A catalogue is the one part of a business you cannot quietly redo. Every quotation, order, receipt and stock movement points at it. By the time the naming is obviously wrong, ten thousand rows depend on it being what it is.
The good news is that the rules are short, and almost all of the damage comes from breaking four of them.
A SKU is an identity, not a description
The most common mistake is encoding facts into the code. A SKU that reads BLU-ASTRAL-190-MAIN has four things in it that can change — the colour, the supplier, the price and the location — and a code that changes is not an identity.
- Keep it stable. If a fact about the product can change, it does not belong in the code.
- Never encode price. Prices change more often than anything else in the business.
- Never encode the supplier. You will switch, and the old code will lie about it.
- Never encode the location. The same product sits in two places the day you open a second one.
- Keep it short enough to read aloud down a phone line, and long enough not to collide.
What is left is a category or line prefix and a number. Dull, stable, and still correct in five years.
A barcode is not a SKU
They get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The SKU is your name for the product. The barcode is somebody else’s — usually the manufacturer’s — and it belongs to the thing in the box. Two products can share a barcode when a supplier reuses one. One product can pick up a new barcode when packaging changes. Keep them in separate fields, and search both.
If the difference is on the shelf, it is a variant. If it is on the invoice, it is a price level.
Do not put the variant in the name
The second mistake is a catalogue full of products called "Cotton Shirt — Blue — L", "Cotton Shirt — Blue — XL", "Cotton Shirt — White — L". It works until you want to know how many cotton shirts you hold, or to change the price of all of them, or to find out that blue outsells white two to one.
One product, with colour and size as attributes, gives you variants instead. Each variant carries its own stock, its own barcode and its own price, and every one of them still belongs to the same product. Quoting, ordering, receiving and counting all happen at the variant, so the numbers stay honest, and the questions above become answerable.
Define your attributes before you have five hundred products
NOVOLIG ships no fixed list of attributes, because there is no list that suits a jeweller and a fastener merchant at the same time. You define them: colour, size, purity, weight, finish, capacity, voltage, thread, whatever the business actually varies by. You choose which of them a product varies by, and which are simply recorded.
The freedom is the point, and it is also the trap. Attributes invented one product at a time turn into four spellings of the same idea. Spend an hour on the list at the start, keep it short, and add to it deliberately.
Price levels, not duplicate products
The fourth mistake is a second copy of a product for the wholesale price. Two products, two stock figures, two things to update, and a count that is wrong the moment anybody sells from the wrong one. A product has one identity and as many price levels as the business sells at — retail, wholesale, trade, contract. The customer decides which one applies.
The test
Before you commit to a naming scheme, ask one question of it: what happens when we open a second location, add a third price list, and take on a supplier who packs this in tens instead of twelves? A scheme that survives all three is a scheme you can stop thinking about.