Search tips for in-app bulk product editing
Effectively searching for products in the Ablestar Bulk Product Editor will save you time and make it quicker to filter products.
The search bar
From the Shopify dashboard, click to open the bulk editor and then click the Start an In-app Edit button
Once the 'Product' screen appears, you'll see the search bar where you can filter for the products you want to edit or export:
Search Text
The quickest way to search for products is to type in some text and press Enter (or click the Search button). When you do this, the Bulk Editor app will search for products who have the text in any of these fields:
- Title
- Vendor
- Product Type
- Tags
- Description
While this is a quick way to find products, it might return some unexpected results and can be slower than using more specific criteria.
If you are looking for products that match a specific field, we recommend using the Add filter + button.
Add filters
When you click on the Add filter + button you can select from an dropdown list of product and variant filters. In addition to filters for fields and metafields there are alsocustom filters like:
- Compare-at Price is Blank
- Has Duplicate SKU or title
- Has/Doesn't have images
- Not in any Collection
- Not in any Manual Collection
- Price < Compare Price
- Price = Compare Price
- Price > Compare Price
Different match types
After you choose the field to filter, you have the option to choose how you want to match against that field:
The options vary by field but include things like:
- equals/does not equal (case-sensitive)
- contains/does not contain (case-sensitive)
- is blank/is not blank
- is greater than/is less than
- contains any of the words
Saved searches
You can save frequently-used searches by clicking on the + icon to the right of the tabs at the top of the search bar. The icon to create a new view will only appear once you have added at least one search condition.
You can view, rename and delete saved searching by going to Settings → Saved Searches in the left-hand menu. Learn more about saved searches.
Searching for only some variants of a product
When you search for a variant field (like price, option 1 value etc..) only the variants that match the product are selected. This way you can edit only some of the variants for a product.
When only some of the variants are selected the app will show how many of the total you have selected:
Clicking on the eye icon next to the variant number will open up a popup listing the exact variants that you selected.
Exclude products from a search
You can manually exclude individual products from the search results. To do so, click on the circle icon with the minus sign to the right of the product row. This icon will only appear if you already have other filters added to your search.
Toggle Filter Match
When filtering your products, you can choose if the displayed products match all of your filters or if they match any one of your filters.
You can toggle this by on the icon to the far right of the Add filter + button.
Filter duplicates
The app has three custom filters to help searching for products with duplicate titles, SKUs, or barcodes. The search results will include the all products with the duplicate values (ie, the original and the duplicate).
You can use additional filters like 'Date created' or 'Handle ends with -1' to further narrow down your selection.
For more information please read our article on searching for duplicate titles.
Searching multiple SKUs or product IDs
- Select 'SKU' as the field to search
- Use 'contains any of the words' as the criteria
- Input a list of SKUs separated by a space
If you're copying the SKUs from a spreadsheet you can copy the column contents directly into the value field. The same technique will also work for product IDs if you select the 'Product ID' field instead.
✅ Tips and Troubleshooting
- Filtering offers a faster method to narrow down search results
- Take advantage of the option to save your view so you don't have to re-create it new each time
- No commas are needed when adding several words from a spreadsheet, just spaces
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