Shopify: Limitations & Lies. The truth that no one tells you.

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A merchant shares extensive frustrations with Shopify after attempting to build a large-scale store (1.5 million products), claiming the platform engages in deceptive marketing practices.

Key Limitations Discovered:

  • Product upload caps: Despite “unlimited products” marketing, Shopify limits uploads to 1,000 products/variants per 24 hours after reaching 50,000 items. Requests for exceptions were denied with impossible conditions.
  • Storage restrictions: Advertised as “unlimited,” but merchants report hitting undisclosed limits. Support refuses to specify actual storage capacity or usage metrics, making it impossible to manage.
  • Performance degradation: CSV import times doubled (50 to 100 minutes) as catalog grew. Language exports, HTML editors, collection filters, and sitemap generation all failed at scale.
  • File limits: Internal documents cite 50GB (non-video), 500GB (video), 1000 total files—never publicly disclosed.

Support Response:
Shopify support reportedly closes tickets without resolution, suggests paid third-party apps as workarounds, and one support agent stated Shopify doesn’t support stores exceeding 100,000 products despite marketing claims.

Community Reactions:

  • Some validate concerns while noting the merchant’s use case (massive catalog) is an extreme outlier among millions of users.
  • Multiple merchants report similar experiences with hidden limits and inadequate support for non-Plus subscribers.
  • Original poster ultimately migrated to WooCommerce, citing better performance and SEO capabilities.

Status: Unresolved; merchant warns others about platform limitations before committing to large-scale projects.

Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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I have a large warehouse full of products.
I deliver the products myself for the reason that I am not a Dropshipping store and it is always better to control your shipments than to delegate to the Chinese, I think, is this bad? I don’t know what it has to do with Shopify lying and manipulating their conditions.

This is not a bad experience, this is a deception in the conditions of service, without any type of prior notice, without making it official or equal to all clients, only to me, and without telling me how much real space I have to be able to adapt my project , they leave you in total ambiguity.

The truth is I don’t know what it has to do with the Apple iPhone, they didn’t deceive about its features, they didn’t say it had a video camera and then it was a lie, they didn’t compare themselves with other brands that didn’t have a video camera saying that they did. and then it was a lie, wanting to defend Shopify is impossible.

What can I go to another platform? Yes, but who reimburses me for the time and investment made by Shopify? Nobody. They deserve a lawsuit for what happened, if I were any of the other CMS platforms with which they are compared with false data I would sue them, there are many crimes they are committing and sooner or later they will pay for it.