Updating product descriptions in bulk
Descriptions age faster than people expect. A supplier changes a specification, a product line gets a new name, a delivery term changes, or you decide to rewrite descriptions that were copied from the manufacturer. Editing products one by one in the store admin is fine for ten items. For a category of two thousand, you need a way to select the right products and change them together.
Start with the right selection
A bulk update is only as good as the filter behind it. Before changing anything, define exactly which products are affected:
- by category or subcategory;
- by brand or manufacturer;
- by supplier;
- by a word or phrase in the title or description;
- by missing data, for example products with an empty description or fewer than three attributes.
Check the size of the selection before you apply changes. If a filter for one brand suddenly returns half the catalog, something in the data is off.
Typical bulk changes
- Replacing outdated text, such as an old warranty term or a discontinued model name.
- Adding a standard block to every product in a category, for example care instructions or a size note.
- Writing descriptions for products that have none, using their attributes as the source.
- Rewriting duplicated manufacturer text so your pages are not identical to every competitor's.
Protect your edits from the next import
The most common surprise with supplier catalogs: you improve a hundred descriptions, the next price list arrives, and your text is replaced with the supplier's again. Decide for each field where its "source of truth" is. Prices and stock should follow the supplier. Descriptions you have written yourself should not.
How it works in YfiFX
In YfiFX all supplier data lives in one Master price list. You can select products by the fields that matter to you and work with the whole group, including generating descriptions and SEO texts with ChatGPT for products that have no text or only the manufacturer's copy. Because supplier products are linked to your catalog once, regular imports keep prices and stock up to date without touching the content you have prepared. The updated descriptions are exported to your store along with everything else.
A safe routine
- Filter the products and check the count.
- Apply the change to a small sample and review it on the live store.
- Apply it to the rest of the selection.
- Keep an export of the previous version, so you can roll back if needed.
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