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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Since the REST API is being deprecated, are there any plans to improve the stability of the products and productVariants queries?

Problems I have encountered:

  1. There is no way to query products by multiple categories other than using the category query for each category and matching the products ourselves. This makes the operation impractical for stores with thousands of products. Currently, we have to use the productVariants query, which can find product variants by categories, but it does not always return all the results it should. Searching by automated collections is also troublesome, as the search sometimes returns a 500 error or no product variants at all. I have reported these issues many months ago but I haven’t heard any progress regarding this. I had to introduce an error message in the app that explains about these issues in Shopify.

  2. Please make the https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/2024-04/mutations/productVariantsBulkUpdate accept variants for multiple products, or at least support partial updates. Currently, if you provide an ID for a non-existent product variant among others, the entire mutation fails.

Thank you.

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