We are a startup in the content selling business and the real challenge we are facing is to execute our business idea i.e. “Which platform would support such a huge list of products” and “how long would it take to import all the products”. We need to import 140 million products or SKUs to our store.
Details about our products: There would be a 400 words description for each product and there will be a single/common product image (thumbnail size) that would be used across all the products. All contents are sold online. No physical shipment or content downloads are applicable.
Can anyone please let me know if executing the above requirements is possible with Shopify? As per Shopify customer care, there is a limitation of 50,000 products at a time. After which, I can import 1000 product per day at max.
Shopify can basically handle over 100,000 products. For 99.99% of Shopify stores, it’s plenty.> > I’ve worked with several brands who have more than 100,000 and it seems to run fine providing the traffic is stable.> > Most brands I know eventually switch from Shopify to Magento later on. Once you start doing about 4–5million in sales per month, Shopify doesn’t offer too much for massive brands that big. Magento is more customization. And if you are doing 4–5mil per month in sales, you can afford a $200,000 Magento website to sustain your brand.> > For 99.99 of brands doing under 4–5mil in sales per month, then Shopify is the perfect platform and can handle well over 100,000 items.> > The largest store I’ve worked with on Shopify has 2.4 mil products. But they only do about 160,000 in sales per month. So they’re not anywhere close to the limits Shopify’s platform has.> > I’ve worked with business owners who’s stores have a million products but they made 0 in sales because they didn’t understand marketing at first.> > I’ve worked with business owners who’s stores has 1–5 products and they made $1000 a day in sales.> > More products doesn’t mean better site. It all comes down to the brand, and marketing.
Here is Shopify support team response to large volume product import:
"Hi there Sadique Akhter,
Trey here from Shopify, following up on behalf of Jasmin, the Shopify Support Advisor you chatted yesterday.
We understand that the type of products you’d like to add are digitally delivered products, and that it would be for 124 million products. No images, just company name and the financial details that can be bought online.
As you can see below, for basic plan Shopify offers unlimited products.
However, if you reached a limit when uploading products, you can always contact us so we could manually make adjustments for your account."
Question: Does this mean I can import those million products even in my basic Shopify plan?
Shopify’s pricing page says, “unlimited products,” but it is not true. Once you hit 50k product variants, you can only upload 1k per day. It is akin to a restaurant buffet, which offers all-you-can-eat, but once you eat the first plate, you can only take one teaspoon per hour. Hardly unlimited.
Shopify Plus waives the daily upload limit, but it costs $2k per month.
We love Matrixify app (used to be called Excelify) for bulk uploads and downloads of all types of data, including products and collections.
BTW, you will also want to keep an eye on the max # of collections:
5k automatic collections plus $100k custom collections.
I’m in a similar situation. I’m a very small (individual) startup so I cannot afford the one year of 2500/mo for the Plus plan.
I just tried using the recommended approach of contacting shopify for a temporary approval to load millions of products but was denied. It seems that they have changed their policy. I have an immediate need to load 4 to 5 million products short term and then another 6-10 million over the next couple of months.
By this logic, it will take me 16 years to load my first set of products and more like 27 years to load all of them. I’ll probably be dead before product loading is completed. I’m beginning to realize why businesses choose other platforms for B2B commerce. This is not a logical approach to onboarding customers. I will have to go a different path.
My market is very high mix product and low volumes. So revenue is more heavily dependent on the quantity of products I have for sale than any specific subset.
Where did you end up going when you realized you couldn’t load your products into Shopify?
