Multiple Variants on one "line"

We’re considering Drupal E-commerce as a (multi-staged) solution for our e-commerce site, and I have a question about how it handles variants, and if anyone is available to do some guidance-offering or possible consulting.

(Sorry, this is long.)

Currently, we’re managing our product and website content through a system of point-of-sale data, access tables, spreadsheets, and text files. We process all this data together and export it to our shopping cart solution (uniteu).

I want to get rid of as much of this bird’s nest as possible, and especially need a system that maintains accurate, efficient and scalable product and brand taxonomies.

I’m thinking Stage 1 of this project is importing our product data daily (SKU, inventory, etc), using Drupal to manage content (descriptions, navigation pages, about us, help pages, etc.), and then using Drupal to export to our current cart (uniteu) via .csv. Stage 1 will not use the cart.

Stage 1.5 would be setting up an outlet site using Drupal and a cart solution to test it without cutting over our main site.

Stage 2 would be, once we’re satisfied with the outlet site’s performance, cutting our main site over and managing everything in house.

Now, the reason I’m here is that we’re running into a stumbling block trying to figure out how e-commerce handles Variants.

It looks like e-commerce treats each option (color, size, length, etc.) as different nodes (if I’m using the right term) that are associated centrally. But our Point-of-sale, and current cart solution treat each variant as a complete combination of Product, Color, Size) associated only with the parent style.

For example, we have a product, Spyder Men’s Vail Jacket that comes in 2 colors, Red and Green, and 3 sizes: M, L, and XL.

We push the variant (option) data to our cart, and would push to Drupal as

Green, M
Green, L
Green, XL
Red, M
Red, L
Red, XL

Where each record has attributes (price, inventory, etc.) associated with that specific color/size combination.

See this page for an example:
http://www.peterglenn.com/pglenn/product.asp?pf_id=071203_SPYDER

Sp…is this possible to do this with e-commerce?

We’re thinking it won’t “matter.” Just as easily as you can call something “Red” you can call it “Red, XL.” But storing them centrally may be an issue as we could have 50 different versions of “Red, XL” for each of our 50 products that come in that size/color combination.

However, each variant option does have it’s own unique record and a field that ties it to its parent…so again I feel like this is doable

And finally, if this is possible – I’m working with a Drupal dev but he’s a content guy. While he’s awesome and is into the project we both think that a dedicated e-commerce dev may be better suited. At the very least it may be good to have someone to help us out when we do the data modeling. Know where I can find one?

Thanks,
Jason