Beyond 100 Variants: How a Custom Pet Shop Breaks Shopify (And How to Fix It)

Introduction: The Brick Wall of Personalization

If you are a Shopify store owner, especially one selling custom or personalized goods, you’ve probably had this exact moment of panic.

You’ve designed your perfect flagship product—maybe it’s a bespoke pet bed, a custom piece of jewelry, or a personalized cutting board. It’s complex, it’s high-margin, and it’s designed to be customized by the customer. You spend weeks building out the product page, adding size, color, material, and engraving choices.

And then... you hit the wall. A hard, digital limit, accompanied by a cold, impersonal error message: "You can't add more than 100 variants to a product."

For stores selling simple t-shirts, this is a minor headache. But for ambitious, "build-your-own" brands like Evieira Pets, that 100-variant limit is a growth ceiling. It forces you to make painful compromises that destroy the user experience, confuse your customers, and ultimately, kill sales.

You're forced to ask terrible questions: "Do we stop offering three of our best-selling colors?" "Do we have to tell the marketing team we can't launch the new custom font?" "Do we have to hire a developer for a complex custom solution that breaks every time Shopify updates?"

This isn't a dead end. This frustration is the precise reason modern, AI-driven tools are being developed. Today, we’ll use Evieira Pets as a real-world case study to show why a solution like Sectionly AI Product Options is not a "nice-to-have" app, but an absolute necessity for any custom e-commerce brand.

The Case Study: Evieira Pets and the Promise of Bespoke Goods

Let’s set the stage. Evieira Pets is not selling generic pet supplies. They are positioned in the high-margin, personalized pet goods market. Their business model is built entirely on emotional attachment—giving customers unique items for their beloved pets.

This strategy sets an extremely high customer expectation. The customer isn't just buying a product; they are designing a masterpiece. They expect a seamless, professional, and powerful buying journey. Any friction, any confusing choice, or any "cheap-looking" part of the product page will instantly break that illusion of quality and shatter trust.

The products themselves demand complexity:

• Custom Pet Beds: Require choices for shape, size, material (fleece, canvas, orthopedic foam), primary color, embroidery color, and font style.
• Personalized Collars: Need size, leather vs. nylon material, metal buckle finish, and specific engraving text fields.

These complex configuration needs are what make their products profitable, but also what breaks the basic Shopify platform.

The Core Problem: Why Shopify Fails the Custom Store

When this high-touch, premium product meets Shopify's mass-market, one-size-fits-all platform, you get a technical headache. Let's break down the three critical ways the default Shopify platform fails a custom e-commerce brand.

The Obvious Problem: Smart Pricing & Upcharges

The most immediate challenge is handling customization that adds cost. Imagine a Custom Pet Bed sold by Evieira Pets.

The customer needs to see a clear, simple price structure:

• Base Price: $99.00 (Canvas, Small)
• Upgrade 1 (Material): Orthopedic Foam (Adds +$50)
• Upgrade 2 (Size): Large (Adds +$25)

This seems intuitive to the customer: "$99 + $50 + $25 = $174."

But default Shopify hates this logic.

Shopify's variant system wants each combination to be a unique product with a unique final price listed in a dropdown. The clunky workaround is:

• Pet Bed - Canvas, Small - $99.00
• Pet Bed - Orthopedic, Small - $149.00
• Pet Bed - Canvas, Large - $124.00
• Pet Bed - Orthopedic, Large - $174.00

This is a terrible customer experience because it destroys Price Anchoring. You want the customer to anchor to the base price of $99 and see the additional costs as small, reasonable add-ons. By listing out the full prices, you confuse the buyer, forcing them to compare four different products and calculate the differences, introducing friction and doubt right at the moment of purchase.

Sectionly AI is built for this. It allows the owner to set a single base price and then create options that add to that price, showing the total update instantly and clearly. It's simple, transparent, and builds the trust needed to sell premium goods.

The Bigger Problem: The 100-Variant Limit

This is the real sales killer. It's the hard ceiling that limits marketing efforts and kills good ideas.

