What is the variant limit in Shopify?
One critical aspect of managing an online store is understanding product variants, different versions of a product, such as size, color, or material.
However, Shopify has had some limitations regarding variants that store owners should be aware of to optimize their inventory management and avoid potential issues.
Many Shopify store owners have complained for years that the variant limit is too small.
Store variant limit
Historically, Shopify imposed a maximum limit of 100 variants per product. This meant you could offer up to 100 different combinations of options for a single product.
For instance, if you were selling a shirt and wanted to offer different colors and sizes, the total number of color and size combinations could not exceed 100.
Additionally, Shopify allows up to 3 options per product, such as size, color, and material, which many feel is too restrictive.
Each option could have multiple values, but the total number of possible combinations had to stay within the 100-variant limit. For example, with 3 sizes (S, M, L) and 5 colors (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Black), you’d have 15 possible variants (3 sizes × 5 colors).
GraphQL product APIs variant limit
As of April 1, 2024, Shopify has introduced new GraphQL product APIs that significantly increase the variant limit. The maximum number of variants per product has been expanded from 100 to 2000.
These new 2000-variant limits are planned to be made available to all Shopify users in 2025. Currently, the APIs are in developer preview and can only be used by developer stores.
REST API limit
With the REST API, you will still be constrained by the historical limit of 100 variants per product unless you switch to the GraphQL API.
A promise that Shopify will increase the limit for all stores to 2000 variants in 2025 can be seen in this post on their official forum.
Conclusion
Until Shopify releases the new variant limit to all Shopify stores, we need to work within the 100-variant limit.
