Admin API: Best way to update 25K variants - Plus Store

Technical Q&A
1

In our custom non-Shopify product admin, we call variants items.
We currently have an AWS Lambda function that accepts an array of item_ids and uses the Admin API and updates one variant at a time every second.

For each variant we update we make 2 requests:

  • 1 graphQL request to get the actual variant ID to use for the update.

  • 1 REST call to update the variant. (I inherited this code).

We add a 1 second delay between item_ids to keep up with the request limit.

We’ve used this with arrays as large as 400 item_ids, but never 25K+ items.
AFAIK theoretically with the 1 second delay, we should be able to run it with an array of all 25K items without getting throttled.Even though this will potentially take up to 8 hours.

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this and if there is a better way to do a bulk variant update.