Bulk change the tax status from all products in WooCommerce

Question

I am changing my business type, which will not permit me to collect tax on products - ie, all products must be without tax.

So, with over 1200 products, how can I change the status from 'taxable' to not taxable ?

I have seen that the posts_meta table holds the tax status for each product - they are all set to "taxable", but I have not been able to find what it should be set to for not taxable.

I know that I can change the site to not charge tax (which I have done), but I want to clean up the product definitions to keep everything correct.

I am wanting to simply run the following command on the database :

update myshop_postmeta set meta_value = "???" where meta_key = "_tax_status"

After having replace the ??? with the right value.

Can anyone point me in the right direction, please ?

Answer 1

To bulk set all WooCommerce products tax status to "none", There are 2 related tables in the database to update (so 2 SQL queries):

UPDATE wp_postmeta as pm  SET pm.meta_value = 'none'  WHERE pm.meta_key = '_tax_status';
UPDATE wp_wc_product_meta_lookup as pml SET pml.tax_status = 'none';

You should first check your database tables prefix (by default it is wp_)

This is tested and perfectly works, using for example PhpMyAdmin.

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On WooCommerce Admin Products list, you could also use the "Bulk actions" to edit the tax status of multiple products at once.