How to migrate to Shopify with products with more than 100 variants

The most skilled business leaders will know that adapting to technological and cultural change is almost essential for your business to succeed. This can be something as simple as putting a new marketing spin on a product, or as complex as integrating an entirely new data management platform. In eCommerce, the most common, and arguably most impactful migration is the oft-travelled migration from one eCommerce platform to another. 

There are several reasons why a brand may choose to migrate to a new platform, such as increases in the costs to stay on the platform, or the platform becoming too difficult to manage, but the most common reason we see is simply technological change over time. As we’ve discussed previously, consumer trends and preferences are constantly changing, meaning that one platform may become better customer serving than another. Additionally, the internal workings of the businesses behind the major eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento, are constantly changing too, which can make the platform you’re currently on less appealing and another more appealing. 

This goes a large way to explaining the en masse migration of eCommerce stores from the previous king of eCommerce, Magento, to the new king, Shopify - a point Shopify has even made a part of their marketing strategy in recent years.

However, this is where many Magento store owners have run into issues. The open source nature of Magento presented store owners with endless possibilities to customise their stores, letting them have as many product variants as they pleased. Shopify is not an open source platform unless you’re on Shopify Plus, meaning store owners will have to work within the confines of Shopify and implement some creative thinking when it comes to moving over their complex products. 

What is a complex product?

When we say complex products, we don’t inherently mean extremely technical machinery such as computers or cars. A complex product can be something as simple as a T-Shirt. It’s a term that we use to refer to products that have multiple different customisation options for customers to choose from, or simply a product with more than 100 variants.

A simple version of this might be having a T-Shirt that’s available in different sizes, different colours, in different materials, and customers have the option to include their own message to be printed onto the shirt. 

Sounds simple enough to move from one platform to the other right?

…Wrong!

In fact, migrating these products from one platform to another, can be just as complex as the products are themselves. This complexity is largely due to the native restrictions of Shopify, which only allows you to have a maximum of three customisation options per product and, prior to an update announced in February of 2024, only allowed you to have 100 possible variations linked under one product in the first place. 

How do you migrate complex products to Shopify?

Unfortunately, migrating complex products onto Shopify does not have a one-size-fits-all style of solution. Your store has specific needs, and therefore there will be unique requirements to move over your complex products too. But, let’s look at our process and maybe you’ll see some crossover.

Before you do anything - Backup your old site.

Even if your site doesn’t have complex products, it’s simply best practice to back up your old website and create a staging site for the new changes when undertaking any sort of website migration. This means if there are any problems with the new site at any point, you can fall back on your old site. This is great, as search engine crawlers won’t index your test site until the URLs are officially published, meaning you can take all the time in the world, and make as many mistakes as you need. 

Step one - Find out how many complex products you have and how many variations there are. 

Whilst you may not have the exact number to hand, it’s likely you’ll have a rough idea of how many complex products will be on your site. It might be every product, or it might just be one or two. Similarly, mapping out a diagram of how your complex products work - their parameters and the components that go into each product - is a handy exercise to understand exactly what kind of variants you’re dealing with. So, once you know the scale, you can get started.

Step two - Create groupings of variants, each limited to a maximum of 100.

Once you’ve selected the first complex product to migrate over, you’ll need to create groupings of said products’ many variants. If you have more than 100 variants you’ll be making at least two groupings, but the number will vary depending on the number of variants you have. We creatively call these “variant groupings,” and they can act as “sub-products.” Doing this process gets us around the 100 variant limit that Shopify places on us per product.

So, for example, if you have 601 variants, you would need seven groupings - six groupings of one hundred and one grouping of one.

Alternatively, if you had 699 variants, you would again need seven groupings - six groupings of one hundred and one of 99.

Step three - Link these sub products together using a “face product"

A face product looks like a regular product page, in fact for the most part it is, but instead of your standard drop downs, a face product contains a custom data structure that links together the groupings you’ve made. As it’s using a custom data structure, this face product can have as many drop downs as you please. Once on the face product, a customer’s combination of answers will select one of the many variants from across the sub products you've made.

Step four - Repeat for all of the complex products you have

You’ll have to repeat this process for as many complex products as you have, maybe that’s just one or two times, or maybe it’s every product you stock, either way, it’s got to be done in order for your migration to be fully actioned. 

Step five - Trust the process

It’s likely you’re moving to Shopify for a reason. Whether you’ve determined that your current platform is proving too much to handle, or you believe Shopify is going to allow your business to grow quicker, a migration is a huge undertaking. Even if there is promise that there is light at the end of the tunnel, the journey to get there can be long and not without challenges, case in point - complex products. Whilst it would be extremely easy for Shopify to simply add more customisation options for products, they have yet to do so, and this is the process we currently have to go through to get these kinds of products live on your Shopify site.

The standard rules for a migration still apply

Even without complex products, if your site has been going for many years and you want to migrate to Shopify, the process can take many months - it’s not something you can just do in an afternoon. So be patient and keep your eye on that light at the end of the tunnel - with time, it will all be ok in the end. 

And if it all sounds like too much to manage yourself, contact us to find out how we can help.