How many products can I import into Product Catalog?

Environment: 

Data Import Wizard, Assets, Products, Product Catalog
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution: 

The products you import into the Product Catalog are visible, if set to have visibility, under the Product drop-down field when creating Assets.

Oracle B2C Service has a "soft limit" of 40,000 products.  This limit is dictated by technology within the product defined as the optlist.  It is the optlist that facilitates the real-time communication of changes to menus such as changes to product/categories, staff accounts, etc.  The optlist only supports a threshold of 40,000 records and when more than that are added, an error will be displayed in the Info log for the site.  The info log can be accessed in the Navigation area under Configuration -> Site Configuration -> Logs.  Whenever an edit is made to the products when over 40,000 products exist, an error will be added to this log similar to:

File: optlist/optl_util.c
Line: 490
In Fcn: optl_error
Description:
Optlist Error
Optlist ID: 10
Description: Optlist item count (XXXXX) exceeds the maximum threshold of 40000.
 
(XXXXX shows the number of products the site currently has. )

The reason this is referred to as a soft limit is, even when this has been exceeded, the product can function properly.  However, if you exceed this limit, a functionality impairment for the Product Catalog can occur or it can trigger a host of different problems. 

The difficulty in communicating a hard limit is because the actual hierarchy and configuration of those products and the site significantly impacts what will and won't work. Best Practice is that you do not exceed the soft limit of 40,000 products in order to ensure the product performs efficiently and without error.