Overview
Depending on your Shopify plan, and on the size of your catalog, you may run into a limit on how many product variations you can upload in one day. This article will talk about this limit, who's most likely to be affected by it, and what you can do to get around it.
What is a Product Variant?
A product variant is any possible variation of a product that has multiple options. For example, if you were selling t-shirts in red, blue, and black colors, and small, medium, and large sizes, a small red shirt would be one variant, a black large shirt would be another, and a blue small shirt could be a third. In order for you to be able to successfully sell medium blue shirts and large red shirts, all of those variants need to be uploaded to your site. This is often done in bulk, in a spreadsheet format, which brings us to the problem at hand:
What is the Product Variant Limit?
Shopify's product variant limit kicks in when your store has more than 50,000 product variants. At this point Shopify will only allow you to upload 1,000 variants per day.
Now, the good news is that 50,000 variants is a very large number of variants, and most catalogs won't hit this limit. That being said, if this is something you're worried about, there are two main options for dealing with it:
What Can I Do?
The first option is to simply deal with the limit on new product variations. If your catalog is over 50,000, but not by more than a few thousand, we can simply upload 1,000 products a day until we're done. Again, depending on your catalog size, it's unlikely you'll need to upload more than 1,000 per day in the future after initial setup, so this is potentially a non-issue.
The second option is to upgrade your Shopify plan. Shopify Plus does not have the limit on product variations, meaning you can upload as many as you want, whenever you want.
If you have any questions about this, or about upgrading your Shopify plan, please don't hesitate to submit a support request.