SKU
Stock Keeping Unit
Every product you sell needs a code of its own, so you can tell a small blue T-shirt from a medium blue one, or a 500 ml bottle from a 1 litre bottle. Every different size, colour or pack gets its own code, and your stock, prices and shelf locations are all counted against it. That code is called a SKU, short for stock keeping unit.
It is your own code, not the barcode printed by the manufacturer. A SKU can follow whatever pattern suits you, as long as no two products share one. A barcode (GTIN, EAN) is different: the manufacturer assigns it, and every shop in the world reads it the same way.
In practice
A shop sells one running sock in four sizes and three colours. That is one product but twelve SKUs, and the system knows exactly how many of 'sock-blue-42' are on shelf B3.
Further reading
Related terms
Ready to see BizBloqs on your own process?
Book a demo and we will walk your warehouse and order flow end to end — inbound, storage, picking, shipping, returns — and tell you honestly what BizBloqs would change.
Two questions about your own operation
How many of your articles sit in a pick location they empty less than once a month?
Part one: Laying out a warehouse does not start with the racking
After your last integration, how many systems hold a stock quantity for the same item? Name them.