Bulk add attributes to WooCommerce products: terms and visibility

To bulk add an attribute to WooCommerce products, say a Material for the whole catalogue or a second Color term for one collection, you need two things the product edit screen does not give you: a way to pick hundreds of products at once, and control over what happens to the terms they already have. BEAR does the first with filters and the second with three behaviours: append, replace and remove. The two flags WooCommerce keeps for every attribute of a product, Visible on the product page and Used for variations, are set by separate tools, and most surprises with attributes come from not knowing which tool touches which flag.

How WooCommerce keeps attributes on a product

A global attribute, created under Products → Attributes, is a taxonomy named pa_ plus its slug (pa_color, pa_material), and its values are terms of that taxonomy. A product holds a list of attributes, and for each one it keeps the selected terms, a position in the list and the two flags. Visible on the product page controls the Additional information tab. Used for variations matters only for variable products: only such attributes can define variations.

BEAR works with global attributes. A custom attribute typed into one product's Attributes tab is stored as plain text inside that product, not as terms, so it does not appear in the editor. If a value has to be edited across many products, make it a global attribute.

Bulk add attribute terms to products: append, replace, remove

1. Select the products: filter them in the Filters tab (by category, tag, type, an existing attribute term, price and so on) or tick them with checkboxes on the page. Ticked products take priority over the filter; with neither, the operation runs on every product in the shop. The line at the top of the Bulk Edit tab says which one is active.
2. Open the Bulk Edit tab, section Basic, block taxonomies. Every attribute has its own row there, named the way WooCommerce names the taxonomy, for example Product Color. The attribute column does not have to be switched on in the Settings tab for its row to work.
3. Tick the row's select it to use checkbox, choose one or several terms in the drop-down and set the behaviour:
   • append adds the selected terms and keeps the ones the product has. A product that did not have the attribute gets it with the selected terms.
   • replace makes the selected terms the attribute's only terms on each product.
   • remove takes the selected terms off and leaves the others. The attribute itself stays on the product, even when no term is left.
4. Press Do Bulk Edit and wait for the progress bar to finish.

Several terms are added in one run by selecting them all in the drop-down; there is no separator to type. A ticked attribute row with no term selected takes the whole attribute off the products, whatever the behaviour says. That is the intended way to detach an attribute (replace with nothing selected), and a costly mistake when you only forgot to pick the term.

When an attribute is new to a product, BEAR adds it at the end of the product's attribute list with Visible on the product page on and Used for variations off. Attributes the product already had keep their flags and their position. No variations are created by this tab. Term changes made here are recorded in History, so a wrong append or replace can be reverted per bulk operation.

The drop-down lists terms that exist. Create new ones first, under Products → Attributes → Configure terms, or with the new button of an attribute cell in the editor (described below), then reload the editor page so the Bulk Edit row lists them.

Visible on the product page and used for variations

Show or hide attributes on the product page

In the Bulk Edit tab, section Additional, the Attribute visibility row takes a list of attributes and a choice of Visible or Hidden. It sets the flag for those attributes on every selected product that has them and does not touch the others. To show only Brand and Material on the front end, run it twice: Visible for those two, Hidden for the rest. It works for simple and variable products.

For a few products, switch on the Attribute visibility column in the Settings tab. Its cell lists the visible attributes; the set you save in the cell becomes exactly the visible set, and every other attribute of that product is hidden.

Hiding an attribute only removes it from the Additional information tab. The product keeps its terms, so filters by attribute still find it, which is what you want for values used only for filtering. Visibility changes made with the Bulk Edit row are not recorded in History; note the current state before a large run.

Switch "Used for variations" on or off in bulk

This flag is set in Variations Advanced Bulk Operations, tab Visibility, and only on variable products. Press Add attribute, pick the attribute, set the two checkboxes Visible on the product page and Used for variations (both are ticked by default), add more attributes if needed and press Set visibility. The operation writes both flags, so set both the way you want them to end up.

