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For example, if a company provides the SKU to advertise a certain discounted refrigerator, shoppers cannot readily compare price of the same refrigerator with other retailers, based on the SKU alone. This stops competitors from matching the advertised prices and luring away customers. In contrast, universal product codes (UPCs Universal Product Codes (UPCs) are same, regardless of which business is selling the products in question.
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Always ensure that the SKUs and UPC codes are not the same. Important: Let the SKU identify the product traitscharacteristics, and the UPC code identify the manufacturer (first six numbers), item (next five characters), and check digit (last number.) The check digit is usually formulated by adding and/or multiplying multiple digits in the code to show that the UPC code is valid. |
Example of usage of SKUs in
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modern retail
SKUs are making the shopping experience more efficient than ever before. For example, earlier store sales force would have had to visually scour the back stockroom, to hunt for a specific model of shoes in the accurate size of the customer. But now they can enter the SKU in an inventory management system, and know instantly if stock is available and where it is located.
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Codes must be logically understandable. For example, to sell cosmetics from different brands, a cascade chart for the information to be presented has to be prepared. Begin by taking the biggest set of information about your item first – in this case, ‘Cosmetics’ – and call it set ‘C’. Then you look at the next most relevant subset, for example, ‘Lipsticks’. Let us call that set ‘L’. Then you ask, what brand does this lipstick belong to? What colour is it? And so on. Keep . It is probable, that a typical SKU for pink, Revlon lipsticks - in this case - would look like == CL-REV-PNK-001. Keep adding attributes till you can uniquely identify that particular lipstick in your warehouse using only the code. Stop adding the questions as soon as this unique identification is possible.
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