Running an online store already comes with enough things competing for your time that we really don’t need to remind you of! Updating products one by one, changing collection settings one at a time, or constantly moving data back and forth isn’t something you should be wasting time on every week.
That’s the whole idea behind Your Store Tools. We build tools for Shopify and BigCommerce that take some of those repetitive store-management jobs and make them faster, so you can spend more time actually running your store instead of managing data.
And four of our newest Shopify tools came directly from requests we’ve been getting from users.
We’ve now added Export Products, Import Products, Export Collections and Import Collections for Shopify, giving store owners an easier way to get information out of Shopify, work with it in a spreadsheet, and bring those changes back into the store.
Stop Updating Products One at a Time
If you only need to change one product, opening it in Shopify and making an edit is no big deal. But when you need to make changes to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of products and variants, doing things product by product can eat up a lot of time.
That’s where Export Products and Import Products come in.
Export Products lets you pull your Shopify product information into a CSV or Excel spreadsheet. You can then sort it, filter it and make your changes using the spreadsheet tools you already know.
Once you’re finished, Import Products lets you bring those changes back into Shopify.
One of the biggest reasons we built the Import Products tool was something Shopify store owners have asked us for repeatedly: the ability to update products and variants by SKU.
Shopify’s own product importer relies on the product handle when updating existing products. Our importer can match variants using the SKU instead.
If you receive a spreadsheet from a vendor, warehouse, distributor or another system where SKU is the common identifier, that can save a lot of extra work. Instead of trying to match everything back to Shopify handles, you can work with the SKU that’s already in the file.
You also don’t need a giant spreadsheet containing every possible product field just to make a small change. If you want to update prices, for example, you can work with a file containing the SKU and the new price. Blank fields are ignored, so you can keep an update focused on just the information you actually want to change.
Collections Don’t Have to Be a One-at-a-Time Job Either
The same idea applies to Shopify collections.
Managing one collection manually isn’t difficult. Managing a long list of them, changing rules, reorganizing products or preparing seasonal collections is where the job can become tedious.
With Export Collections, you can pull your collection information into a spreadsheet. That includes collection rules, manually added products, exclusions and metafields. Once you’ve made your changes, Import Collections can create, update or delete collections from that spreadsheet.
It’s a much easier way to handle bulk changes without jumping from collection to collection inside Shopify.
It can also be useful when you’re setting up another Shopify store and need to recreate collection structures without rebuilding everything manually.
Our Goal Is Simple: Save You Time
These tools aren’t meant to make managing a Shopify store more complicated. They’re designed to do the opposite.
There are plenty of things you should be spending your time on: adding new products, working on promotions, improving your site, helping customers and growing sales.
Spending an afternoon opening products one at a time just to update a field probably isn’t one of them.
The new Shopify Export and Import tools give you a way to handle much of that work in bulk using spreadsheets, then send the changes back to Shopify when you’re ready.
Try Them for Free!
If you have a Shopify store, getting started with Your Store Tools doesn’t require a paid subscription.
The Shopify Basic plan is free and includes one daily use of many of our popular tools. If you need to use the tools more often, Shopify Premium is just $10 per month and includes unlimited use of all available tools, removes the import record cap, adds scheduling and includes priority support.
Pricing and plan options for BigCommerce are different, so check the current plans for your platform.
Whether you’re updating a few products every week or regularly working with large catalogs, the idea behind Your Store Tools remains the same: spend less time managing data and more time managing your store.
You can see all of the tools currently available for Shopify and BigCommerce at YourStoreTools.com.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.