There is a Shopify limit that will prevent us from syncing products to shops with more than 50,000 variants. At least temporarily, but we have solutions. Read below to find out more!
Your shop is currently limited to 1,000 new product variants being created each day if you have more than 50,000 variants. If that limit has been reached for the day, we are not able to create any additional products for 24 hours.
A variant is a size or color option for a product. IE, an item offered in Small, Medium, Large, 1XL, 2XL, 3XL has six variants.
What is the variant creation limit?
This is a Shopify limitation. It is placed on shops with more than 50,000 total variants. Since it's a Shopify limit, unfortunately there's nothing we can do on our side to get around it.
You can learn more about variant creation at the link below (we've pasted the relevant paragraph), but we encourage you to reach out to Shopify support if you have further questions.
"Stores with 50,000 or more variants are subject to a daily rate limit for uploading variants by using an app or CSV file import. You can add up to 1,000 new variants in a day before the limit is reached. If you exceed this limit, then an error is displayed and you need to wait 24 hours before you can add variants by using an app or CSV file import. Plus stores are exempt from this limit."
Our system will automatically resume product creation after waiting 24 hours, picking up where it left off when Shopify blocked any new products, but once 1,000 variants have been created (approximately 150 products), Shopify's limit will kick in again.
This limit is typically only an issue when you are just getting started with Ave, as we have approximately 2,200 products (around 15,000 variants) to create up front. After that, we only create 30-50 new products each week, for a total of around 300 variants, well below the limit of 1,000.
Note: While most shops don't hit the limit with these weekly batches, it can happen, especially if they work with several drop-shippers that happen to create products on the same day. But in these cases the automatic retries usually do the trick. If not, contact our team and they can help.
You have a few options on how to handle the situation:
Option #1: Upgrade to Shopify Plus
Shopify does not place the variant creation limit on Shopify Plus shops. So if you upgrade, you could create as many products (and variants) each day as you'd like. There are several other benefits to Shopify Plus as well.
The downside is, Shopify Plus is $2,000 per month, with a 12-month contract.
We only recommend this option if Shopify Plus is a good fit for your business, and the cost is within your budget.
Option #2: Delete old products
Another option is to delete old products from your store to bring the total number of variants under 50,000. The number of products that would need to be deleted varies, and will depend on the total number of products/variants you currently have.
Note: Sales history for deleted products is retained (as explained in this Shopify post), so deleting old products would not delete your sales history for those items.
Option #3: Manual selection
Our system will automatically retry creating the initial batch of products twice after reaching Shopify's limit (three total attempts including the first one), but after the third attempt will not try again.
To determine which of the missing products you'd like us to push over, you can look through our wholesale site and send us list. Most shops will start with the more recent releases, then work their way back through older items. We can then manually push these items over until you have the initial batch of products you want.
Please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team through chat or email us at hello@theavenueshops.com if you have questions about the variant creation limit. :)