We are thrilled to announce a landmark update to the Shopify platform: The product variant limit has officially been raised from 100 to 2,048 variants per product.
This isn’t just an incremental increase; it’s a fundamental expansion of what’s possible on Shopify. For years, going above 100 variants has been one of the most requested features from merchants with complex catalogs. We listened. We’ve re-architected a core part of our platform to deliver one of the highest variant limits in commerce, giving you the power to manage intricate product lines and merchandise your catalog exactly as you envision.
Read on to learn about the importance of high-variant catalog support, how we tackled this exciting project, and more.
The power of choice: meet modern customer demand and boost conversions
In today’s competitive market, choice is everything. Consumers have come to expect a wide array of options, and the brands that deliver on this expectation are the ones that win.
Give the customer what they want
As consumer choice has expanded, so have expectations. Buyers now want to find their perfect option, whether it’s a specific color, fabric, pattern, or material. Product phenomena like the Stanley Quencher—celebrated by fans globally with each new colorway drop—showcase the power of variety. The fastest-growing brands are finding immense success through limited-edition product drops, brand collaborations, and strategies that lean heavily into providing customers with an abundance of choice. With 2,048 variants, you now have the runway to execute these strategies without compromise.
A better buyer experience that converts
Beyond meeting expectations, consolidating all your product variants onto a single page delivers significant business benefits. It creates a seamless shopping experience and a powerful marketing asset.
By using a single product detail page, you concentrate all your efforts from SEO, ad spend, and social marketing onto one canonical URL. This means better search rankings and more efficient campaigns. Once a visitor lands on your product page, they can explore every available option without needing to navigate away or risk bouncing because they don’t immediately see their desired choice.
Industry-specific support
While 100 variants may be sufficient for some, many industries require far more flexibility. For example, furniture companies often offer items that come in multiple sizes, colors and materials, quickly blowing past the 100-variant limit. This is also common for apparel companies that sell bras, often merchandised in countless sizes and colors. For these industries, having access to a higher-variant limit was not a nice-to-have, it was essential to their merchandising strategy.
From clunky workarounds to a single, simple workflow
Given the clear importance of offering more choice, merchants have developed a number of creative solutions over the years to work around the 100-variant limit. These included splitting a single product across multiple product pages, custom development, or using third-party apps to stitch listings together on the storefront. While necessary for brands looking to merchandise more than 100 variants, these approaches created friction, adding setup costs, complexity, and ongoing management overhead.
Our goal was to make offering high-variant products seamless, eliminating the need for complicated workarounds and replacing them with the simple, intuitive product creation flow you already know. We knew it would be a big undertaking, requiring significant updates to our underlying data models and APIs.
The project: a multiyear endeavor
We first needed to fundamentally rethink how products were supported inside the platform.The sheer amount of data for high-variant products was no longer compatible with the design of the REST Admin API. So we updated the GraphQL Admin API in April 2024, releasing a new version of the product APIs that supported 2,048 variants. This kicked off a large-scale migration, where thousands of Shopify partner apps had to migrate to our new APIs in order to support 2,048 variants, or else merchants would have a broken or downgraded experience.
Our partners showed up in a big way. Through community Q&As, surveys, and hundreds of direct conversations, this deeply collaborative effort between Shopify and our partner ecosystem was one for the record books. We want to give a huge shoutout to the more than 6,500 app partners who migrated to the new APIs, ensuring the entire Shopify ecosystem is ready to support your most complex products. This platform-wide upgrade makes the whole ecosystem faster and more powerful for every merchant, and this variant increase is the first incredible result of that shared investment.
Built for scale, engineered for speed: the Shopify difference
Our goal was to deliver a comprehensive solution that sets a new benchmark for quality and performance, engineered on three core principles: ease of use, reliable performance, and an industry-leading limit.
Same admin, more variants
Despite all the change we were doing behind the scenes with our data model and APIs, it was important to us that the increase of the variant limit didn’t add any additional complexity to creating products. And we delivered. The process for creating a product in Shopify is exactly the same as it used to be—you can just add more variants.
Performance that keeps pace with your growth
As the number of variants grows, so does the complexity of the data required to manage them. We knew that simply increasing the limit wasn’t enough; the experience had to be blazing fast for both you in the admin and your customers on the storefront.
An entire team was dedicated to performance, and the results are transformative. This investment in our core infrastructure has also yielded benefits across the board. Creation time of products at the 2,048-variant limit improved by 10 times over the course of the project, and single variant products are now 33% faster in the admin.
A differentiated variant limit
If you’ve shopped around in the ecommerce software world, you’ve probably noticed that it’s uncommon to find a variant limit over 500. And this is understandable, given the significant investment of infrastructure required and the fact that the vast majority of merchants don’t need support for this complexity. However, at Shopify, we support some of the most complex catalogs in the world, and that requires going above 1,000. We ultimately landed on 2,048 to ensure merchants had plenty of headroom for their most complex products.
Get started with 2,048 variants today
To get started creating or editing a product with more than 100 variants in Shopify admin, simply add your options and option values all the way up to the new limit of 2,048. It’s the same intuitive workflow, now supercharged for your most complex products.
To learn more, visit the Shopify Help Center.
