I have just seen the introduction of the new 2048 variant limit with the new product model. Since the ‘24 Winter Edition I have been excited about the announcement.
My main concern is that I always thought this will also mean the introduction of more variant options, which is the biggest issue I always had with the old product model. There was also an image in the ‘24 Winter Edition that showed 4 options on a product page. Has extending this limit been scrapped? Will this limit ever be increased?
I would love to hear an explanation on this matter.
I can confirm that we are only increasing the product variant limit at this time and for the foreseeable future, though we are collecting feedback and interest from merchants who are still interested in seeing a product option increase above the current limitation of 3 product options.
If you are working with any particular merchants that have a usecase for increasing product options above 3, please do reach out to our Shopify Support Team via the Shopify Help Center and we can gather the necessary context and information and submit that feedback on your behalf.
Some alternative workarounds you can consider to get around the 3 option limit includes:
Creating separate products for additional product options.
For example say you have a product with the following options, Size, Colour, Style, and Material, you can create separate products for each Style to keep the options per product at 3.
Using Line Item Properties to indicate a custom product option on a product added to a cart/order.
Using API mutations like productOptionsCreate, productOptionUpdate, productOptionsDelete, productVariantsBulkCreate, you can create new variants and options as they are required with each order, deleting them after the fact to remain below the 3 option limit.
FTFY: to indicate a custom product information, that does not affect price, sku, weight or other tangible characteristics of a product.
Merchants get confused enough as is with info-arch, we sure don’t want devs thinking LIP’s are somehow interchangeable with productOptions in any way.
App doing this should explore trying to do this pre-emptively by create ready-to-go resources as a pool to pull from.
So when needed only an update has to happen, not a full CRUD roundtrip.
e.g. a productVariantsBulkCreate then an update can be a lot of latency
Thanks for the additional context and input, I do understand the workarounds mentioned won’t necessarily work with all use cases, and do have their various pros and cons of use.
I would recommend to reach out to the Shopify Support team as mentioned above, and provide any context you have while expressing your interest in an increased product option limit. We do take our merchant and partner feedback with great value, and the more feedback we get for things like this, the more likely/quicker it would be added in the future.
The most annoying use case for us at the moment would be highly customizable products like a refurbished apple macbook. In this case we would need Storage, RAM, CPU, Color, Condition and Keyboard language. In our current setup we are using Storage, Color and Condition as an option and we need to make in average 32 products for the same model due to the other options not being possible inside the same product. However the combinatiom of all these options would still fit inside the 2048 variant limit. This is very annoying du to how the initial announcement had us believe that this would also extend product options not just the variant limit.
Can you forward this to support? If you can’t please let me know how I can handle it myself.
I can definitely submit some feedback internally, though I do recommend reaching out to Shopify Support directly as mentioned, as we are gathering interest from merchants specifically and will need you to be authenticated with a merchant account to gather the necessary information for our records of interest.
It could be sometime before we even see more than 3 options.
So might want to consider a different architecture.
Such as using bundles where the “options” are just components, this is even more relevant if the characteristics can be directly mapped to individual skus/inventory; i.e. socketed memory or CPUs.