I run a Shopify app for book dropshipping that provides merchants access to a catalog of over 14 million book titles.
Many of our users have been asking if they can import the entire catalog into their Shopify store. Currently, our app only supports importing products one at a time, which works for smaller stores but becomes a major limitation for larger merchants.
We’re currently in conversations with bigger bookstores that want to migrate from other platforms to Shopify, but the inability to bulk import very large catalogs has been a deal breaker for them.
I’d love to get guidance from the Shopify team and the community on a few things:
What are the current best practices for handling extremely large catalogs (millions of SKUs) in Shopify?
Are there recommended architectures or APIs for apps that need to make a very large external catalog available to merchants?
Is there a recommended way to allow merchants to access a large catalog without needing to import every product individually?
Are there any roadmap plans or features that would support this type of use case?
Our goal is to make it easy for merchants to launch on Shopify while accessing a very large catalog through dropshipping.
I’d recommend that instead of importing all 14 million products that are part of your global catalog you should explore building a sales channel app that acts as the bridge between your external book catalog and the merchant’s store. Merchants browse and select titles through your app’s UI, and only the products they actually want to sell get created in their Shopify store.
Hi Liam, thanks for the reply! That’s currently what we have available (see image), but booksellers usually prefer to have the entire catalog accessible. I think a big part of that is that Amazon has set the expectation that customers should be able to find anything they’re looking for. As a bookseller myself, I completely understand—as a small business it’s hard to keep up with everything that’s available out there and have time to create content, etc.
I do understand where you’re coming from, but importing 14M products onto each store is not going to be practical and you’ll hit rate limits for product creation quickly into this process, see:
