Daily variant creation limit reached when updating products

[Conner]

I received an error rejecting my Product/Variant updates due to a "Daily variant creation limit reached". I attempted to push up an update with 530 Products & 3800 Variants and they were all rejected. I have 11,200 Products & 52,000 Variants on this store currently.

I already throttle my API calls based on Shopify's leaky bucket system, but this appears to be a separate limit?

Here's the exact response below:

{
"product": [
"Daily variant creation limit reached. Please try again later. See https://help.shopify.com/en/api/getting-started/api-call-limit for more information about rate limits and how to avoid them."
]
}

I followed the link in the response and, as far as I can tell, it provides almost no details on this limit. I can't find any information about a daily limit.

Does anyone know where I can find more information about this? I'd love to know what the daily limit even is, as I can't even find that.

Thanks!

[RennWerks]

We chose shopify because we read it supported unlimited products….our trial runs with 5,000 and 15,000 products went smooth and left us full of excitement. Then after trying to add our first 100,000 we got hit with errors. We have also hit this wall….. using the API also gives errors.

If shopify can increase this limit to 10,000 then i feel like we would all benefit. Until then……

If you have Big data… say over 20,000 products then it seems to make more sense to use a Big Commerce platform that supports unlimited products and changes.

This limit is such a problem that we are considering leaving shopify so we can properly build out our site with ALL our products.

[PaulNewton]

@RetailGroup  What does it mean then that we can add Unlimited Products if we canNOT add an unlimited amount of products? That sentence does not even make sense when you say it out loud but that's what we have happening here.

There should be asterisks in the marketing of "unlimited"* products. Per @palmartin's post,  a note about 365k variants, that is effectively a limit of 50k +  additional 315k/year.

*"unlimited" in marketing materials now means "unlimited with enough time" as in : sure you can eventually get all your unlimited products added as long as you have  an unlimited supply of years to make that happen adding 1k each day /mustache-twirl Nyeh, heh, heh, heh!  

@Josh Limitations are healthiest when clearly told upfront to involved parties, https://www.shopify.com/pricing is not doing that.

@palmartin Have you found the 1K limit is only for creation and never applies to updating?

So it may be feasible choice in some cases to premake placeholder variants that can then later be updated en masse to the real variant data. Meaning it's possible for stores to pre-emptively start maximizing that 365k/year products in advance before they may even know they need to bypass that limit.

[PaulNewton]

Reference for future readers

Docs help.shopify.com adding variants -

Stores with 50,000 or more variants are subject to a daily rate limit for uploading variants by usin...

[celeste16]

Any luck on getting this answered???

[maurinclan]

I am receiving this same error.  I offer lots, and lots of fabrics for my customers to choose from.  Each fabric has 33 variants.  I have hundreds of fabrics to upload before I open my store to the public.  At 1000 variants per day, I can only add 30 fabrics a day.  It will take me FOREVER to get my shop open.  I will need to find another platform for my business.  

[RennWerks]

@maurinclan I would suggest looking into lowering the variants for each product. We did this by only having one(1) image per product to fill out our product listing. We also had to develop scripts to re-tag all products in a more effective way that allows us to categorize, filter, and provide a more robust search.

I am a bit curious to your situation with so many different fabrics.... Could it be possible to lower your variants by using metafields, and modifying the product page with a couple select options on 'add to cart'?

Any solution to solve this challenge will open up a can of additional challenges to overcome. For instance, lets say you were to lower variants based on images and types by combining the images into a single image, and then modifying the add to cart logic.. Then you would need to implement changes into the product html, each section/snippet of your theme, as well as develop a script to combine your images and map them matching the product details/selections. This would be very similar to css sprites on a larger scale. Most product images should be over 300px. So you could combine say, nine images at 400px each to a 1200x1200 size image. Then use CSS, and your logic to display the  nine (9) different images. 

This might be an actual decent solution for variants that are heavy based on images of products. Someone should develop a theme that has this logic built into it. 🙂

[maurinclan]

I contacted shopify directly and got it worked out : ) I don't see a way that I can use less variants, without making it too confusing for my customers.  All my variants are actually different products, but I don't know how to do what you're saying, with the metafields.  If you have more info on that, I'd love to look into it.

[RennWerks]

I did a google search and this might help explain the metafields... https://www.sunriseintegration.com/learn/how-do-i-use-the-new-shopify-metafields-day-1

I'm happy to see that you got your issue worked out... What solution did Shopify provide? It might be helpful for others to also know.

[maurinclan]

They were really great about it; I explained my situation and they extended my unlimited variants for a month while I finish adding my products.  They said they would reevaluate at that time.  I think I will have the majority of my listings up by then and be able to stay under the daily limit after that.

[Magdy_Dakak]

Hi, is there any e-mail address to contact Shopify directly? I have the same problem and I need to find a solution for it. Thanks.