Hi Derek,
Yes, you’re right. Even if you don’t create a variant for the product, Shopify creates one under the hood.
To answer your questions,
- There is an options array that specifies the different options for variants but you cannot specify an option value and not have any variant utilise that option value; any such values without an associated variant would be ignored. Therefore, the values specified for an option are actually ignored, because it is populated using the variant options. If you take a look at the section to add a variant on the Admin store, the values for the options are not presented as a drop down, however, a drop down is available on the customer-facing storefront. In essence, if you want a value to be part of the options array, then a variant has to exist that specifies a value for that option. If the variant isn’t available, then you can set its quantity to zero.
- To create additional variants, you would need the Product Variant resource to do this.
If you had any additional questions, let me know.
Best,
Seth.