Product ID vs SKU

This is for:

Developer

In this article, we’ll discuss the difference between a product Id and Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) and some of the rules around using them in your setup.

SKU

An sku (stock keeping unit) is a unique Id used to distinguish each product from all of the other size, color, pattern, material, age, group, gender variants.

Product ID

A productId in Qubit’s data collection context is an Id used to identify a product, normally covering all of its size, color, pattern, and material variants.

Warning

The value in product.productId must NOT match the value in product.sku.

productId can be different for different colors if it makes sense to do that. For example, if a website typically presents different colors of the same product as distinct items on the product listing page or linked product carousels, it makes sense to have a different product Id for same product with different colors.

Products might have other Ids such as UPC, EAN, GTIN, Item Group Ids, but that level of detail is not required. It is perfectly acceptable to only capture the productId and sku.

Example combining product ID and SKU

Here’s an example dataset that shows how the same product of 2 colors, Bettle Blue and Lipstick Red, has 2 distinct productIds for each color and 4 distinct skus for each color/size combination:

[{
  "productId": "SB1799B_BeetleBlue",
  "sku": "5056001272446",
  "name": "Lateral Run Vest",
  "size": "S"
}, {
  "productId": "SB1799B_LipstickRed",
  "sku": "5056001272439",
  "name": "Lateral Run Vest",
  "size": "S"
}, {
  "productId": "SB1799B_BeetleBlue",
  "sku": "5056001272323",
  "name": "Lateral Run Vest",
  "size": "M"
}, {
  "productId": "SB1799B_LipstickRed",
  "sku": "5056001272316",
  "name": "Lateral Run Vest",
  "size": "M"
}]

It would be OK to use SB1799B in the above example as well but you should be aware that this will affect which products show up in your recommendations feed. For example, if you share the same Id across all colors, we will only show one color variant in the feed. If you use different Ids for each color variant, we’ll show each of the product’s color variants in the feed.