A specific version of a product — size, color, material combination.
A variant is the sellable unit inside a Shopify product. Options like Size and Color combine to define variants; the product itself is a container. Each variant carries its own price, compare-at price, SKU, barcode, weight, inventory levels per location and (optionally) an image. Standard plans allow up to 100 variants per product and 3 option axes; Shopify Plus raises those limits. Almost every bulk-edit disaster starts by confusing 'product' with 'variant' — a 10% price increase applied at product level in a CSV can silently write the same price to every variant, erasing the size-based pricing you spent a year building.
