A Stock Keeping Unit or SKU is a unique alphanumeric value assigned to a product for the purpose of managing inventory and ease of tracking. Each unique SKU refers to a specific product in your product catalog.
A SKU is comprised of a combination of letters and numbers which may provide details about a product or be totally random as long as it is unique to a particular product.
Each company usually has an internal standard for creating and naming its products. There are many ways to create SKUs and no wrong way per-se, but there are some best practices to consider.
- Each SKU must be unique. Never reuse a SKU for any reason. Once a SKU is created it always refers to the product it was created.
- SKUs should be a short as possible to identify the product. The longer the SKU the harder it is to read and understand which product it refers and may not work with some inventory management systems, or marketplaces. For example: Amazon limits merchant SKU to 50 characters.
- Do no use spaces of special characters. Creating a SKU with spaces or special characters can be confusing and obscure the product it is linked to.
- Do not use letters that can be mistaken for numbers. Refrain from using letters such as O and I, which can be mistaken for 0 and 1.
Additionally, when creating a SKU, you should avoid using certain characters and symbols in particular like single or double quotes, asterisks, percent signs, etc., especially if it is used as a primary key for an inventory table. Many of these characters are reserved characters for many database management systems (DBMS) and can cause unexpected results, or other issues when used to filter data in an SQL statement.
For example: single quotes in MS SQL Server identifies the parameter as a text or date value. It can also act as a terminator for an SQL statement when SQL Server encounters an extraneous quote in the filter criteria. Premature termination of an SQL statement can cause errors and yield unexpected results.
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