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 a large amount of unnecessary results and could slow down your processing time. Adding filters is a great option to get more specific search results.

Add filters

When you click on the Add filter + button you can select from an dropdown list of product and variant filters like collections, date created, or handles. There are also custom 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
Inventory quantity < > =

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

If you want to search for products that are in a list of SKUs you can use the filter drop down with the following conditions:

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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