Amazon Business Owner

A Quick Guide To Amazon SKU 2022

This month, our team at Clearinity kicks off our quarter-long blog series on Amazon ecommerce inventory. We aim to offer you, our dear readers – tips, tricks, and leading solutions to running your Amazon fulfillment procedures.

Our experience working with diverse ecommerce companies has helped us understand Amazon’s unique business processes which impact how an entrepreneur approaches both inventory and technology.

While unique processes can confuse how you want to:

  • Scale your business
  • Make your business available on omnichannel platforms
  • Sign up your business for Amazon

Our blog series aims to equally educate, inform, and guide ecommerce business owners like you around Amazon’s leading inventory paradigms. 

Amazon: A Powerhouse Marketplace

Amazon is one of the largest ecommerce marketplaces. With almost 2 Million sellers, Amazon has become a coveted selling channel for many ecommerce business owners. Shockingly though, of those 2 Million sellers only 8% have joined in the last 2 years. While Amazon is not difficult to sell on, learning Amazon’s key concepts will give you the advantage to stick with Amazon and make it the most profitable for your company.

 One critical piece of data that differs from the rest of Amazon is the SKU. At Amazon, they use a concept called ASIN and FNSKU

In this blog, you’ll learn:

  • What are SKUs?
  • What challenges will you experience when you create SKUs for your inventory?
  • What are the best practices when you make your SKUs?

Take better control over your products in this powerhouse platform and start learning the ins and outs behind SKUs.

What Are SKUs?

Amazon uses SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) as product identifiers for inventory files. These are treated just like normal vendor SKUs.

As unique alphanumeric codes, SKUs ensure your products are associated with the appropriate product detail page on Amazon’s catalog helping you:

  • Track your business stock
  • Identify items that you sell
  • Secure better inventory management

You can choose to generate this barcode for yourself or let Amazon do the work for you.

Here are some of the items you must take note of about SKUs:

  • They are limited to 40 characters in length
  • They include details such as size, color, and other pertinent information about your product.
  • They are only visible in your seller central account.

What is an Amazon ASIN?

As an eCommerce seller on Amazon, you must understand the difference between SKU and ASIN codes. This concept is crucial to succeeding in the powerhouse marketplace.

As mentioned earlier, SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) are used for listings for better tracking, identification, and securing inventory management processes. 

ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) on the other hand are unique product codes used to categorize all products in Amazon in the same category on a global scale. 

What Is The Purpose of SKUs?

SKUs are a critical piece of data for your business. This helps you effectively organize your products by size, color, and type. Thus, making it easier for your staff to pick, pack, and ship your products.

SKUs in your inventory management system will help you:

  • Manage the inventory you sell across multiple channels.
  • Make strategic inventory forecast decisions
  • Track location for your items
  • Improve your communication with vendors

Generally, SKUs aim your business to improve your inventory accuracy making it easier to scale your business.

What are SKU best Practices for Amazon Sellers?

We’ve listed down six best practices on creating Amazon SKUs to help you build better barcodes for your business:

  1. Take charge of creating SKUs for your business instead of asking Amazon to do it for you. Do this to standardize your system better.
  2. Make sure you only use one SKU per product/type. This avoids confusion in your people, processes, and technology.  
  3. Create SKUs in a consistent format. This makes technology integration easier, faster, and effective.
  4. Do not use leading zeros as the software often disregards zeros on their system. This might risk your business experiencing issues along the way.
  5. Prevent from using symbols or letters that look like numbers as this might cause technology or software to read your product spreadsheet correctly.
  6. Avoid using letters that look like numbers. 

The Bottomline

The convenience and reach that Amazon offers to ecommerce business owners is unrivaled compared to other ecommerce marketplaces.

As an entrepreneur living in this critical sales channel, we highly suggest that you take the time to learn and master the ins and outs of the platform. By doing this, you get to both organize and sell your products more effectively.

Our team at Clearinity wants to make sure that you understand the crucial points to sell on Amazon. We want to set your business up for success.