Shopify is a fantastic ‘Managed Ecommerce’ platform that provides a powerful, safe and easy to use online store for business of all sizes. Unfortunately as its a hosted platform, the core codebase is a ‘one size fits’ all arrangement, enforcing some limitations on stores.
One of these limitations we fell foul of recently was the 100 Variant Limit.
What is a variant? For all intents and purposes, a variant is a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) or unique variation of a product. If you have a t-shirt that comes in 5 sizes and 5 colours, you have 25 variations or variants of it. The key purpose of variants in Shopify is to allow different SKUs to have different prices and different inventory levels (e.g. 37 blue XL shirts, 23 blue Small shirts, etc.)
Unfortunately, 100 variants simply isn’t enough for some product ranges so you have a find a work around. At present there are really only two options, each with their own benefits:
| Solution | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Rethink the Product | Allows the use of Inventory Levels | Splits Variations of the Same Product |
| Use a Custom Line Item Field | Allows an almost unlimited number of additional options | You lose the unique SKU naming for each variant Harder to manage You cannot use Shopify’s inventory management for these SKUs |
How Do I Work Around the 100 Variant Limit in Shopify?
Answer 1: Rethink the Product
In some cases, it may make more sense to logically separate the product variants in to different products. For example, if you have t-shirt that comes in 9 sizes (S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL, 5XL) and 14 colours, it may be simpler to break this down in to one product called ‘Acme T-Shirt’ and another called ‘Acme T-Shirt, Larger’. You can then link between them in the narrative and customers will still be able to find their products using product filtering options.
Answer 2: Use a Custom Line Item Field
You can create a custom product template in Shopify to add your own additional fields to the ‘Add to Cart’ area of product pages and then capture this information in the shopping cart and order process. Obviously you probably don’t want a custom field showing on every single product (for example, you wouldn’t want a colour selector on a detergent product) so you create a separate Product Template specifically for products that need the Custom Line Item.
Example 1: A Custom Colour Selector for a T-Shirt Product
In your Shopify Admin panel, go to Online Store
Click Themes at the top of the left menu
Click Customize theme in the top right of the currently displayed theme
At the very top of the theme page (which will probably be showing your homepage) click the Theme Options drop down
Click </>Edit HTML/CSS
You should now be presented with a list of the various page templates that make up your stores theme.
Under the Templates heading, click Add a new template, select the template type as product and then enter a useful name for it:
Click Create Template
You will now be presented with a block of code for that template – it may be a little daunting but to narrow it down, we are looking for the <form> tags that mark the beginning and end of where the ‘Add to Cart’ section of a product page is located I’ve highlighted them in this sample:
The code that we need to insert for a colour drop down will look like this and typically needs to go above the <div class=”product-single__prices”> code:
Note that the form field name attribute cannot simply have your field name in any format, it needs to be name=”properties[Your Field Name Here]”, for example:
For those not comfortable with writing the code for a drop down menu (or any other custom form field), Shopify have very generously created a simple code generation wizard here: http://ui-elements-generator.myshopify.com/pages/line-item-property
An example of the finished script with the custom field in could look like this:
