How to update product prices and their custom option prices by the same percentage in bulk?

Question

I am quite new to the Magento platform and have been slowly getting the hang of it, but have come to an issue I need help with resolving.

A lot of the products on my website have custom options which have different prices than that of the base product. I am fortunate in the way that, whenever I need to update the price of the base product, I have to update the custom option prices by the same percentage. But even so, with a lot of products on my website, this becomes quite troublesome if I have to do it one by one.

So, what I would like to ask is, what would be the best way to change prices of certain products in bulk, as well as their custom options prices at the same time by the same percentage?

Is there an extension which would allow me to do that, or should I take on this issue from a different angle all together?

I would like to thank you for any help in advance and if any part of my question is unclear, please ask for a further explanation.

Answer 1

Given that you are new to Magento you might want to a) spend months getting an integration of sorts to work or b) use the slightly notorious 'Magmi' program:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/magmi/

The philosophy of Magmi is to disregard the Magento methods as they are too slow and sometimes you don't need five hundred queries to update some small detail of one product. Obviously a lot of developers prefer doing things the Magento way so Magmi will only get you so far and not a lot of respect from the certified developers out there.

The benefit of rolling your own code (rather than going the Magmi route) is that you can implement your own logic. For instance, if a product is in a certain category it might need a certain custom option with that option's price based on something else. (For instance). You could code that sort of logic in PHP and, in that way, spend less time filling out spreadsheets.

Returning to the Magmi idea, definitely try it on a well backed up development machine first.

Answer 2

Your problem is this, Magmi bypasses indexing so you need to reindex which puts a load on your server plus other business related problems. Using the API is slow, the pricing logic is a fundamental flaw in the Magento architecture. If you don't have too many products it's manageable, but if you have multiple base currencies, too many products and non-clustered hosting you will likely hit serious problems.

We do something differently as we have access to technology that keeps the price in wholesale and calculates everything in realtime. You would need to provide endless amounts of detail to find a possible solution, most start with Magmi.