Understanding Shopify variants and the 50,000 variant limit

What are Shopify variants?

In Shopify, a variant is a unique combination of options for a particular product. Let's say you're selling a T-shirt in multiple sizes and colors; each size and color combination would be considered a 'variant' of that product. So if there were 2 colors and 3 sizes, the T-shirt product would have 6 variants (2 x 3). Variants help to organize your store and make it easier for customers to shop for exactly what they want.

When selling content, a product might be an image, whereas the variants would be the unique combinations on your pricelist. E.g. if you sell each image with three different license options, each product would have 3 variants.

The 50,000 variant limit

Once your store has 50,000 variants, Shopify imposes a daily upload limit for adding new variants. Specifically, you can only add up to 1,000 new variants daily through app integrations or CSV file imports. This limit is in place to ensure optimal performance for all Shopify stores, even those with extensive inventories.

Good to know: There are no variant limits on Shopify Plus plans.

Queuing files for automatic upload the next day

We are looking at developing a feature to automatically queue images for upload the next day if you hit the 1,000 new variants daily limit.

✴️ You can upvote this feature on our roadmap here.