Best Practice Sku Format
Contents
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SKU basics
Background info
SKU is usually pronounced "skew".
A SKU is a unique ID for a specific unique product in your warehouse/store.
While you might edit your product title over the years, you'll be aiming to keep you SKU the same - so it's a good idea to start with a decent SKU format.
This is often overlooked at the start but skipping thinking about this early can result in issues later.
Key ideas
- Less is more : shorter codes are better
- People are going to have to manually type these codes for the life of the product - help them out :)
- Use unique SKUs
- Keep them short (5-15 is the standard length, up to 30 is ok)
- Don't use the product title in the SKU, use a summary code word or number.
- eg. instead of 'Summer Love Beach Basic Long Sleeved White Small Shirt' you could have 172772-WHT-S
Formatting
Decide on a format before you start, and stick to it!
- Use CAPS
- Don't use spaces or non-alphanumeric characters
- This will help you integrate with other apps in the future, and any time you want to get into spreadsheets (eg. mapping sales forecasts, creating Purchase Orders, stock lists) you'll thank yourself for not having things like >, *
- Usually acceptable characters are: _ -
- Avoid confusable numbers/letters if possible (ie. I, O, L, 1, 0, l)
- Your warehouse crew will thank you
- Don't start SKUs with a zero
Logical structure
When thinking about how to create your SKU format, here's some ideas.
- If you sell configurable products, aim at having the product number first, then each sub-feature (possibly hyphenated).
- eg. 172772-BLK-XL, 172772-WHT-S, etc
- Keep key parts of the product human-readable. This is going to save you and your warehouse team a lot of time and stress.
- eg. instead of 'Summer Love Beach Basic Long Sleeved White Small Shirt' you could have 172772-WHT-S : you can easily read that code as White and Small, which is way easier than trying to remember or lookup eg. 172772-299237-12919373
You might want to include:
- Product code
- Color
- Size
- Brand
- Season (for eg. fashion)
- Other unique product attribute
Recommended Warehouse Shelving Structure
If you're just setting out to optimise your warehouse, eg by using Pick-n-Scan and TrolleyBox, you might discover you need to update your shelving location labelling.
The most-used format comes down to:
1) Row, usually A, B, C, D etc. These are the solid rows in the warehouse, with the letters on the end of each row. Often these are split, so one physical unit will have a different letter on each side - eg. AB CD EF etc.
2) Shelf (aka 'Floor'), usually 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 .. 09. This is from the floor to the ceiling. Double digits to avoid sorting issues (10 is sorted ahead of 1 in some systems).
3) Position (aka 'Location'), usually 001, 002, 003 or 01, 02, 03 etc depending on the length of your units. These start at one end and go back, ie. it lets the Picker know how far down the unit to go.
The end result is going to be like:
A-02-06
B-04-06
B-04-08
etc.
Recommended Shelving Labels
The usual system is to have magnetic or velcro laminated location labels, but just printing & sticking can work as well.
There's a few key parts.
1) Location code
eg. A-02-06
2) Direction arrow
It's very helpful to your Pickers to indicate, with a large arrow, whether the label is referring to the space above or below the label.
3) Location barcode
When you're saving location to Magento, adding products to a location (or removing them), doing stock checks, etc - it's extremely helpful to have a barcode to scan.
StockEasy will work with this, so you can for instance:
- scan a barcode of a product that you're adding to stock - scan/type the qty that's being added - scan the shelf
or
- scan the shelf and see what the stock should be
etc.
Since these labels quite often are high up, to save time it's handy if these are scannable from a distance - ie. large fonts to read from far and a large barcode to aim at from far are both key.
