SKUs
What is a merchant without items to sell or a customer without items to buy? In this section, you will learn about how to add SKUs to an organization and associate the SKUs with prices, stock items, and shipping categories.
What is a SKU?
SKU is a unique identifier, meaning Stock Keeping Unit. This is the stock unit in a warehouse used to track availability and stock variations of an item to be sold. SKUs can be a variant of any item (e.g., Medium or Large size of a jogger pant). An SKU will be associated with a shipping category to determine the available shipping options for that SKU.
Commerce Layer is not a content management system. It is designed to take care of the transactional functionality of commerce, leaving all content management (including product, category, and catalog information) to the CMS of your choice. The link between the product information on the CMS and Commerce Layer is precisely the SKU code (that is linked to the single variant, not the generic "product").
An SKU consists of letters and numbers (either EAN code, UPC, or any other code format) like "LSLEEVMM000000FFFFFFMXXX". SKU refers to an item's details as a specific variant (e.g., a T-shirt, Red color, Nike brand, 0.5g, XL size, etc.). An SKU identifies each product item's characteristics such as manufacturer name, brand name, style, color, weight, and size.
Each SKU can have one or more prices in one or more price lists and many stock items in many stock locations. The presence of a price and a stock item determines the SKU availability for a given market or customer group.
Digital products
SKUs usually refer to physical goods, stored somewhere, ready to be picked by a carrier, and shipped to the final customer. That's the most common case, but not the only one.
In order to provide maximum flexibility in this respect, Commerce Layer lets you leverage two options available for the SKU resource: do not ship and do not track. The former prevents the creation of shipments when the SKU is added to an order (in this case the relatioship between the SKU and a shipping category is optional), the latter makes the SKU always available as far the stock is concerned. Managing the combination of these two flags you can handle lots of different scenarios, such as:
- Intangible products generating no shipment.
- Products with a virtually infinite stock.