SKU naming: a practical guide for product variants
4 min read
A SKU is the code that identifies exactly one sellable item. Good SKUs make picking, restocking and reporting easier. Bad ones cause mix-ups that cost real money. A few simple rules make the difference.
Start with a structure
The most reliable SKUs follow the same order every time: a short product code, then the option values from the most general to the most specific.
For a t-shirt, that could be TSH-BLACK-M: product, color, size. Anyone on your team can read it without looking anything up.
Rules that keep SKUs clean
- Keep them short. Eight to sixteen characters is easy to read and to type.
- Use capital letters and numbers, with hyphens as separators.
- Avoid spaces, accents and special characters, which some systems change or reject.
- Do not start a SKU with a zero. Spreadsheets often drop leading zeros.
- In short codes, avoid letters that look like numbers, such as O and I.
- Never reuse a SKU, even for a product you stopped selling.
Use the same order everywhere
Decide the order once — product, then color, then size, for example — and apply it to every product. Consistency matters more than the exact scheme you choose.
Patterns you can copy
- Clothing: TSH-{COLOR}-{SIZE} gives TSH-BLACK-M.
- Shoes: SNK-{MODEL}-{COLOR}-{SIZE} gives SNK-AIR-WHITE-42.
- With a material: BAG-{MATERIAL}-{COLOR} gives BAG-LEATHER-TAN.
Generate them instead of typing them
Typing SKUs by hand is where duplicates and typos come from. In VariantFlow you write the pattern once and every variant gets its SKU. Two variants with the same SKU are flagged before you export.