Understanding Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) validation

Use this overview to help you understand the Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) validation that can occur when adding or modifying products or product variants.

For SKU validation to occur, Enforce SKU uniqueness must be enabled in the Administration section of the Product Management application. In this situation, when a SKU is specified, the system validates that it is unique across the Global and all of the Sales catalogs.

When Enforce SKU uniqueness option is enabled

When a new product is added or an existing product is modified from the Global catalog or a Sales catalog:

When a product or variant SKU is added or modified. During the Save action, Product SKU uniqueness is validated against all other published product SKU and published variant SKU fields in the Global and in each Sales catalog:
If the SKU is unique, the product and SKU field are saved
If the SKU is not unique and the SKU is already in use by a product or variant SKU of another product, the SKU validation prevents you from saving and an error message is displayed: The SKU value '{value of sku}' is already used in another SKU field for product {ID}
When a new product is added or an existing product is updated with the Orckestra Commerce Cloud API, the SKU validation is also performed before updating the SKU
validation is not performed when the SKU value is empty
Changing the SKU attribute in a Sales catalog that inherits from the Global catalog

When the Sales catalog inherits from the Global catalog, and a SKU attribute is added or updated for a product or one of its variants in a Sales catalog:

the SKU value is updated for the product or the variant at the Global level
the SKU value is updated for the product or the variant in other Sales catalogs that inherits from global where the product or variant exists

When you click Save or Publish, a warning message is displayed in a pop-up as follows:

When a Sales catalog inherits from the Global catalog, the SKU values are validated against existing SKU values in the Global catalog:

the SKU uniqueness is validated against the existing published product SKU values in the Global catalog
validation is performed when a product draft is saved and during the publish action
validation is performed when adding or updating SKU for a product at the Global or in a Sales catalog
validation is performed for other products and any product variants
if the SKU is already in use by another product or variant or one of the product's variants, the draft is not saved and an error message appears
if the SKU is not already in use, the draft is saved
the SKU is read-only in a Sales catalog
Changing the SKU attribute in a Sales catalog that does not inherit from the Global catalog

If the Sales catalog does not inherit from the Global catalog then the SKU attribute is not copied for that product or variant in the Global or other Sales catalogs.

When SKU validation is enabled and the sales catalog does not inherit from the global, the SKU values are validated against existing SKU values in that Sales catalog:

SKU values are validated against the existing published product or variant SKUs in the sales catalog
if the catalog is set back to inherit from global, the product values including SKU are overridden
Changing or updating a SKU attribute in the Global catalog

When the SKU attribute is added or updated for a product or one of its variants in the Global catalog:

the SKU value is updated for the product or the variant in all sales scopes that inherit from the global if the product or variant exists
there is a change notification in the Sales catalog
when reviewing the change notification in the Sales catalog, the SKU value set at the global is enforced and the user is unable to apply another value

Copying a Product

When you copy a product, the SKU value is not copied.

When Enforce SKU uniqueness option is disabled in Orckestra Commerce Cloud

When you add or modify a product SKU or variant SKU with a value that is already in use:

no SKU validation is performed by the system during the publishing process
the SKU and product are saved and published

Changing the SKU value of a product in an inheriting sales catalog, when the option Enforce SKU uniqueness is disabled, does not update the values of any other inheriting sales catalog or the global catalog.

When Enforce SKU uniqueness is disabled, you can save a product with a SKU that is already in use by another product or variant SKU field. The system does not prevent you from adding a product or variant SKU that is already in use by another product or variant when creating or modifying a product.