Shopify is a platform that was created out of an acute necessity to sell snowboarding equipment in Canada. Since 2006, the project has grown into one of the leading e-commerce platforms with almost 20% market share.
It provides everything a merchant needs to create and manage a store, as well as support its successful operation. If you chose to use the platform, nearly everything you need is just Internet access and a web browser.
Shopify is a perfect solution for entrepreneurs because, unlike Magento, Volusion, or other website builders, it requires minimal effort and almost zero skills in creating websites. The users of the service don’t have to worry about programming, hosting, or buying a domain through intermediaries. No doubt, Shopify is convenient and easy to navigate, the statistics speak for themselves — it has gained popularity throughout all these years and there are over 2,500 million websites that use Shopify.
Obviously, there is an abundance of similar services on the market. But still, sellers choose Shopify because it is more dynamic and created with the possible scaling of business in mind. It seems that everyone, from small e-commerce projects to large online stores operating on the international market and earning millions annually, already uses the Shopify platform.
Besides, if you want to launch e-commerce on Shopify or make an alteration in your offline business, you need to learn about some special technical features of the platform. One of the major obstacles many stores stumble upon when arranging their businesses or using Shopify for commerce is the limit to 100 variants on a single item. To bypass this setting, you can implement some ingenuity.
Contemplate one of these ways to add more than 100 products in Shopify:
Add internal links
The first alternative to help you enlarge the number of variants suggests that you should divide the product with different characteristics into separate ones. Also, it can actually help out users while online shopping. For instance, there is an item – a pair of jeans – and it comes in different colors. It would be more user-friendly to see this style of pair of jeans in one color and consider its purchase as you allow to select the particular product over again. If you do not separate different pairs in multiple colors, the customer is going to click first on the item and change color later. Looking through each product will include a selector to change between colors.
Within the selected item, there is always another category to choose from – size. So, there are lots of steps attached to find a preferred product, and making a decision can be easier if you separate multiple categories, i.e. color and size.
For the implementation of that feature, you’ll need a technical specialist, a developer, to help your store with that. This way you’ll have separate products for customers and this trick will help you to get past the 100 variants limit along with improving their experience. Many sellers do not even understand that meta fields are utilized to connect the products and that feature they can not set up themselves. This is the main issue in this case, so the goal of adding internal links is not that easy and fast to achieve.
Restructure the data
The other option might seem a kind of conundrum but it may solve the problem of the limitation once for all. The question here is to determine the immediate need for more than 100 variants per item. For a better understanding, you should analyze the original product data and try to prepare it to suit the e-commerce industry. Many merchants aimed at exceeding the limit of 100 product variants and those in need of retail data introduced into the new world of online trade. When working with such data, the problem will remain to be some kind of passing track that addresses the data structure in general.
Apparently, the e-retail industry is not going to lose its popularity so instead of postponing the inevitable you should sort out the issue. Do your best at cleaning up, scaling down, and reforming the products data so that it would correspond to the 100 options on Shopify. Better think twice: do you have an urgent need for more than 100 options per product for a successful business? If the answer is negative, take time to work on the catalog of your items. Surely you can make some adjustments not to face the maximum limit on the platform.
Use the app
Unless you decide you really have to exceed the limit, there is an option to go beyond the basic settings of the platform. Also, you are provided with much more value than you would expect apart from eliminating the Shopify 100 variant limit. The app opens you the access to add some extra features to the items. For example, to add an extra element on a bag will add 5% to the price of the final product. That way if you want to change its price at any moment you don’t have to change the add-ons. Besides, there are color or image swatches, and inventory control at your disposal. It is easy to install with absolutely no technical knowledge required. Check out a reliable Shopify Product Options App and stress less while your business is improving.
To Draw The Line
Despite the fact that many companies still sell goods exclusively in physical stores, more and more people are switching to online shopping nowadays. Fortunately, Shopify will allow you to make a necessary transition and focus on creating new products, while the online store will generate sales for you. Keep in mind, that you should wisely work around the limit of 100 variants on a product that is set by the platform. Make your experience in the e-commerce business easy and convenient using one of the provided options. Consider advancing sales by having more than 100 product variants to make the most of the platform. Your sensible choice will eventually influence a successful trade of products.