title: Is there a way to create multiple products with one Shopify API call?
body: <p>The Shopify API allows clients to download lists (products, collections, etc) with 250 items at a time. Is there a way to also upload new lists with multiple items with one API call as well?  It looks like, from the documentation at api.shopify.com, that only one item can be created per call.  If true, would be both counterproductive and extremely inefficient for users trying to interface the storefront with an existing inventory management system, for example.</p>
  
  <p>Let's say we have a store with 20,000 products and 200 custom collections where, for the sake of argument, a product belongs to only one collection.  Downloading information about the products would take 80 calls to products.xml, 1 call to custom_collections.xml, and 80 calls to collects.xml.  We would need only 161 calls to the API to perform the operation, and that number is well under the limit of 500 calls in 5 minutes imposed by Shopify.</p>
  
  <p>However, to perform the opposite task (create or modify the same number of products, one at a time, according to the documentation) would require 20,000 API calls to products.xml, 200 calls to custom_collections.xml and 20,000 calls to collects.xml, which would take 7 hours to complete at 500 calls every 5 minutes.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a better way to do this?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong> <em>I understand from the answers below that, indeed, the Shopify API does not allow creating/updating multiple products at a time.  This is, in my opinion, a significant shortcoming in an otherwise efficient product, so I leave here my request for the implemention of this feature.  For now I will have to create a service app that will be hitting the API non-stop, updating products as fast as possible.</em></p>