What are parent_skus and skus?

Created Nov 16, 2022

1 min read

What are parent_skus?

Parent_sku - The parent_sku groups multiple skus together into a single listing.

You can think of the parent_sku as the product sku without the variation information. For example: ‘TOY-TRUK-50-RED’ becomes ‘TOY-TRUK’ after removing the size (50) and the color (RED).

sku - The stock-keeping unit for your item. The sku must be unique for each product. Your SKU should provide useful information about the item to make it easily identifiable. If you don’t have a sku and don’t want to create one, you can instead just provide random valid characters.

Note: You MUST have a sku for a listing with no variables. You MUST have both a parent_sku and sku for a listing with variables.

How do you format parent_skus

Both Parent_skus and skus are formatted the same

  • Max 32 characters
  • Cannot use ~ ` ! @ # $ % ^ & * - _ = + \ | / ? . , > <
  • Cannot end with ( [ {
  • Cannot have spaces

Examples of parent_skus

Below is a product with 4 variations

Image showing a product with four variations

Below are 4 individual products

Image showing a four products with no variations

What errors might you see with parent_skus?

Invalid SKU

For more information visit the Documentation pages:

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