Shopify put out a limit on the number of variants that can be made, which went into effect on March 14, 2019. In short, the new change means that Shopify will now limit the number of variants that can be made through the API once a certain threshold is reached on a store per day.
You need to know that this kind of limit didn’t exist before. Only stores that aren’t signed up for Shopify Plus will be affected by this new release.
What does it mean that you can’t do this?
There is no official information about the exact number of limits, but as a Shopify app (Dropship Empire), we got an email with the following information.
They will limit the number of variations that retailers can make with apps that don’t belong to Shopify but use the Shopify API. Once a shop has 50,000 variants, the API call limit is set to 1,000 variants per 24 hours (subject to change). Please keep in mind that each product adds one to the total number of options in the shop.
For example, you’ve reached the limit if you have 10,000 products and each one has five different kinds.
Who doesn’t have to worry about the variants limit?
These are the cases:
Those who have a subscription to Shopify Plus.
Having one-of-a-kind products (items with no other options): If you have fewer than 50,000 products with no other options, this is a problem.
Having different kinds of a product: If you have more than one version of a product in your Shopify store, you need to make sure that the number of versions doesn’t go over 50,000.
Having products with and without variations: You need to pay attention to how many variations you have in your store. Keep in mind that one product always means one variant.
What can you do so that the variant limit doesn’t affect you?
- If you sell a lot of products and get a lot of unique inquiries, and you’ve been thinking about signing up for the Shopify Plus Plan, now could be the time. The limit does not affect people who use this pricing plan.
How can you keep track of your products if they come in many different kinds?
If you don’t want to get error messages and don’t want to be surprised when new products don’t get added to your store, dropship-empire recommends that you do the following.
Now, if you don’t have a Shopify Plus plan but have a lot of products with variants, we recommend that you only upload a few product types from your supplier per day into your store. This way, if you have more than 50,000 variants, you won’t hit the 1,000 variants per day upload limit. It also means that you can’t add more than 50,000 single products to your store, since each of them means one variant. The limit doesn’t apply to updates; it only affects uploads and making new variants.
What to do as an example
What if you want to add all of the products from a supplier, like Matterhorn, to your Shopify store? Let’s say they have 24,000 things to sell. Since they sell lingerie, their items come in a wider range of colors and sizes. This company has about 98,000 different products. It means that you won’t be able to upload every item from the supplier in one day if you don’t have a Shopify Plus subscription. To avoid this trouble, it would be best if your Shopify store only sold a few of the supplier’s products. In this case, you won’t have too many products, too many variations, or the chance to add more than 1,000 new products a day. So, you can add 50,000 products on the first day if they don’t have any options. After that, you have to choose categories for up to 1,000 products, and you have to keep doing this every day if you want your store to have more than 50,000 products (without options/more variants).