Ordoro - What are best practices when creating SKUs?

SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit and is critical in managing your inventory and sales.

Each product and variation should have a unique SKU to track order velocity and stock levels.

Below we outline a few best practices and guidelines if you’re wisely taking the time to create, update, or manage your SKUs.

Topics

Guidelines for SKUs

SKUs should be alphanumeric and generally all capitalized.
1. Example: 123JKL
2. If all letters are capitalized, you can tell the difference between the capital letter I and the lowercase letter L ( l ).
A few special characters can be included:
1. Period ( . )
2. Dash ( – )
3. Underscore ( _ )
4. Consider email addresses. Anything that goes before the @ sign works for SKUs.
5. Examples: APN-123-XYZ or APN_123_XYZ
Keep in mind characters that look similar.
1. Letter O and number 0 (zero) look identical.

Things to avoid adding to SKUs

No special characters, other than what was listed above. In particular, these are problematic:
1. Slashes ( / )
2. Spaces
Leading zeroes at the beginning of SKUs
1. Example: 0012345
2. In Excel, the example would change to 12345.
Long numeric values
1. Example: 123456789012
2. When Excel sees this value, it will shorten it via scientific notation.
3. In Excel, the example would change to 1.23457E+11.

Think about who will view and manage SKUs

Ensure SKUs will scale as you grow

It may be tempting to use your supplier’s SKU as your own. However, what if you no longer work with that vendor? Or if you have multiple suppliers for the same SKU? Or two suppliers may use the same SKU for different items.
Consider other brands, variations, or product categories you plan to carry in the future. Make sure your SKU naming conventions will extend to those.

Apparel

Automotive parts