Overview of the concepts related to Variants, the sellable units of a Product, and how they are modeled, published, and presented.
Key concepts
Product catalog models
Product Variants can be modeled in two ways:
- Classic model: Variants are stored directly within their Product, and each Product can have up to
100Product Variants. - Modular model: Variants are stored separately from their Product, and each Product can have up to
10 000Variants. Pricing in this model is handled exclusively through Standalone Prices; Embedded Prices are not supported.
In the Modular model, you can model, publish, and unpublish Variants independently from their parent Product.
In the Modular model, Products don't have a Master Variant, but you can set a Variant as the default Variant for the Product.
Variant Projection
Variant Projections are optimized for use cases such as product detail pages (PDPs) and product listing pages (PLPs). These pages require variant-level data without fetching all the data of the Product.
Lifecycle and states
Each Variant contains current, published data. Staged (draft) data is only present when there are unpublished changes, allowing you to manage changes before publishing them. When you create a Variant, only the current version is created. When you update a Variant, you can choose to update either the current or staged data. When you publish a Variant, the staged data is copied to the current data.
In a Project that uses the Classic product catalog model, you cannot publish or unpublish individual Variants. You can only publish or unpublish the Product, and consequently publish or unpublish the associated Variants.