Overview
Shopify has a 100 variant limit for products. This means a single product can only have 100 potential variations while it's on your Shopify store. This article will go over what that means, and what Modern Retail can do for you to get around this limit, if necessary.
Product Variants
A "Product Variant" refers to a potential variation of a product you sell on your site. This can be hard to wrap your head around, so let's dive into an example. If you were selling a sweater in different colors (black, white, and green), different sizes (small, medium, and large), and different materials (cotton and silk), then a small black cotton sweater would be one variant, a large green silk sweater would be another, and a medium white cotton sweater would be a third. Each of those potential variants has to exist in Shopify so your customers can actually purchase them.
In the above sweater example, that sweater would have 18 different variants. (3 colors x 3 sizes x 2 materials). Realistically however, your products may have a much larger number of variants than 18, which brings us to variant limits.
Variant Limits
There are three main limitations to how Shopify handles product variants.
- There's a limitation to how many variations can be uploaded in a single day.
- Unless your catalog is very large, this likely won't be a concern for you; but you can read more about it here.
- There's a limit to the number of options you can create for a given product.
- This limit is three, so in the earlier example you could sell that sweater with color, size, and material options, but not color, size, material, and a design option, because that would be 4 options.
- There's a limit to the total number of variants a single product can have.
- The limit for this is 100 product variants per product. So using the sweater example, you could have a sweater with 33 colors in 3 sizes (99 variants), but not 33 colors, 3 sizes, and 2 materials (188 variants).
- If you're not sure how many variants a product has, multiple the number of choices for each option. (Number of colors * number of sizes * number of materials).
Because a single product can typically only have 100 product variations in Shopify. Modern Retail gets around this (to an extent) by taking products with 100+ variations in our data tables and only pushing the variations with inventory down to Shopify, so only the variations that you're actively able to sell are taking up spots.
If you have additional questions on this topic, please feel free to submit a support request.