Variable products and their variations

An attribute added to variable products in the Bulk Edit tab arrives as a plain attribute: visible, not used for variations, and the existing variations are not touched. That is the right result for a filter value like a fabric or a season. To turn it into a variation attribute:

1. Run the Visibility operation with Used for variations ticked for it.
2. Give the existing variations their term with the Attaching operation, as described in adding attribute terms to existing variations. Attaching does nothing while the attribute is not marked Used for variations, which is why the first step comes first.

Be careful with replace and remove on an attribute that is used for variations. If a variation is built on Brown and Brown leaves the parent, customers can no longer choose that variation. To change Brown into Red without breaking variations, use the Swap operation, explained in swapping one attribute term for another. All these operations are covered in bulk edit of variable products and variations. They are not recorded in History, so back up the database before running them on a large set.

There is no way to attach an attribute to a category as such: WooCommerce links attributes to products, not to categories. To give every product of a category an attribute, filter by that category and append the term.

Edit attributes product by product in the table

Switch the attribute on in the Settings tab: the attribute columns carry the attribute names. Click a cell, choose the terms, press save. The new button opens a small form that creates terms in that attribute. To create several at once, separate them with a vertical bar: Cotton|Linen|Wool. The bar is the separator, so a comma stays part of the name and Lestage, Denise becomes one term. On variation rows the attribute cells cannot be edited; they show the variation's own value in brackets.

With binded editing on and several rows ticked, the terms you save in one cell are written to all ticked products, so use it only when they should end up with the same terms. BEAR has no tool to reorder attribute names on a product: existing attributes keep their position and new ones go last.

Rename, merge or move attribute terms

BEAR edits products, not the attribute definitions. Renaming a term is done once in Products → Attributes → Configure terms, and every product shows the new name at once, because products point to the term, not to its text.

Merging two terms, for example Navy and Navy Blue, is a product edit:

1. Filter the products by the term that has to go.
2. In the attribute's Bulk Edit row, append the term that stays.
3. Keep the filter, select the old term in the same row and run remove.
4. Delete the old, now empty term in WooCommerce.

Moving a value to another attribute (Cotton entered as a Color instead of a Material) works the same way with two rows: append the term of the right attribute, then remove the term from the wrong one. For attributes used for variations, use Swap instead, as above. To find products that do not have an attribute at all, see filtering by attachment of taxonomies and attributes.

An attribute or a term is missing in the editor

• The column is not shown. Columns are kept per user. Switch the attribute on in the Settings tab of your own account. After renaming an attribute's slug, its column is a new one and has to be switched on again.
• A term created elsewhere is not listed. Term lists are built when the editor page loads. Reload it, with a hard refresh if the page comes from the browser cache.
• Some terms never appear. WooCommerce attributes are flat. A term that was given a parent term, usually by an import or by code that made the attribute hierarchical, can be missing from the lists. Remove the parent from the term or recreate it.
• Rows are missing for a shop manager. Administrators decide which fields other roles see; see limiting the shop manager role.
• Only one attribute can be edited. The free version edits one attribute: the first in WooCommerce's attribute list, which is sorted by slug. The others are shown in red containers without the select it to use checkbox, and the Attribute visibility field is not available. Switching to the full version is described in upgrading the bulk editor from free to pro.

Checklist before you press Do Bulk Edit

• The line at the top of the Bulk Edit tab names the products you mean: ticked, filtered or all.
• Every ticked attribute row has at least one term selected, unless you mean to detach the attribute.
• The behaviour is right: append to add, replace to overwrite, remove to take terms off.
• For variable products, you know whether the attribute should be used for variations, and you will run Visibility and Attaching after the bulk edit if it should.
• Replace and remove are not touching an attribute that existing variations are built on.

If an attribute still does not end up the way you expect, open a topic on the BEAR support forum with the attribute, the behaviour you used and what the product's Attributes tab shows afterwards.