Shopify Community AMA with Shopify Developers: The New GraphQL Product APIs

Community Events

Topic summary

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.

Summarized with AI on November 4. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Hi! I have a few questions:

  1. Is it possible to increase the limits of a specific store much earlier than the beginning of 2025? We want to implement more than three options in the near future.
  2. What changes are there in the API regarding the standard work with variants? If I need to get all the variants and make a standard variant selection on the PDP in my headless application, do I need to make any additional changes?
  3. We use the Search and Discovery app for a large number of filters. After adding more options, can we discontinue the app and use only filters from the options?
  4. Do you plan to add the ability to filter products by multiple types? Currently, it’s only possible to filter by one type.

Thank you.

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