Once a shop carries more than a few dozen products, product names alone are no longer enough. Two incense products with similar names, several candle sizes or different stone variants become difficult to manage without a stable identification system.
Selling online? Our guide to preparing an online esoteric catalogue brings together useful products and tools for your business.
SKU: your internal reference
An SKU is a reference created by a business to organise its own catalogue. It can encode a category, brand, size or sequence. It is not intended to be a universal standard: its purpose is to help tills, inventory systems and staff identify products quickly.
GTIN and EAN: standardised identification
A GTIN uniquely identifies a product according to GS1 standards. EAN-13 is one common format used in barcodes at points of sale. For a brand that wants to sell through several retailers or marketplaces, genuine GS1 identification makes listings easier to manage.
GS1 France states that membership provides a company prefix and allows businesses to create the GTINs they need. Since 2019, a GTIN assigned to a product must not be reused to identify a different new product.
Establish an SKU naming convention
Avoid references that are too long and information that may change, such as price. A format like BRAND-CATEGORY-NUMBER may be sufficient. What matters is that each code remains unique and understandable.
One variant, one reference
A red candle and an otherwise identical black candle should not share an SKU if their stock is tracked separately. The same applies to sizes and packaging formats. Each genuinely distinct inventory unit must be identifiable without ambiguity.
Clean up the catalogue before growing
Before importing hundreds of products into a till system or ERP, remove duplicates and standardise brands, categories and units. The cost of a poorly structured catalogue increases with every new sales channel.
This goes hand in hand with reliable stocktaking and checking supplier deliveries.
Sources
GS1 France — Identification standards · GS1 France — Obtaining GTIN/EAN codes