Right now, a product like a Custom Pet Bed is deceptively simple, but the marketing team at Evieira Pets must be thinking bigger to compete. Let’s imagine a very realistic growth strategy meeting:

With just a few simple, realistic requests, the store is now 500 combinations over Shopify's limit.

What happens next? Good ideas die. The marketing team is told, "No, we can't launch the new holiday fabric because the platform won't let us." Or, the owner is forced to split the product into multiple, separate product pages (e.g., "Bed - Orthopedic Edition" and "Bed - Canvas Edition"). This is awful for the customer, destroys your SEO, and splits your social proof (customer reviews).

Sectionly AI was built to destroy this limit. It treats options as properties of a product, not as new products, ensuring Evieira Pets can sell 600 combinations or 6,000 combinations without breaking a sweat. It turns a hard ceiling into an open sky.

The "Feel" Problem: A Premium Product Can't Look Cheap

We must return to customer expectation. You simply cannot sell a $150 premium, custom-embroidered pet bed using a clunky, basic, default HTML dropdown menu that looks like it was pulled from a 1999 website.

It feels cheap. It erodes trust. It creates subconscious friction.

Every single element on your product page is either building trust or destroying it. A basic, unstyled dropdown menu on a personalized product screams "amateur." It creates a jarring disconnect between the beautiful, high-budget product photography and the low-effort buying experience. It makes the customer pause and wonder, "Is this site legit?"

A premium product demands a premium User Interface (UI). Sectionly AI solves this by providing a library of rich, modern UI elements:

• Image Swatches: Instead of a drop-down for "Primary Color," show clickable, high-resolution image swatches of the actual fabric. This is tactile and intuitive.
• Button Selectors: Clean, modern buttons for "Size" or "Material" feel far more professional and tactile than a generic selector box.
• Tooltips & Info: Add small information icons next to complex options (like "Orthopedic Foam") to give the customer a pop-up explanation of why it's worth the extra money, right when they need that information.

This is about conversion optimization. A clean UI that matches the brand’s premium feel gives the customer the confidence and clarity they need to click "Add to Cart" on a bespoke item.

The Sectionly AI Solution: The Efficiency Engine and AI Advantage

The root of the entire problem is a mental model: Shopify thinks in "Variants." Ambitious brands need to think in "Options." Sectionly AI makes this conceptual shift a reality.

The Power of Natural Language Setup

In the past, even if you had an app that could manage unlimited options, setting it up was a technical nightmare. You'd have to write complex "conditional logic" manually. This was a massive bottleneck.

With Sectionly AI, the AI removes the developer bottleneck. The owner of Evieira Pets doesn't need to learn to code. They can just type a natural language prompt, just like using a search engine:

• "I need an option for a custom dog collar. Include choices for leather ($10 extra) or nylon (base price). Make the leather choices only show brown, black, and tan."
• "Create a color selector with image swatches for the new line of dog tags: Gold Glitter, Rose Gold Glitter, and Holographic Blue."
• "Add an option for a protective coating as a checkbox. Add a $5 fee and a small tooltip explaining the protection against weather."

The AI understands this plain English and instantly generates the perfect, professional-looking, fully functional option set. What used to take a developer a week now takes a marketing manager 30 seconds. This empowers the brand to be agile and never be bottlenecked by their own platform again.

Direct Revenue Impact: AOV and CVR Mastery

The true measure of any e-commerce tool is its impact on the bottom line. Sectionly AI improves the most critical metrics for Evieira Pets: Conversion Rate (CVR) and Average Order Value (AOV).

Stop Compromising, Start Customizing

As the Evieira Pets case study clearly shows, a product options app isn't just about adding more choices. It's a fundamental shift in how you run a high-margin, personalized business.

It’s about handling smart pricing so you're not confusing customers and can maximize your Average Order Value.

It’s about breaking the 100-variant limit so your marketing team can actually do its job and you can stop saying "no" to good ideas.

And it's about matching your brand's premium feel so the customer trusts you enough to click "Buy Now" on high-ticket custom items.

That's why Sectionly AI Product Options exists—so ambitious American brands like Evieira Pets can finally sell their products at full scale without being held back by a broken platform.

Ready to see how easy it is to set up unlimited options in 30 seconds?