Global Changes: Changing Multiple Products at Once

ProductCart makes it easy and fast for store administrators to change product-specific across multiple products at the same time. To access this feature, select Global Changes from the Products menu. The window is divided into two sections, which are described below.

The top area of the page allows you to filter the product database so that you temporarily group the products that you need to modify. You can use one of the following filters. Select All if you wish to apply the change to all products in your store, but please be advised that changes applied to the entire product catalog can take several minutes to take place if your store includes thousands of products.

• All products in the following category
  Select a category to apply the change only to products that belong to it. Check the “Include Sub-categories” check box (new in ProductCart v3.5) to apply the change to products included in subcategories of the selected category. On large catalogs, this can slow down the system as ProductCart checks product assignments. The default selection (All), is to include all categories. See the note below about which categories are shown.
• Products whose part number (SKU) contains
  Enter a part number (SKU) or part of it. The search filter is not case sensitive.
• Products whose name or description contains
  Enter one or more keywords that the selected product should contain in the product name or product description. The search filter is not case sensitive.
• Products whose online price is higher than
  ProductCart will filter out all products whose online price is lower than the amount entered here. Products whose price is equal to or higher than the entered amount are included.
• Products whose online price is lower than
  ProductCart will filter out all products whose online price is higher than the amount entered here. Products whose price is equal to or lower than the entered amount are included.
• All products belonging to the following brand
  Select a brand name from the drop-down menu. Any change will be applied to all products that have been assigned to the selected brand.
• All products belonging to the following supplier/drop-shipper
  Select a supplier or a drop-shipper to apply the changes to all products that have been associated with it.
• All products that are: In Stock/Out of stock
  Use this filter to easily target all products that are in or out of stock. For example, you could take all products that are out of stock and set them to Disregard Stock.
• All… Standard Products | BTO Products | BTO Items | Downloadable Products | Gift Certificates
  The search is based on the product type. Some of the product types might not exist in your store, depending on which version of ProductCart you are running. You can individually target Standard Products, Downloadable Products, Gift Certificates, Apparel Products (if you are using the Apparel add-on), Build To Order Products (Build To Order version only) and Build To Order Only Items (Build To Order version only).
• Products that are not assigned to any category
  The Global Changes feature allows you to quickly assign multiple products to a category. Use this feature to assign to a specific category all products that are not assigned to any category at the moment.

The bottom area allows you to specify which change should be applied to the selected products. You can select one of the following changes:

• Modify prices
  You can modify the Online Price, List Price, or Wholesale Price, by either a percentage value (e.g. 5%) or an absolute amount (e.g. -10). Changes can be positive or negative. Therefore, for an 8% decrease in price, enter ”-8” and select ”% change”. As you modify the price, you can opt to have ProductCart round the updated price to the nearest integer.
• Recalculate prices
  You can quickly set a price based on another one. For example, you can set the wholesale price as a percentage of the either the Online Price or the List Price. Wholesale prices for the selected products are set as a percentage of the online or list price. For example, if the online price is 50 and you enter 75, the wholesale price is set to: 37.5. The resulting prices can be rounded to the nearest integer.
• Assign or remove a product attribute
  The attributes that you can either assign or remove from the selected products are virtually all the settings that appear on the Add/Modify Product page. For more details on these attributes, see the section that talks about adding products to the store. If you opt to assign the “Not for Sale” attribute, you can specify a message to be displayed on the product details page (e.g. “This product has been discontinued”). If you opt to assign the “Oversized” setting, you can specify the package dimensions.
• Assign product weight
  You can quickly set the product weight for the selected products to the amount entered on the form. You can specify the amount in pounds and ounces (or kilograms and grams).
• Assign the…
  You can set numeric properties such as the inventory level by entering the corresponding value in the input field. Whatever value is currently associated with the product(s) will be replaced with the new value. For example, the inventory level would be replaced with the new number.
• Minimum quantity customers can buy
  You can set a minimum quantity that customers need to buy, and activate the Force Purchase of Multiples of the minimum quantity you enter. For more information about this feature, please see the section of the User Guide that talks about adding a new product to the store.
• Change Product Type
  This feature only applies to users of ProductCart Build To Order. You can change the product type for the selected products to one of the 3 product types supported by ProductCart BTO: Standard Product, BTO Product, and BTO Only Item.
• Move products to the selected Supplier/Drop-shipper
  Use this feature to easily move products from one drop-shipper to another (or supplier).
• Page Layout
  You can quickly change the page layout setting for multiple products at once using this feature. For more information about page layouts, see the Display Settings section.
• Assign to a category
  You can use the Global Changes feature to quickly assign multiple products to a specific category.

Next, click on the Submit button to verify the changes that you are about to make to the store catalog. The Global Change Confirmation page will be displayed. It lists how many products will be affected by the change, what type of change is being applied, and what filter was used to select these products.

If the information contained on this page appears to be correct, click on the Continue button to run the global change script. If you need to edit the product selection criteria or the change details, click on the Back button.

After running the update script, ProductCart will display a summary page.

Be extra careful when using this feature as changes are sometimes difficult to undo, and may affect a large number of products in your store catalog. If you need to undo a global change, the only way to do so is to use the exact same product filtering criteria, and opposite change details (e.g. if the online price was increased by $10 for some products, you can decrease it by the same amount). Percentage changes are difficult to undo because the percentage is calculated on the new value (e.g. increasing 10 by 5% is not the same as decreasing 10.5 by 5%).

The category drop-down menu in the ”Select the products…” section of the Global Changes page only displays categories that contain products. All categories that do not contain any products are hidden. This is done to reduce the number of categories listed in the drop-down menu, which could otherwise be very large in stores with a large product catalog.

If you prefer to include all categories - so that you can select a parent category and include all of its subcategories by using the “Include sub-categories” feature - you can do so by performing a small code change in the file pcadmin/globalChanges.asp:

Locate the code:

cat_Type="1"

… and change it to:

cat_Type="0"