Digital Lexicon Hub

An internal alphanumeric code a seller assigns to each distinct product variant to identify, track and manage it in inventory.

SKUs give inventory, ecommerce, finance and advertising systems a common key for each sellable item, so stock levels, margins and ad performance can be reported and optimized at the level of a specific product variant.

A clothing retailer codes a medium navy cotton shirt as TSH-COT-NAV-M, uses that SKU as the id in its Google Merchant Center feed and joins Shopping ads data to stock and cost data by SKU to pause ads for low-stock variants.

SKUs are seller-specific, so the same product carries different SKUs at different retailers and they cannot replace GTINs for marketplace matching. Inconsistent naming, reused codes or too many variants make catalogs hard to maintain.

Each unique combination of attributes such as size, color, material or pack size gets its own SKU, often built from readable segments for category, attribute and variant. Unlike a UPC, which follows GS1 rules and is shared across retailers, a SKU is defined by the seller. Google Merchant Center recommends the SKU as the product id, limited to 50 characters. SKU-level data supports Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and Average Order Value (AOV) analysis.