About the Client
Fitness Superstore is a leading retailer of premium fitness equipment, offering one of the most extensive catalogs in the industry. From treadmills and ellipticals to strength machines, their catalog includes thousands of configurable products. This made Shopify product variants management critical, since customers needed flexibility and scalability in their shopping experience.
Challenge: Overcoming the Shopify 2000 Variant Limit
Fitness Superstore migrated from BigCommerce to Shopify to expand their e-commerce capabilities. While their in-house team managed the migration, they faced platform-specific challenges that required the support of Shopify Plus experts to ensure scalability and high performance.
The store had outgrown Shopify’s default variant limit of 100 per product. With thousands of configurable items—including treadmills, ellipticals, and strength machines—they needed a scalable solution that allowed customers to choose from a wide range of sizes, finishes, and add-ons. Although Shopify has announced support for Shopify 2000 variants, this was insufficient for some products—and at the time of development, this feature was not yet available. The limitations in Shopify product pages and the default checkout created friction, impacting both user experience and order accuracy.
Additionally, the Shopify checkout process needed to reliably handle highly configurable products, while the Shopify cart and product pages weren’t functioning as intended. To ensure performance, scalability, and stability, the client required a solution beyond third-party apps.
Solutions: Unlocking Shopify Plus Advantages
To overcome Shopify’s variant limitations, Fitness Superstore initially completed a Shopify Plus migration to leverage Shopify Plus advantages, including the one of the best product variant app for Shopify, Avis Product Options app. Although the app allowed unlimited options, it often caused issues, particularly with the cart and product pages.
However, as Shopify Plus development experts, we recognized that relying on a third-party app would not meet long-term scalability or performance goals. To deliver a robust, high-performance solution, we proposed a custom approach leveraging Shopify variant metafields and metaobjects.
We engineered a custom Shopify Plus solution at both the cart and checkout levels to dynamically handle thousands of product options. The Shopify cart architecture was redesigned to ensure smooth selection, accurate validation, and reliable order processing. At checkout, custom variant data was integrated directly into the process, preserving Shopify’s reliability while supporting complex product workflows. This approach eliminated dependency on third-party apps, reduced performance risks, and created a scalable, future-proof eCommerce platform.
Results: Performance and Scalability with Custom Shopify Plus Development
The custom solution enabled Fitness Superstore to manage thousands of product configurations seamlessly without compromising site performance. By overcoming the Shopify variant limit 2000, Fitness Superstore can now easily add variants on Shopify, Customers navigate customizable products, and complete checkout with confidence. For instance, check out their French Fitness FSR90 Functional Trainer Smith Squat Rack to see this functionality in action.
By removing third-party dependencies, maintenance overhead was significantly reduced, creating a sustainable, long-term eCommerce infrastructure. The solution delivered a future-proof, scalable Shopify Plus eCommerce platform built for growth. Reliable Shopify checkout and Shopify cart functionality were optimized to handle even the most complex product configurations.
The project is nearing completion, with the final product page and Shopify cart transform function enhancements pending client input. Once implemented, the system will fully support all configurable workflows, demonstrating how to add variants on Shopify efficiently while providing a seamless end-to-end experience for both customers and the operations team.
