GraphQL productCreate API and VARIANT_THROTTLE_EXCEEDED

Retired Boards Appdev Graphql Basics And Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

For some stores, there is an error when calling GraphQL productCreate api.

The response to the api call is as follows.

{“data”:{“productCreate”:null},“errors”:[{“message”:“Daily variant creation limit reached. Please try again later. See https://help.shopify.com/api/getting-started/api-call-limit for more information about rate limits and how to avoid them.”,“locations”:[{“line”:1,“column”:78}],“path”:[“productCreate”],“extensions”:{“code”:“VARIANT_THROTTLE_EXCEEDED”}}],“extensions”:{“cost”:{“requestedQueryCost”:72,“actualQueryCost”:10,“throttleStatus”:{“maximumAvailable”:1000.0,“currentlyAvailable”:990,“restoreRate”:50.0}}}}

Originally it was working fine, but the problem has been occurring since yesterday.

Looking at the response, actualQueryCost is 10 and maximumAvailable is 1000, but a VARIANT_THROTTLE_EXCEEDED error occurs.

https://shopify.dev/api/usage/rate-limits

I’ve read the above page but couldn’t figure out the cause of the problem.

What’s causing the problem?

Where should I check more?

2

Does the store have more than 50,000 products , and is not on a Shopify Plus Enterprise plan?

Then it now has a daily limit

The following Admin API resources, in both GraphQL and REST versions, have an additional throttle that takes effect when a store has 50,000 product variants. After this threshold is reached, no more than 1,000 new variants can be created per day.> > https://shopify.dev/api/usage/rate-limits#:~:text=The%20following%20Admin%20API%20resources%2C%20in%20both%20GraphQL%20and%20REST%20versions%2C%20have%20an%20additional%20throttle%20that%20takes%20effect%20when%20a%20store%20has%2050%2C000%20product%20variants

3

Thank you for your reply.

As you said, having over 50000 product variants seems to be one cause of the problem.

But the real problem is, I can’t register even one product right now (not 1000 per day).

I have contacted Shopify Partner Support and am waiting for a response.

4

We are also facing this issue after passing the 50k variant limit on Shopify Advanced. We’re creating maybe 200-250 variants, then we’re met with the API Error:

VARIANT_THROTTLE_EXCEEDED

I’ve double checked our logs to make sure and can confirm that in a 24hr period, we’re way under the 1k/daily created variant limit.

Only thing I can think of is that the GraphQL api is miscounting the number of requests by including the number of GET requests (GQL Queries) accidentally.

We had submitted a ticket about this last night but haven’t heard back yet - hoping for a resolution soon as we have products with missing sizes now.

5

Update: We haven’t had any success going through the Shopify support email channel. It seems that this variant throttle is being affected by both updating AND creating variants. We log all API calls to Shopify for metrics and when we add up the updates and creates together, we see we hit the 1k mark, in which we start to get errors back from Shopify.

This doesn’t appear to be documented correctly if this is the case, as the error described should stem only from variant creations.

I suppose the next steps for us is to upgrade to Shopify+ since the store we’re working in deals with a lot of variant updates (price and inventory) and variant creations (new sizes coming in, for example).

6

Update 2: we’re still getting this error even after upgrading to shopify+.

I suppose I’ll have to try reaching out to support again!