Shopify hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on June 18, 2024, focused on the new GraphQL Product APIs released in version 2024-04, which support up to 2,000 variants per product—a significant increase from the previous 100-variant limit. The APIs also deprecate REST product endpoints and certain GraphQL fields.
Key Developer Concerns:
API Stability & Performance: Multiple developers reported existing bugs, timeouts, and 500-level errors even at the 100-variant limit, raising concerns about scaling to 2,000 variants. Shopify acknowledged performance regressions and committed to improvements, prioritizing non-complex inputs to process synchronously within 45 seconds.
Migration Complexity: The new productSet mutation replaces productCreate/productUpdate, but lacks full feature parity (e.g., inventory item costs, media management). Bulk operations for productVariantsCreate are not supported, complicating workflows for apps syncing large catalogs.
Webhook Changes: Product webhooks now include only the first 200 variants, requiring additional queries for complete data. Developers requested variant-specific webhooks (variants/created, variants/updated) and fixes for metafield updates not triggering webhooks.
Rate Limits & Costs: Questions arose about GraphQL query cost calculations, especially for stores with thousands of products and variants. Shopify recommended using bulk queries for large datasets and promised clearer cost estimation guidance.
Theme & Storefront Implications: Concerns about Liquid/AJAX frontend APIs and theme compatibility with products exceeding 100 variants remain partially addressed.
Timeline: Public apps must migrate by February 1, 2025. Early access to 2,000-variant support is available via dev stores with extended variant preview enabled.
Thank you. One detail that I think is very important to note, is that the graph QL endpoints noted above did not have performance issues originally. Instead, the performance regressed over time. I am not requesting performance beyond what the system offered originally, I just want the regressions that occurred over the past few years to be investigated and repaired.
Also, can you please provide a timeline for which the performance regressions will be addressed?