The booth batch editor ("Selling > Batch edit items") is your best friend for managing your listings when you have more than a few items. It lets you operate on groups of items in bulk, rather than having to manually edit each item. What more do you need to know?
How do I access the batch editor?
What's the least I should know about the batch editor?
How do I select items to be acted on?
How do I choose an action to perform?
I picked an action and the batch editor told me no items were affected. What gives?
Why does the batch editor sometimes act on my items immediately, and sometimes tell me that it's processing?
Tell me more about the text replacing features.
Tell me more about the item trait setting features.
Tell me more about setting up international shipping.
What's the quick and dirty rundown on how the batch editor works?
Basically, the idea is that you pick whatever items you want to perform an action on, you choose what action you want to perform, you hit "Apply changes," and all of the items you picked are changed. Tada!
How do I access the batch editor?
You can access the batch editor by hovering your mouse over the "Selling" link in the upper left-hand corner of any page, then selecting "Batch edit items" from the drop-down menu.
If you are already viewing the Selling Dashboard, select "Items" from the menu bar on the left-hand side of the page, then select "Batch edit."
How do I select the items I want to act upon?
In the simplest cases, you just select the checkbox to the left side of the item. Once your listing has been selected, the row will be highlighted to indicate that item has been selected.
If you want to operate on many items and you don't want to click on tens or hundreds of rows, you have a couple options:
- Use the "Add a filter" feature (positioned above your list of items) to narrow down what listings are shown. Once you've narrowed down the items shown, you can click on the checkbox above the listings to the left of "Picture" and all items in your list will be selected at once. If you don't want to operate on every item in that list, you can go deselect the items you don't want to act on by unchecking those items.
- Alternately, if you would like to affect all items at once, you may select the same top checkbox without using the filter first. This will give you the option to "Apply to all items" next to the "Apply changes" area.
How do I choose an action to perform?
Presently, there are eight pages of actions available to you:
- a page of "Basic" options (delete items, change their status, apply discount to the items, etc.);
- a page of shipping options (set international shipping, set shipping prices);
- a page for trait options (brand, size and other applicable traits);
- a page for search optimization (Google information for advanced users);
- a page of actions for changing the text in your items (replace text, add or remove text from beginning or end of item description);
- a place to edit your images (upload, rearrange or delete photos);
- a place to review your item analytics;
- a page to export your inventory to .CSV file and print inventory sheets (printing only available to Pro Members).
To change between the pages, click the tabs to the left of the main toolbox at the top of the page.
Applying an action to your selected items is as simple as clicking the radio button to the left of the action you want to perform, and then clicking the "Apply changes" button below the options. Note that only the option you had picked will be applied to your selected items. That is, if you pick the radio button to change your items' category, then the batch editor will only change the category of your items when you click submit. It will not change the status of your items, mark them as "Used," or do anything else pertaining to the other actions shown on the page. It ignores these actions since they aren't selected.
I picked an action and the batch editor told me no items were affected. What gives?
There are a couple of common reasons that you may be told that no items were affected when you use the batch editor. The most common reasons are the most obvious ones: that you either forgot to click the radio button next to an action, or you forgot to select items to act upon from the list of items in the batch editor.
Another possibility is that the action you selected may not be possible. For instance, you can not change the properties of sold items, so if you selected an item that was sold and tried to change its status to "For sale," nothing will happen (hint: if you want to relist an item, go to your "Sold items" from the Selling page and click "Relist items" link under the offer that your items were sold in).
Why does the batch editor sometimes act on my items immediately, and sometimes tell me that it's processing?
If you are submitting a large number of items to be modified (more than 50), or you are performing an action that takes a long time for our system to process (such as changing text in the description) then we add your batch edit request to a queue that is processed while you do other things on the site. In most cases, your action will begin processing within a couple minutes after you submitted it. Depending on the action you performed and how many items you performed it on, processing may take from a minute to an hour or more.
Tell me more about the text replacing features.
These warrant a topic unto themselves. Please see our page on batch edit text functionality.
Tell me more about the item trait setting features.
These, too, warrant a topic unto themselves. Please see our page on Item Traits.
Tell me more about setting up international shipping.
Setting up international shipping for your items means that when a buyer in another country is interested in buying your items, they can do so immediately without waiting for you to respond to their offer and negotiate an appropriate shipping cost.
You can set up to 11 international shipping policies for each item that you list. This allows you to setup separate costs for shipping to each of the eleven available regions. If you have two overlapping options set (such as shipping policies for "Germany" and for "Europe"), the site will choose the more specific region to calculate shipping costs.
To create multiple international shipping policies, you would repeatedly pick your region(s), set your cost, and click the "Submit" button on the batch editor for each policy (be sure to select the items you want to apply the shipping policy to first).
This page has more detailed information on how to set international shipping via the batch editor.
