How increase the product uploading speed in shopify?

Question

I have more than 600k products in my shopify store . the store is taking too much time to upload a products in admin back-end ( 11k product is taken almost 8 hours to complete the upload process )

I have even Used the "shopify product API" to add my product to store .

Even API is taking to much time to insert a product to store .

Now i am in big confusion that which i prefer to upload the product .

whether through "admin back-end" or "shopigy API call .

please suggest me a best way ..

thank you

Answer 1

If you have that many products you should either be looking at Shopify Plus or another platform entirely.

Each product takes one API call to upload and over time your API call limit averages out to 2 per second so 600k products with one variant per product would take 83 hours to upload. Your 11k products should only take 1.5 hours to upload though so unless you have a number of apps running there is something wrong with your API setup.

If you maximize the partition of your products into variants you can upload a product and its variants in a single call. Each product may have up to 100 variants so if you can group your products into variants the theoretical saving could be down to 6k API calls and just under an hour of processing (if you have variant images I think you'd need 3 calls per product/variant/image group - 1 to upload the products/variants/images; one to read the variant and image ids; one to assign the images to the variants.

Shopify Plus has 5 times the API limit (though I can't find an official confirmation of this) so your 600k products could be uploaded in 16 hours.

Answer 2

As @bknights said putting all the variants and combining products as variants is the fastest way.

I'd also like to add this: split your portfolio into lots and using API you can have parallel API calls running.

I have to update 60K variants on my store once a week. As I figured out it used take an entire weekend sometimes to finish of the things. I must add that I use PowerShell for this task. Later I came to realize that while one call is running my program is running idle and by trial and error I came to a conclusion that I can have 4 call made at 250 milli seconds gap each. So I update variants of all the products (each having around 45 variants) in a single call.

This way, the time cut down to less than 1/12th of the total time. Also you can use the API call limit returned by Shopify to calculate the time gaps further. For a non-Plus Shopify account this is the fastest way possible.