Is there a maximum allowed number of product variants?

Hi,

There is no limit in HikaShop. However, HikaShop has to run a lot of MySQL queries (for each variant, it has to load the prices, the images, the files, etc). That's like having a products listing with 1331 products all displayed on the same page.
So it requires a lot of resources from the server. First, it needs time to run all the MySQL queries and load all the data from the database and second, it requires a lot of memory to be able to load that data in the PHP memory.
So you must hit the "max_execution_time" and/or the "memory_limit" settings of your server's php.ini configuration file.

So you have two things you can try:
- increase these on your server (you might need to ask your hosting). However, if the page requires a minute to load, that's not viable and not much can be done to optimize that.
- reduce the number of variants. For example, if one of the characteristics is a color selector and that the quantity and the price don't change based on the selected color, then you don't need to use a characteristic for that selector. Instead, you can create a custom field of the table "item" via the menu Display>Custom fields. A custom field does generate variants and thus doesn't require much resources from the server as basically HikaShop just needs to load the data of the field. And there is no problem in having a mix of characteristics and custom fields.