Shopify stands as a powerhouse in the e-commerce world, empowering countless entrepreneurs to build thriving online stores. However, one persistent limitation has frustrated merchants with complex product offerings: the cap of 100 variants and three options per product.
This constraint poses a significant hurdle for businesses selling highly customizable items, such as bespoke furniture, curated gift boxes, or specialty foods like artisanal pizzas. In this blog post, we explore the current challenges, Shopify’s unfulfilled promises, and practical workarounds—highlighting how tools like Easify Product Options can help merchants overcome these restrictions and deliver a seamless, customer-friendly shopping experience.
TL;DR: How do I add more than 100 variants on Shopify?
Shopify limits products to 100 variants and three options, creating challenges for stores with complex products. While Shopify promised a 250-variant limit in Summer ’23, it’s still unavailable as of August 2025. To add more variants:
- Custom Code: Modify theme code to use line item properties, but this requires advanced technical skills and risks errors, especially for large stores.
- Recommended Solution: Use a third-party app like Easify Product Options, which offers unlimited variants/options, 26 display types, 30+ templates, advanced features (e.g., conditional logic, bulk customization), live previews, and 24/7 support for a seamless, scalable solution.
Choose Easify for an easy, reliable way to bypass Shopify’s limits and enhance your store’s customization capabilities.
Shopify’s 100-Variant Limit: Promises Made, Promises Pending
Shopify’s restriction of 100 variants and three options per product has long been a pain point for merchants, particularly those offering highly customizable products like bespoke furniture, tailored gift boxes, or specialty foods. This constraint often forces store owners to compromise on product offerings or seek cumbersome workarounds, limiting their ability to fully showcase their catalog’s potential.
In response to community feedback, Shopify’s Editions Summer ’23 announcement promised a significant change: an increase to a 250-variant limit through new APIs, aimed at supporting more complex product structures. This development sparked excitement, but the absence of a confirmed release date has left merchants in limbo.
Discussions on platforms like Reddit have speculated that the expanded limit might roll out as early as Q1 2024, yet Shopify’s latest developer documentation, as of August 2025, still confirms the 100-variant cap remains in place. This discrepancy highlights a broader issue: the lack of transparency around the timeline and scope of the update.
Even if the variant limit increases to 250, the restriction of three options per product may still hinder businesses requiring greater flexibility, such as those needing multiple customizable attributes. Additionally, challenges like untracked inventory for variants, limitations in variant display options (e.g., pills or dropdowns), and the need for advanced input methods like text fields or date selectors remain unaddressed.
While Shopify’s acknowledgment of the issue is a step forward, the unfulfilled promise and ongoing uncertainty continue to challenge merchants navigating the platform’s evolving capabilities.
Overcoming Shopify’s Variant Limitations: Practical Solutions
Shopify’s 100-variant and three-option limit can be a significant barrier for merchants offering complex, customizable products. Fortunately, Shopify’s developer documentation outlines two primary workarounds: customizing theme code to extract line item properties or using third-party apps from the Shopify App Store.
Below, we explore these solutions, highlighting their feasibility and recommending a user-friendly app to simplify the process.
Customizing Theme Code: A Technical Challenge
One approach to bypassing Shopify’s variant restrictions involves modifying your store’s theme code to leverage line item properties, allowing you to capture custom requirements from customers. This method requires extracting and processing additional data, such as custom fields, to simulate more variants or options.
However, this solution is not ideal for most merchants. It demands advanced technical expertise in Liquid, Shopify’s templating language, and a deep understanding of the store’s codebase. For large stores with extensive product catalogs or complex variant structures, manual code changes can lead to errors, breaking the storefront or complicating future updates.
Unless you have a dedicated development team, this approach is prone to inefficiencies and costly mistakes, making it less practical for scaling businesses.
Using Easify Product Options: A Seamless, Scalable Solution
For a more accessible and robust solution, Shopify recommends using third-party apps from the Shopify App Store. Among these, Easify Product Options stands out as a top choice for its versatility, ease of use, and comprehensive features tailored to merchants’ needs.
Here’s why Easify is the go-to app for overcoming Shopify’s variant and option limitations:
- Infinite Options and Variants: Easify breaks free from Shopify’s 100-variant and three-option cap, enabling store owners to create unlimited product options and variants, perfect for highly customizable products like furniture, apparel, or specialty foods.
- Diverse Option Display Types: With 26 option display types, including text boxes, image swatches, dropdowns, and more, Easify allows merchants to present options in a way that aligns with their brand and enhances the customer experience.
- Ready-Made Templates: The app offers over 30 pre-designed option set templates for various industries, such as clothing, jewelry, bedding, or pizza, streamlining the setup process for diverse stores.
- Rich Advanced Features: Easify includes powerful tools like conditional logic, addon products, extra pricing, option-based image changes, tiered wholesale pricing, option groups, advanced pricing, and multiselection, providing unmatched flexibility for complex product configurations.
- Bulk Product Customization: Merchants can efficiently create and assign custom options to multiple products at once, saving time for stores with large inventories.
- In-App Live Preview: The live preview feature lets store owners test and visualize all options before publishing, ensuring a polished and error-free customer experience.
- 24/7 Support: Easify provides round-the-clock in-app live chat support, along with free live demos and consultations, ensuring merchants have the guidance they need to succeed.
By leveraging Easify Product Options, store owners can bypass Shopify’s limitations without technical hurdles, creating a seamless, scalable, and customer-friendly shopping experience. Our app empowers merchants to fully showcase their product offerings while maintaining ease of management, making it the recommended solution for tackling Shopify’s variant constraints.
Final Thoughts
Shopify’s 100-variant and three-option restriction remains a significant challenge for merchants offering complex, customizable products, and the promised 250-variant limit, announced in Shopify Editions Summer ’23, has yet to materialize as of August 2025.
While the platform’s acknowledgment of this issue is encouraging, the lack of a clear timeline and lingering uncertainties about option flexibility leave many store owners in a bind. For now, merchants must rely on practical workarounds to meet their needs.
Customizing theme code, while possible, is a technically demanding and error-prone approach, best suited for those with robust development resources. Instead, third-party apps like Easify Product Options offer a user-friendly, scalable solution, empowering store owners to create unlimited variants and options with ease, backed by rich features and reliable support.
