Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify all come advertised as supporting ‘Unlimited Products’, but what’s less known is that there are some limits. Users have discovered a Shopify 1000 variation limit per day, which is restricting some from uploading their entire available inventory. These limits don’t apply to Shopify Plus accounts.
This is an edge case and appears likely to prevent Shopify’s API from becoming overloaded. The limit also only comes in once a shop has 50,000 variants. After this threshold is reached the Shopify 1000 variation limit per day throttle kicks in.
You may ask how it’s possible to upload that many variations but in some industries it’s the norm. An example is the print on demand industry where it’s perfectly possible to have a product such as a Tshirt in a range of sizes, colours and designs. It only takes 10 products each with 100 variations to hit the Shopify 1000 variation limit per day.
It’s also worth noting that Shopify only support up to 100 variations per product with 3 options. Naturally the three options for your variations can be different from product to product. Options can also have multiple values such as size, colour, design, weight, quantity, finish, or material.
The Shopify 1000 variation limit per day could also impact you if you are deleting existing products to update and replace them but again it’s worth emphasising that this will only impact you if you already have more than 50,000 variations listed.
