you will see a message saying that there are no products matching the search parameters. This is normal because they are no longer drafts! You just need to click the active filters to remove them.

Then, your entire catalog will reload and you will see that your selected items are now published.

4. Schedule WooCommerce products in bulk

Scheduling products in WooCommerce can serve multiple strategic purposes:

• Managing seasonal or themed products that are only relevant during specific times of the year (like Christmas or Black Friday).
• Coordinating new product launches with marketing activities and email campaigns.
• Publishing content automatically while you are away or on vacation.

Therefore, we will show you how you can quickly schedule the publication of your products, including a specific date and time for it. For this example, we will select some specific products using the checkbox selector column on the left side of the grid, and then open the Bulk Edit tool.

After opening the Bulk Edit tool, you can enter these values to schedule your products:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit the rows that I selected manually in the spreadsheet.
• What field do you want to update: Date
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Select the (future) date and time in which you want the products to be automatically published.
• Click on Execute now.

Finally, you will see that the dates of your products have been changed, and the product status has been updated to “Scheduled” automatically by WordPress.

5. Delete WooCommerce products in bulk

Another way to manage your catalog is to completely remove old or discontinued items. If changing the status to “Private” or “Draft” isn’t enough, you can bulk delete them.

We have prepared a complete dedicated tutorial to show you how you can delete products in bulk.

6. Bulk import WooCommerce product status from a CSV file

If you prefer to manage your inventory offline in Excel or Google Sheets, you can easily import status changes directly into WooCommerce.

To begin, ensure that your CSV file contains at least the product name, status, and ID (if you want to schedule some products, you will also need the Date field). Additional fields, such as categories, tags, images, or custom attributes, may also be included.

Important: Before executing any bulk imports, we highly recommend making a backup of your site and products.

Start the import process by going to the WP Sheet Editor interface and clicking on the Import button on the top toolbar.

In Source, select CSV file from my computer.

Next, click on Choose File, and select the CSV file you want to import from your computer.

Click Next.

Select the columns to import. In this case, you can select Import all the columns.

In the Do you want to update or create new items? dropdown, select Update existing items, ignore new items.

Map the columns in your CSV file to the appropriate fields in WooCommerce by selecting the WooCommerce field name from the dropdown menu next to each CSV column header, and click Next.

Review the import preview to ensure the data is mapped correctly, and click The preview is fine, start import to initiate the import process.

After the import is complete, check your spreadsheet to ensure all product statuses have been updated correctly.

With WP Sheet Editor, you can now handle massive amounts of product statuses quickly and effectively, making your e-commerce inventory management much simpler and more pleasant.