This is not a new virus or an otherworldly term. The SKUs They are codes that those who are dedicated to keeping inventories and product catalogs already know and have become their best allies when ordering the sea of articles through which they navigate daily.
If you have just arrived in the world of e-commerce or perhaps you have been here for some time, but you want to better understand what this matter is about, let me explain it to you in an easy, understandable and human-friendly way. what is a SKU, what they are for and how they can help you manage your inventory without losing sleep. are you coming with me?
What is a SKU?
A SKUs It is a code made up of a set of numbers and letters that is used to identify, locate, control, manage and keep track of a product in the warehouse of a company or a store.
In addition to SKU code, is also known as a “product reference number” and is very useful to prevent confusion between different items or between units of the same product. You can find it on product boxes, labels, even on web pages of an article, on a site, an app or in a marketplace.
Each company has its own unique SKU codesso that although two companies sell the same item, at the same price and in the same space, the items internally have a different SKU code.
What does SKU stand for?
Per se, SKUs is the English acronym for the term Stock Keeping Unit and means “Warehouse Maintenance Unit”.
What is the SKU for?
The SKU code It serves to correctly and efficiently identify each article, in addition to allowing each of these to be located throughout the production, shipping and sale chain.
Another important function performed by SKU’s in business is to identify and track items facilitating inventory management, stock on hand and stock sold.
💡Tip: Speaking of codes, I invite you to read this article where we tell you step by step how.
Benefits of having SKUs in your business
Getting into the matter, let me explain some of the most important benefits of having SKU’s in your company:
- Optimize product catalog management
- They help to have a better control of the inventory
- They are useful for analyzing sales trends and buyer behavior
- They prevent you from running out of stock of the most demanded products
- You can reduce staffing and save costs
- Improve the productivity of your business
I explain each of them below.
📈 Product catalog management optimization
How many different items do you have in your store? How do you keep track of all the sundries you have? The SKUs they are great tools that allow you to keep track of all your products in your catalog. Thanks to SKUs you can identify how many pieces of an item you have in its multiple variations, such as size, color, shape, material, even manufacturing origin, depending on how the SKU codes are configured in your catalog. And the best thing is that you can know it at a glance.
📦 Help to have better inventory tracking
By being able to efficiently identify and label your products, sku codes They will help you have better control of your inventory and detect which are the items that are sold the most, those that you always have in stock or if you have a certain number of products that are only sold seasonally.
This feature is particularly useful for companies that have multiple storage locations or , as they can tell from the SKUs where these items are located, if they are in warehouse A, warehouse B, point of sale C or if they are in transit between one place or another.
🛒 They are useful for analyzing sales trends and buyer behavior
Since you will have better tracking, the codes SKUs can be used to find out which items are best sellersif any size or color is more easily sold, and even know what type of items to put in a kit as they are one of your star products, or which ones to put in promotion as they are one of the ones that you have the most in stock and have the least movement.
They will also help you know if some items are sold more seasonally or if you can sell them all year round, being useful to know what direction to take, creating or marketing new products based on the behavior of buyers.
🙌🏼 They avoid running out of stock of the most demanded products
Perhaps this point is explained with the previous one, but it is worth understanding it thoroughly. The SKU codes They can help you detect which items have the most movement, helping you predict how often you have to restock a certain product so as not to run out of stock.
Suppose you sell colored t-shirts. Through the SKUs you might notice that the item TSHR-AZU-M which is associated with medium size blue t-shirts is the one with the most movement, selling 3 pieces weekly. In this way, if your stock is 12 pieces, we can know that that product, in that color and with that size, should be stocked once a month, according to what the purchasing trends indicate.
Besides all, the use of SKU codes In conjunction with an inventory management software, it can help you establish a system of personalized alerts so that every time an item has a volume below the usual, the purchase order can be generated to recover the stock.
💰 Can reduce staffing, leading to cost savings
The logistics area of a company usually requires a large number of people to control the warehouse, manage inventory, accommodate products, among many other activities. Wearing SKU’s It is possible to reduce the size of this area since the handling of the products tends to be more controlled and simple, reducing time.
