WooCommerce: How to Manage Product Visibility in Google Sheets

Managing a WooCommerce store with hundreds or thousands of products requires constant updates. Sometimes, you need to hide certain products from the shop page, make them available only via direct search, or hide them entirely if they are out of stock or out of season.

By default, WooCommerce allows you to change the Catalog visibility of a product to:

• Shop and search results
• Shop only
• Search results only
• Hidden

However, doing this manually involves opening each product, clicking edit, changing the setting, and saving. If you need to update 500 seasonal products, this is not a viable strategy.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to manage WooCommerce product visibility using Google Sheets. This workflow allows you to bulk update the visibility status of thousands of products, audit your hidden items, and collaborate with your team without giving them WordPress admin access.

Why manage WooCommerce product visibility from Google Sheets?

Exporting and importing your product visibility data with Google Sheets offers several strategic advantages:

• Bulk updates: Change the visibility of hundreds of seasonal or out-of-stock products at once using drag-and-fill or simple copy-pasting.
• Fast auditing: Filter your spreadsheet to instantly see all “Hidden” products and verify if they should be visible again.
• Collaboration: Let your store managers or marketing team decide which products to feature or hide directly in a shared spreadsheet.

What you need to manage product visibility

To follow this guide, we will use these WP Sheet Editor tools besides the WooCommerce plugin:

WP Sheet Editor – WooCommerce Products: This plugin generates a spreadsheet inside your WordPress dashboard where you can view and edit all your WooCommerce products.

Google Sheets Sync: This service connects your WordPress site directly to your Google Sheets account for seamless two-way exports and imports.

Step 1. Connect WordPress to Google Sheets

When you subscribe to the Google Sheets Sync service, you will receive a helper plugin that connects your WordPress site with your Google account.

Follow our installation guide to complete the setup and authorize the Google API connection.

Step 2. Export WooCommerce Products to Google Sheets

First, we need to send our existing products to Google Sheets and make sure we create a bidirectional real time sync so that the changes we make on WordPress are reflected in Google Sheets, and vice-versa.

Open the WooCommerce products spreadsheet by going to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Products.

Click on the Export tool on the top toolbar.

Select the following settings in the export popup:

• What columns do you want to export: You can select the specific columns you need. For example:
  • Name
  • SKU
  • Visibility in catalog
  • In stock (Stock status)
  • Stock
  • Low stock amount
• Which rows do you want to export?: We will export all the products, so let’s select “All rows from my current search”.
• What app will you use to edit this file?: Select Google Sheets.
• Name of this export: Type a name for your Google Sheet.

• Tick the Run this in the future checkbox.
• Notify this email address when the process finishes: Enter your email address here, and you’ll get an email notification every time the products are updated in any direction.
• Select Real time sync.
• Type of sync: In this example, we will create a Bidirectional sync.
•  What column should be used as an identifier: In this example, we will use the SKU field as an identifier to match the products in WordPress with the products in Google Sheets.
• Click on Start new export.

Now if you go to Export > View scheduled exports, you’ll see the details of the newly created sync.

Since this is a bidirectional sync, the plugin will automatically create an import to auto monitor the changes made in Google Sheets. This is the feature that will allow you to manage your products’ visibility in Google Sheets. Every time you make product visibility changes in Google Sheets, these changes will be automatically imported into WordPress.

And once the process is complete, you’ll be able to open the new Google Sheet by clicking on the scheduled export/import name.

Step 3. Manage WooCommerce product visibility in Google Sheets

Once the export is complete, click on the link provided to open your new Google Sheet.

Locate the Visibility in catalog column. In this column, WooCommerce uses specific text values to determine the visibility status of each product. You can input any of the following values:

• visible: Shows the product in both the shop page and search results.
• catalog: Shows the product in the shop page only.
• search: Shows the product in search results only.
• hidden: Hides the product completely from the shop and search results.

You can now use Google Sheets’ powerful features to manage these statuses. Sort your sheet by categories, find all out-of-stock items, and change their Catalog Visibility to hidden in bulk.

Step 4. Import changes back to WooCommerce

As we have indicated, since this is a bidirectional sync, the plugin will automatically import the changes made in Google Sheets into WordPress. Every time you make product visibility changes in Google Sheets, these changes will be automatically imported into WordPress.

To avoid importing incomplete or incorrect data, we have a delay that allows for a waiting period after you have finished editing in Google Sheets. For example, you can select our plugin to wait from 15 minutes to 12 hours.

To select this, you can go to Settings > Advanced Settings > Google Sheets and select the time in the Google Sheets: How long should we wait before importing the changes into WordPress.

Manage your WooCommerce products in Google Sheets

Managing WooCommerce product visibility doesn’t have to be a slow, manual process. By integrating your store with Google Sheets, you can audit your catalog, hide seasonal items, and publish new products with complete efficiency. Using WP Sheet Editor and the Google Sheets Sync service eliminates manual data entry, making large-scale store management simple.