This feature is a must know when adding products to your Shopify store since it will save you a lot of time.
First you need to login inside your Shopify dashboard. If you do not know how please follow the tutorial: “How to login into your shopify store?”
1. Identify a product that you want to duplicate
Go to the “Products” page (marked with 1 in the image below) and select the product that you want to duplicate (marked with 2 in the image below):
2. Duplicate the product
Now you should see the Shopify product page and on the top right corner you can see the “Duplicate” button/link like in the image below:
Click on the “Duplicate” link and a pop-up will open that will allow you to input data that should be different from the original product.
3. Add your new product details
In the pop-up you need to add the name of the new product (marked with 1 in the image below).
By default Shopify keeps the name of the original product and adds a “Copy of” followed by the original product name.
You have the options to duplicate the original product images if you want (marked with 2 in the image below). If you plan on adding new images for the newly created product leave this unchecked.
SKUs (marked with 3 in the image below) and Barcodes (marked with 4 in the image below) can’t be duplicated since they need to be unique.
If you want you can find out more about Shopify SKUs, how to create correct SKUs and also how they work on the Shopify platform on the: “What is the Shopify SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)?” tutorial.
You have the option to duplicate also the “Inventory quantities” (marked with 5 in the image below).
This should be duplicated only if you have the same quantities for your product or product variants.
If not, leave it unchecked.
Next is the “Product status” option which allows you to choose if you want to make the product visible on the live store or not.
I recommend checking the “Set as draft” (marked with 8 in the image below) until you finish editing the product and preview it to make sure everything is good.
“Set as active” (marked with 9 in the image below) will publish the product immediately on your store and make it available for purchase to your store customers, which is not recommended if you didn’t test the product first.
After you’ve set up all of the above you are ready to duplicate the product. Click the “Duplicate product” button (marked with 8 in the image above).
If you somehow changed your mind and you no longer want to duplicate the product you can cancel it by clicking the “Cancel” button or the close icon (marked with 9 in the image above).
If you check the box to duplicate the images once the product is duplicated Shopify will start duplicating the images which will take some time.
After Shopify finishes with the image duplication you’ll see the images.
After image duplication you do not need to save anything since everything is done automatically.
As you see the product is in “Draft” mode (marked with 2 in the image above) meaning that it is not published on the store and is not visible to your customers.
Make all the edits you need to the new duplicated product and once completed you can publish it.
If you want to edit or add a Shopify product the correct way please follow the tutorial: “How to add products to Shopify?”.
The tutorial will help you avoid editor pitfalls and also helps you avoid Google and other search engines penalisations.
4. Save your new product
To publish the product, change its status from “Draft” to “Active” (marked with 1 in the image below) and after click on the “Save” button (marked with 2 in the image below).
5. Conclusion
You’re done. Shopify makes it easy to duplicate a product without any extra apps or plugins like on other CMS’s since this functionality is found by default inside Shopify which I consider is a huge time saver and an absolute must.