Better managing lots of product variants for storefront & admin-ui

[pepijn-vanvlaanderen]

I wanted to open a discussion around the Product Variants. At the moment the storefront NextJs Medusa Starter provides a way to handle this already. It pulls in the product and its variants and then loops over the options to expose them as select options on the product detail page. Also the Admin UI loads all the product variants as well on the Product Detail Edit page.

In a theoretical scenario where you can have lots of variants. Let's say you have a Product with the following options width x height x color, where for example there are 10 different widths, 6 different heights and 8 colors. This already will result into 10 * 6 * 8 = 480 Product Variants. This can quickly increase if you have more options.

I think it is probably not desirable to have the storefront and Admin UI product endpoint query all those different variants. Currently all variants are loaded and not paginated, which can result in a bulky response. So I was wondering if any other solution will be implemented in the future to handle such a scenario.

Current workarounds I see:

• Creating different products to minimize the option usage. However that would create separate product detail pages, which is not always desired.
• Do not use the product variants in the frontend and use the product variants endpoint. This is probably the best scenario, but it then would maybe be helpful that the GET endpoint for Product Variants could receive filter params for given options and return the result for that combination.