productCreate: VARIANT_THROTTLE_EXCEEDED

GraphQL Admin API Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

Recently I am trying to upload some retail products to our Shopify store using GraphQL (version 2025-07). But I keep getting error response, saying that:

{
  'message': 'Daily variant creation limit reached. Please try again later. See https://help.shopify.com/api/getting-started/api-call-limit for more information about rate limits and how to avoid them.',
  'locations': [{'line': 3, 'column': 17}],
  'path': ['productCreate'],
  'extensions': {'code': 'VARIANT_THROTTLE_EXCEEDED'}
}

The products that I am trying to upload are women’s clothing such as dresses and coats. Each product contains about 10 images. Each product has two options: size and color. The size option contains 4 values: S, M, L, and XL; and the color might contain common colors such as red, blue, and so on. So each product contains about 10 variants.

I have been getting the same error message for weeks. Today I did a counting: Before getting this error message, only 107 products and 1019 variants are uploaded. So is the “daily variant creation limit” 1019 per day?

Our store is using the “Grow” plan.

By the way, when I click into the url given by the error message:

It redirects to https://shopify.dev/docs. So I did not get useful information about the daily limit.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

1 Like
2

Update:

I have found the URL (https://shopify.dev/docs/api/usage/limits, not https://help.shopify.com/api/getting-started/api-call-limit):

which contains the information that I want. In the above web page it says:

Resource-based rate limits

The following GraphQL Admin API types have an additional throttle that takes effect when a store has 50,000 product variants. After this threshold is reached, no more than 1,000 new variants can be created per day.

Our store indeed has had more than 50,000 variants already. This number can be queried by:

https://admin.shopify.com/store/{store_name}/variants/count.json
3

Hey @wshtan, Thanks for sharing that update. I’ll mark this as solved.