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

Shopify Discussion
1

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

8 Likes
2

I’m having the same issue. I use a POD as well. I create shirts with 99 variants that with sizes and colors.

I’m only able to create 10 products a day. I created another shopify “Lite” account to go around the limit and it worked. I tried to import the products over 100 products today via CSV file today and the it gave me an api error after the 1000 variant limit now.

I’m seriously getting tired of this. This putting a real strain on a productive day.

I’m looking into other alternatives. They need to fix this before I find one.

6 Likes
3

Someone found a fix ATM?

I need sales for my ecommerce!

1 Like
4

Funny how on the website it still says “Unlimited products” under the pricing, no mention of the limits

9 Likes
5

They’re really making it hard to progress with shopify.

8 Likes
6

We’ve just been hit with this upload limit. It’s absolutely ridiculous and massively hampers the way we work with our clothing store.

It’s just one thing after another with Shopify trying to push everyone on to the overpriced Plus platform.

We’ll be looking in to alternatives to move our business elsewhere.

13 Likes
7

What really sucks is that a lot of these POD companies only integrate with shopify.

So the hard work you did to create mockups and products will be for nothing if you move to woocommerce or bigcommerce

4 Likes
8

We are having the same issue. The API response we get says:

{
	"errors":{
		"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."
		]
	}
}

Here is the link for ease: https://help.shopify.com/en/api/reference/rest-admin-api-rate-limits#resource-based-rate-limits

1 Like
9

When I was getting errors creating products. I contacted support and they didn’t know what was going on. So they sent emails to the developers with my screenshots to see their responses.

One finally got back with me and told me about the api call limit. I contacted support back and said they just implemented this in April but it was supposed to be for “third party apps” only.

So I started using CSV import and that got past the 1000 api call limit.

But now they just changed that which really is BS. You can email them to ask for api call increase but more than likely be denied.

Now I can’t do nothing for 24 hours.

6 Likes
10

We started having csv import issues in January, it seemed a limit of 9000 varients (per file, not day) was in place after getting in touch with support. This new 1000 limit for 24 hrs is a joke.

3 Likes
11

Ok. I’ll reduce the number of products and try again. If that’s the case it’ll make my life a bit easier

1 Like
12

So far the advice I have been given by shopify staff is “Try only listing your best selling products” - well that’s not really how businesses are run.

The limit is terrible, but what makes it worse is that it’s not a rolling limit. If you don’t upload for a day it doesn’t roll that allowance over, so if you decide in 2 months time that you need to delete and re-create 10,000 variants, it will take 10 days, and you need to make sure you are hitting 1000 a day every day.

8 Likes
13

It makes no sense to delete old items; when return customers reconnect with a vendor, they do so, many times, through old purchases, looking for something similar. The idea of “just delete old items, wholesale,” flies in the face of best practices.

I wonder if this limit is just a sign of major data-structure/infrastructure issues that Shopify is facing. If you start putting a paywall on your API, it can’t be because things are going swell.

It could be problems associated with growth, but then we might see the Shopify Plus price drop. Otherwise, it smells more like a problem associated with shrinkage. Albeit, shrinkage happens in a lot of ways, including the consequences of ridiculous API hits.

1 Like
14

So I just tried to import via CSV file. The file had 21 products with 1100 skus. Got the error again.

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.

So importing is out of the question now. This is completely BS.

2 Likes
15

Over the last few years Shopify has been heavily invested in ‘dropship growth’, it feels like they have benefitted massively from promoting the idea that you with a few apps you can load up thousands of products into the your store and start selling, the problem is that 99% of these businesses fail, and it’s probably quite expensive for Shopify to maintain these large catalogs.

3 Likes
16

What’s even more messed up is the underhanded way they’re doing this. Not any kind of notification be email to all their customers. I feel they’re doing it like this so they don’t get the backlash of complaints.

I’m going to start the process of moving to Bigcommerce. The holidays are getting closer so I want to be ready. I can’t do nothing with 1000 variants a day and not a way to increase that number.

4 Likes
17

It gets worse. You can’t bulk edit either via CSV any more. Definitely a new restriction because we used to do this from time to time.

Just out of curiosity I duplicated product A. Product A has 10 variants. When I duplicated I gave it Product B’s title (product B is new, but once I duplicate Product A to make Product B, Product B now exists). I then uploaded a CSV with only Product B in it and selected the “Replace any current products that have the same handle. Existing values will be used for any missing columns. Learn more” checkbox. That should have just “updated” Product B with the info in the CSV, it has the same 10 variant names as Product A and I was trying to update Product B.

I got the “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.” error when I did that. So even updating existing products is now restricted for a catalog of 50k+ skus. 50k skus is not that many skus if you sell a product with variants. If you sold posters that come in 5 sizes and 10 frame options that is 50 variants per poster. If you have 5 collections of posters with 200 unique designs each that is 1,000 designs and with the 50 variants each you are at the limit. A store with 5 collections and 200 products per collection isn’t even that wildly large of a store. That is only 1,000 parent products.

So now not only are you unable to use CSVs to bulk add products, you also can’t bulk edit products because it throws the same error about API calls, even though I’m not using the API, I’m just using the CSV upload feature.

2 Likes
18

Yes i think when you upload in this manner it actually deletes the variant and creates a new one.

We queried the fact that this is no longer an unlimited product as per their pricing page and they said:

“It is possible to have unlimited products on your store but if you have over 50,000 you can’t upload them all in one go.” which is not true.

If i pay for the a year plan i have a limit of 365000 skus, and that is only if we upload exactly 1000 new ones a day as the limit doesn’t roll over, if only upload products on weekdays then the limit is 261000

2 Likes
19

But bigcommerce might do the same too if it gets “big” no pun intended

1 Like
20

This is a disaster, and it is stunning that they did not bother letting anyone know. They say that they notified stores that already have more than 50k products, but the pricing page still claims “unlimited products.” They did not tell the merchants with smaller stores that may be headed towards the limit and a train wreck. The gurus still do not know about it.

3 Likes