How to surpass the 100 options limit for product SKUs in e-commerce?

[abccservicedesk]

Hello team, is there any solution to pass 100 options limit in any of our products ? need 365 sku for birthday gift [each date day/month have an image]. thanks

[Ivy]

Hi there, @abccservicedesk.

Here's why we have the 100 variant limit: The variant limit is related to how our API works and the total allowable data size of each call. Each API call allows for a maximum of 250 products and 100 variants per product, so 25,000 variants per call. If we were to increase this the time for API calls to complete would also increase. We do have a workaround for this:  You'd take one of your variant options and create separate product pages for each of the variants within that variant option.

Let's look at an example:

Variant options: - Style (t-shirt, tank top, hoodie) - Size (S, M, L, XL, 2XL) - Colour (red, blue, green, yellow, black, grey, white)

With those 3 variants and the amount of options you could have within them, you'd already be sitting at 105 possible variants. For the workaround, you could take the "style" variant option and create separate products for each of them.

Product types (create a separate product for each of these): - T-shirt - Tank top - Hoodie

Variant options within those products: - Size (S, M, L, XL, 2XL) - Colour (red, blue, green, yellow, black, grey, white)

This creates 3 different products, each with 35 possible variants, which is easily supported by Shopify. Thank you!

[MaxDesign]

I believe they are working to change this limit in the near future, most likely to 250 instead of 100 variants (options are not like variants, the current limit is 3 options).

So for your use case, variants might not be the way to go, but more likely custom attributes (aka product properties). Those are not linked to a SKU, so they can't affect prices or inventory level (which means that you have one "mother SKU" for all "custom variations"). Custom attributes can be read in the order details (similary as an order note, but assigned to a product instead). It's also possible to combine both product properties and product variants, it will most likely depend of the way you handle pricing and inventories.

Bar that, custom attributes are more flexible since we don't have any limit. If you want to create those custom variations and attach an image to each of them, you'd need to hire a developer since it's likely that there are some specificites to take into consideration.

EDIT : or as @Ivy rightly suggested, you could combine multiple products. In your case, this could be 12 products (for each month) with 28 to 31 variants each (for each day). Here again you'd likely need some type of code in order to add a custom selector for the 12 products (by default you'll only have a variant selector for the days). It's possible to make a custom selector that looks like a variant selector, but actually redirecting to the selected product). In both case, I doubt you can achieve a decent result without going through the code, it's just how it is. A popular example of this is gymshark.com, you'll notice that their "color variants" are actually redirecting to a new product url.