Having followed up further I have found two items of interest.
1. While I can create products as “Draft” and export them. When imported the variations will not appear. (The variation products are reported as imported – but do not appear in the Variations of the associated parent product. Importing the products as “Published” works.
2. In reading the instructions some emphasis seems to be placed on importing the Parent products first – then importing the Variations. I have found that a correctly formatted .csv file works fine with both the Parent and Variations in the same file. This is much easier to manage in my opinion as you can see all the relationships in the spreadsheet together.
