Are Variations in Commerce Product required or not?

If you want to allow purchasing a "product", then variants are required yes... Otherwise, I guess it is possible to use a product just for display (like a node entity), but in general variants are absolutely required.

Maybe I'm wrong, but commerce_product_variation is purchased. Commerce Core allows you to create a product without variations, even if it is required.

@xperd that's right and I think there's room for UX improvements, especially for (not seldom) cases where products have no variation (which means 1 variation ;)). Maybe there are already maintainer plans for that. I can just tell that clients are also confused in most cases.

A possible workaround is for example to place the variation field on the product form and use https://www.drupal.org/project/inline_entity_form → to have it right in place, but that also has some downsides and I think it would be worth a general UX improvement.

Much word to do in this large project and this is open source, so let's do it together! :)

A possible workaround is for example to place the variation field on the product form and use https://www.drupal.org/project/inline_entity_form → to have it right in place, but that also has some downsides and I think it would be worth a general UX improvement.

But we do that automatically when you uncheck "Allow each product to have multiple variations" on your product type, implemented and released 6 years ago. Or am I misunderstanding what you're proposing?

@bojanz thank you for that hint, I have to admit that I never used that function (operationally blind) as we always assumed we'll have variations. Sorry, mistake on my side and thank you!

Maybe still there might be good ideas to improve the product & variations UX, I'll think about it based on this information. And it was never ment as any kind of negative criticism, Drupal Commerce and Centarro are great!