📊 Improve the productivity of your business
In general, the greatest benefit of SKU’s It is the improvement of the productivity of the entire business, by promoting the saving of time and with it, the saving of effort and costs. In addition to increasing customer satisfaction by being a company with a stock that is constantly renewed.
What is the difference between a SKU code and an EAN code?
The difference between a SKU code and an EAN code is that while the SKUs is an alphanumeric code of variable length, the EAN is a succession of numbers, specifically 12 digits that are usually accompanied by a scannable barcode.
In this table you can have a clearer idea of the difference between SKU codes and EAN codes
EAN-SKU
Composition
Alphanumeric Numeric
Length
Variable 12 digits
Use
internal external
who defines it
Each company International standards and organizations (GS1 Mexico)
If you want to know more about barcodes, how they work and how to generate them 🙌🏼
Where are SKU codes used?
now that you know what is the SKU, it is vital to know where these codes are used. You can find SKU codes at any of the following locations within a business:
- Warehouses;
- Catalogs;
- Databases;
- Inventories;
- Online store;
- product labels;
- item boxes;
- purchase orders;
- Dispatch and logistics centers;
- inventory management systems;
- Directories;
- Guides and shipping labels.
How do SKUs work?
The SKU’s they work in a very simple way, being codes designed to identify items in a warehouse or in an inventory, they are made to point out the most relevant aspects of a product and maintain better stock control.
itself a SKU code It works like this within a business:
- Codes are created by grouping the most relevant characteristics of an article or product.
- They are assigned to a batch or a group of products with the same characteristics.
- They are recorded SKU codes generated with the products in a database for identification. This base can be in Excel or in some specialized inventory management software.
- Each product is identified with the SKUs corresponding, both physically and digitally. It can be through self-adhesive labels or by personalizing the description of the item in the online store.
- Personalized sales reports are generated having as key field the SKUs to know the number of pieces sold, stock available in the warehouse, shrinkage, etc.
How to create a SKU?
Now that we have seen all the theory and discovered what is the SKU of a productNow is the time to go into practice. Create a SKUs It is not something from another world, I explain how to generate them in five easy steps.
Steps to follow to create a SKU successfully:
- Choose the right tool to create SKU’s.
- Select the information to save within the code.
- Create a recognizable pattern and make it the standard on your system.
- Make sure your inventory management system works with the ones you’ve created.
- Replicate and optimize as many times as necessary.
Let’s delve into each of them.
1. Choose the right tool to create SKUs
Fortunately, you can rely on numerous free online tools to create SKU’s. There are also ERP systems that automatically generate these codes, however if it is your first time creating them, perhaps the ones I show you below can be good alternatives.
Free tools to make a SKU
Excel
Even if you don’t believe it, you can create SKU codes fully functional and professional in an Excel document. Since they are internal codes, made up of alphanumeric elements where certain characteristics of the products are concatenated, it is possible to create your own Excel template that creates SKU’s. Although if you want to save yourself the effort, you can download our generator template of SKU’s for Excel or Google Sheets.
How to make a SKU in Excel?
- Download the
- Open the document with Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
- Follow the instructions in the document and automatically create SKU’s with up to three reference fields of your products.
Zoho
Zoho has a great generator SKU’s free and online that you can use. You don’t need to download it. It allows you to concatenate up to three attributes and export your SKU’s in a .CSV document, functional for many inventory management software.
tradegecko
Similar to Zoho’s tool, Tradegecko allows you to generate SKU’s up to three attributes and download those SKU’s generated in a .CSV document.
gorgias
Although it is in English, the Gorgias generator allows you to create codes SKUs in a friendly way, in addition to giving you quite useful recommendations to generate codes with the best practices. This web tool
2. Select the information to save within the SKU.
Once you have chosen the ideal tool to create your SKUs It will be important for you to define what type of information is relevant to generate the codes. Within the best practices is to prioritize the information that is vital for the recognition of the item, being some of the most common fields to choose: brand, model, color, size, capacity, color code, manufacturer and version.
Facebook Comments
Disqus