Shopify has quietly increased the maximum number of variants per product from 100 to 2,048. If you’ve ever had to split a single product into multiple listings because you ran out of variant combinations, this update is for you.
What Changed
Previously, each product in Shopify could have a maximum of 100 variants. A variant is any combination of options like size, colour, and material. If you sold a t-shirt in 5 sizes and 25 colours, that’s 125 combinations—already over the limit.
As of October 2025, Shopify increased this limit to 2,048 variants per product. The way you add products and variants hasn’t changed. You simply have more room to work with.
Who This Actually Helps
This update matters most for stores selling products with many customisation options:
Apparel with extended sizing. Brands offering inclusive sizing across multiple colours quickly hit the old limit. A shirt in 10 sizes and 15 colours needs 150 variants—impossible before, easy now.
Furniture and home goods. A sofa available in 8 fabrics, 4 leg finishes, and 3 cushion firmness levels creates 96 variants. Add one more option and you’d have exceeded the limit.
Custom or configurable products. Jewellery with multiple metals, stones, and sizes. Electronics with different storage, colour, and accessory bundle options.
Wholesale catalogues. B2B stores often need to show the same product in multiple pack sizes, colours, and configurations.
Who This Doesn’t Affect
If your products are straightforward—a candle in 3 scents, a book with no variants—this change won’t impact your workflow. The 100-variant limit was already more than enough.
And even if you could add 2,048 variants, that doesn’t mean you should. More on that below.
What About Your Theme?
Your theme’s variant picker wasn’t designed with 2,000 options in mind. Most Shopify themes display variants as dropdown menus or swatches. With dozens of options, this gets unwieldy fast.
Before adding hundreds of variants, consider:
- How your variant selector displays. Test on mobile. A dropdown with 50 colours is frustrating to scroll through.
- Whether visual swatches help. Colour swatches are faster to scan than text dropdowns, but they take up more space.
- If filtering makes more sense. For very large catalogues, collection filters might serve customers better than cramming everything into one product page.
Some stores find that splitting products actually improves the shopping experience. “Blue T-Shirts” and “Red T-Shirts” as separate listings can be easier to browse than one product with 200 colour variants.
How to Add More Variants
Nothing special required. Add options and variants the same way you always have:
- Go to Products in your Shopify admin
- Select the product you want to edit
- Under Variants, add your options (size, colour, etc.)
- Shopify generates variants for each combination automatically
If you’re working with large numbers, the bulk editor saves time. Go to Products > More actions > Bulk edit to update multiple variants at once.
For developers using the API, the same endpoints work—you just have more headroom now.
Should You Use All 2,048?
Probably not.
More variants means:
- Longer page load times. Each variant adds data to your product page.
- More inventory to manage. 2,000 SKUs require 2,000 inventory counts.
- Decision fatigue for customers. Research consistently shows that too many choices reduces conversions.
The sweet spot depends on your products and customers. But if you’re approaching four figures of variants on a single product, ask whether you’re genuinely serving customers or just avoiding the work of organising your catalogue properly.
Use the expanded limit when you genuinely need it. Don’t use it just because you can.
The Practical Takeaway
If you’ve been splitting products into “Part 1” and “Part 2” or using workarounds like line item properties to handle variant overflow, you can now consolidate. That’s a genuine quality-of-life improvement.
For everyone else, nothing changes. Keep building your products the way you always have.
The 2,048 variant limit was announced in October 2025 via Shopify’s changelog.
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