How to Bulk Edit Product Type and Vendor in Shopify

Every product in Shopify has a vendor field and a product type field. They look simple — just a line of text each — but they drive smart collections, admin filtering, Google Shopping category mapping, and reporting. When those fields contain inconsistencies or outdated values, the knock-on effects touch every part of your store. Fixing them at scale in Shopify’s native admin is surprisingly painful. Here’s what the fields actually do, why the built-in bulk editor falls short, and how to rename vendors and product types across hundreds of products in a single operation.

What Vendor and Product Type Fields Are Used For in Shopify

The vendor field identifies the manufacturer, brand, or supplier of a product. It appears on product pages if your theme is configured to display it, and most standard Shopify themes do show it by default. Beyond the storefront, vendor is used for filtering products in the Shopify admin, building smart collection rules (e.g. “Vendor is equal to Nike”), segmenting sales reports by brand, and driving supplier-level inventory workflows in third-party apps.

The product type field categorises what the product actually is — “T-Shirt”, “Running Shoe”, “Candle”, and so on. Shopify uses product type for smart collection conditions, admin filtering, and — critically — Google Shopping category mapping through the Google & YouTube sales channel. Third-party apps that handle feed management, analytics, or inventory also rely on product type to classify and group your catalogue.

Both fields are free-text with no validation. There is no dropdown menu, no controlled vocabulary, and no warning if you type a value that doesn’t match anything else in your store. This means it is extremely easy to end up with “Nike”, “nike”, “NIKE”, and “Nike ” (with a trailing space) as four separate vendors — each one creating its own filter option, its own smart collection match, and its own line in your reports.

Why the Native Bulk Editor Fails at Scale

Shopify does have a bulk editor. You select products from the product list, click “Bulk edit”, and get a spreadsheet-style view where you can modify fields including vendor and product type. On paper, this sounds like it should solve the problem.

In practice, it doesn’t. The bulk editor uses a drag-to-fill interaction for applying the same value to multiple rows. You type the new vendor name into one cell, then drag the fill handle down to copy it to the rows below. This works for a handful of products, but it breaks down quickly at scale.

There is no find-and-replace. If “Acme Corp” was misspelled as “Acme Copr” on 200 products, you cannot search for the incorrect value and replace it in one operation. You have to filter by that vendor, select products, open the bulk editor, and manually overwrite them — 50 at a time.

The bulk editor view is limited to 50 products at a time. If you need to change the vendor on 500 products, you’re looking at a minimum of 10 rounds of selecting, editing, saving, going back, and selecting the next batch.

There is no rename-all function. You cannot tell Shopify “everywhere you see vendor = OldBrand, change it to NewBrand.” Every affected product must be individually selected and modified.

Step-by-Step: How to Change a Vendor Name Natively

If you need to rename a vendor using only Shopify’s built-in tools, here is the process:

1. Go to Products in your Shopify admin.
2. Use the filter to select Vendor is “OldBrand”. This shows all products currently assigned to that vendor.
3. Select all visible products using the checkbox at the top of the list. Shopify displays a maximum of 50 products per page in the admin.
4. Click Bulk edit. The spreadsheet view opens with your selected products.
5. Find the Vendor column. If it’s not visible, click “Columns” to add it.
6. Type the new vendor name (“NewBrand”) into the first cell, then drag the fill handle down to copy the value to every visible row.
7. Click Save.
8. Go back to the product list. The filter still shows the remaining products with the old vendor name. Select the next 50 and repeat.

For 500 products, this takes 10+ rounds of manual work. Each round involves loading the product list, selecting products, waiting for the bulk editor to open, scrolling through the spreadsheet view, dragging to fill, saving, and navigating back. In total, you’re looking at 30–45 minutes of repetitive clicking for what should be a single rename operation.

Why the Drag Method Breaks Down

The drag-to-fill approach has problems beyond just being slow. At 100+ products, the process takes 30 minutes or more of repetitive manual work. That’s 30 minutes where you’re doing the same click-drag-save sequence over and over, which is exactly the kind of task where mistakes happen.

It’s easy to miss products if your filtering isn’t exact. If some products have “Nike” and others have “Nike ” (with a trailing space), filtering by one won’t catch the other. You can end up thinking you’ve renamed everything when a handful of products still carry the old value.

There is no confirmation of what changed. The bulk editor doesn’t show you a before-and-after summary. If you make a typo in the new vendor name — “NewBrnad” instead of “NewBrand” — that typo propagates to every product you dragged over. You won’t see the mistake until you go looking for it.

And there is no undo. Once you click Save, the old vendor name is gone. Shopify doesn’t keep a history of field-level changes. If you overwrote the wrong products or introduced a new typo, you have to go back and fix them manually — using the same slow drag-to-fill process.

How AssetScope’s Vendor & Type Editor Solves This

AssetScope’s Vendor & Type Editor takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of making you select individual products and edit cells one by one, it shows you every unique vendor name and product type in your store, along with a count of how many products use each value.

The workflow is simple:

1. Open the Vendor & Type Editor in AssetScope.
2. You see a complete list of every unique vendor name in your store, each with a product count next to it. Product types are listed separately in the same interface.
3. Click the vendor or product type you want to rename.
4. Type the new value.
5. Click Apply.

All matched products update in a single operation. Renaming a vendor across 500 products takes under 10 seconds — compared to 30–45 minutes with the native bulk editor. The same applies to product type: renaming “T-Shirt” to “T-Shirts” across your entire catalogue is one click, not ten rounds of drag-to-fill.

Because the editor shows you every unique value and its count, you can immediately spot inconsistencies — duplicate vendor names with slight spelling variations, product types with inconsistent capitalisation, or values created by bad CSV imports. You fix them where you see them, and every associated product updates automatically.

Use Cases

The most common scenarios where merchants need to bulk-edit vendor and product type fields:

• Supplier rebrand: A vendor renamed their company. You need to update all products from “OldCo” to “NewCo” without missing any. A single rename in AssetScope catches every product, regardless of how many you have.
• Brand consolidation: You acquired a brand or merged two supplier accounts. Products from both need to sit under a single vendor name for clean reporting and smart collection rules.
• Fixing import errors: CSV imports are the most common source of vendor and product type inconsistencies. A single extra space, a capitalisation difference, or a character encoding issue creates a new “vendor” that fragments your data. AssetScope shows you all the variants at a glance so you can consolidate “Nike ”, “NIKE”, and “nike” into a single correct value.
• Seasonal product type changes: Some merchants reclassify products for seasonal catalogues or promotional campaigns. Changing product type from “Summer Dress” to “Clearance — Summer Dress” across a category is a one-click operation rather than hours of manual editing.