Bulk Assignment

Introduction

Assigning products outlet by outlet is slow once a store has more than a handful of locations. Bulk Assignment puts every product and variation in one spreadsheet-style sheet, with a column group per outlet, so stock, price and status can be reviewed and changed across all outlets at once and saved in a single action.

The sheet behaves like a spreadsheet on purpose: arrow keys move, typing edits, and blocks of cells can be copied out of — or pasted in from — Excel and Google Sheets.

Navigation path:WooCommerce Point of Sale → Outlets → Bulk Assignment

Reading the Sheet

The first column lists every published product with its SKU and master stock. After it comes one group of columns per outlet.

Outlets appear in the order they were created, and deactivated outlets are still listed and still editable, labelled Inactive.

Variable Products

A variable product is shown as a shaded, bold grouping row, with its variations indented beneath it under a ↳ marker.

• Stock and price belong to the variation. On the parent row these cells are blank and read-only.
• Status belongs to the product. It is edited on the parent row and applies to every variation, which is why a variation's Status cell is read-only and shows the parent's value.

Variations that are disabled in WooCommerce are still listed, labelled Disabled in WooCommerce, so their outlet data can be prepared before they go live.

Editing Cells

Click a cell and start typing to replace its value, or press Enter or F2 to edit the existing one.

Copying and Pasting

Copy takes the selected range to the clipboard as tab-separated values, which is exactly what Excel and Google Sheets read and write. Paste works both ways round:

• A single value fills every cell of the selected range.
• A block of copied cells is placed starting at the active cell and clipped to the edge of the sheet.

Values that land on a read-only cell — a parent row's Stock or Price, or a variation's Status — are skipped rather than applied. Status accepts either the status key or its label, in any capitalisation.

Saving Changes

Edited cells are highlighted in amber and counted in the toolbar until they are saved. Nothing is written to the database until Save Changes is clicked.

Pending changes survive searching, filtering, paging and refreshing the sheet, so a large edit can be built up across several pages of products and saved once at the end. Leaving the page with unsaved changes prompts for confirmation.

When the save completes, a confirmation notice appears above the sheet and the saved values become the new baseline.

If some changes could not be saved, the notice says so, the affected cells are outlined in red with the reason on hover, and those changes stay pending so they can be corrected and saved again. Valid changes in the same batch are still saved.

Finding Products

The toolbar has a search box and a type filter.

• Search matches a product or variation by name or SKU. A product that matches is listed with all of its variations; a product listed only because one of its variations matched shows just the matching variations.
• Type narrows the sheet to All, Simple or Variable products.

Rows load 50 at a time and the next page loads automatically as the sheet is scrolled.

Rules and Limits

These are enforced when the sheet is saved, so a value that breaks a rule is reported rather than stored.

Assigning stock, price or status to an outlet also assigns the product to that outlet if it was not assigned already.

Custom Columns

Beyond stock, price and status, administrators can define their own per-outlet columns — a shelf location, a supplier reference, a per-outlet note — from the Columns button in the toolbar.

Each column needs a name, a key and a type:

A custom column appears under every outlet, after Status, and stores its own value for each outlet and product. Values are edited, pasted and saved exactly like any other cell.

Column Keys

The key identifies the column in the database and is fixed once the column is saved, because the stored values are filed under it. Keys must start with a letter and use only lowercase letters, numbers and underscores. The names stock, price and status are reserved.

The label and the order of columns can be changed at any time. A Text column can be changed to Long text and back; a Number column cannot change type.

Removing a Column

Removing a column hides it from the sheet but keeps its stored values. Adding a column with the same key again brings those values back.

For Developers

Custom values are available to code as well as to the sheet:

• wkwcpos_get_outlet_product_meta( $outlet_id, $product_id, $key ) returns a single value.
• Values reach the register with each product as outlet_meta, and per variation as var_outlet_meta, filterable through wkwcpos_outlet_product_meta_for_pos.

Values are stored as plain text with HTML stripped, so escape them for the context you output them in. The register interface does not display custom columns on its own.

When Registers See the Changes

Saved values are picked up by a register on its next load or resync; open registers are not updated live. A changed outlet price refreshes the register's cached product data automatically the next time it loads.

Related Features

• Per-Outlet Pricing — how an outlet price is charged at the register.
• Out of Stock Products — showing out-of-stock items at the register.
• Outlets & POS Users — creating outlets and assigning products one outlet at a time.
• Products & Inventory — master stock, barcodes and inventory setup.