How to handle the 1000 variant per day limit on API uploads?

[DavisMK]

Backstory (we sell POD clothing all printed in house so have a lot of variants)

About 6 weeks ago we were told that there was a new limit for uploading variants via API, 1000 variants a day when your store hits 50k variants. For us that is approximately two designs per day. We were told originally that this was only an API limit and that we should continue to upload via the CSV, so have been doing that no problem, until today when i tried to upload a file and it hit the limit after 5 products. 

Support chat are telling me this limit is now in force across all creation methods and that we have a choice of either upload less than 1000 a day, or upgrade to shopify plus at minimum of $3k a month. 

Has anyone else run into this problem? It seems that the help didn't even know it was a thing until i sent them screenshots of the error, seems like communication on this could be a lot better, the help pages don't mention a limit at all except on the developers API page

[Robert_Tolmach1]

Night time support (US) goes overseas. Shopify will not say what the hours are. Even daytime calls sometimes go overseas.

[palmartin]

Shopify has a rate limit that takes effect when a store has 50.000 product variants. After this threshold is reached, no more than 1000 new variants can be created per day. We know from our own experience that it's a hassle to upload a new .csv file containing 1000 variants every single day.

Solution for non-Shopify-plus stores:

I would rather prefer Shopify to remove the 1000 variants per day limit but I am pretty sure they won't. We have made a small Shopify App to work this out.
The app is called Bulk Product Generator and can be found here: https://apps.shopify.com/bulk-product-generator
It's simple and straight forward. The app will generate up to 1000 variants every 24 hour. The variant created will have a Random Title and SKU like this:

Title	SKU	Product Type
new product 1	new.product-H371d	NEW PRODUCTS
new product 2	new.product-cRGtw	NEW PRODUCTS
new product 3	new.product-4tt3s	NEW PRODUCTS

Let's say you got Shopify store with 50.000 variants and need to add more products and variants to your store. Install this App and let it run for 10 days and you will have a total of 60.000 variants in your store. 50.000 from previous inventory plus additional 10.000 variants that you can edit using your favorite product editor tool. Personally we use Excel-Like Product manager: https://apps.shopify.com/spreadsheet-bulk-product-manager
You can use Excelify or the built in .csv import function provided by Shopify: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/import-products

I keep Bulk Product Generator running 24/7 and each year I will have 365.000 variants available to edit.
Personally I always have 1 variant to each product so my configuration is 1000 products with 1 variant each. If you are selling clothes with XS,S,M,L,XL you can make the app create 200 products with 5 variants each.

Screenshot from the App:

[Renars]

Hello @palmartin 

Thank you for suggesting Excelify.

We indeed have a special features to support merchants who are having this issue with Shopify Variant creation limit.
While no app can get around this limit - with Excelify you can set up your import, to be automatically repeated the next day with a special checkbox that you can select when creating the import with Excelify.

The app will not just stop at 1000 variants and continue the next day. We will go through the whole file, in case you have items that are updating variants in the middle of the file.
After the import will be finished, the app will schedule a new import the next day with only the items that failed to import due to this error.

We do have an amazing tutorial that explains how this feature works - Automatically continue importing the next day if Shopify daily import limit is reached

If you have any more questions or issues, feel free to contact us directly by any means listed in our Contact Us page.

[Robert_Tolmach1]

We LOVE Excelify! Great product. Great support. Our favorite app. If you have any amount of data to deal with, it is a must.

[shopbooify]

I switched over to Shopify because of the "Unlimited" products. Now that I'm $20k+ into a website rebuild and now find out there is a 1,000 limit. Switching to Shopify has been a disaster and I'd highly recommend anyone considering it think about the ability to grow their brand on this platform. I'm switching back to to my old provider that starts with Ec and ends with wid.

The pricing for ShopifyPlus is stupid and not reasonable.