How to Format Your Inventory Data

This article will cover what clean data is, how to clean up your inventory, resolve structural differences, and best practices for naming conventions as well as SKU generation.

What is clean data and why is having clean data important?

Clean data is usually a term used in data analytics to describe information that has been cleansed of incomplete, inaccurate, irrelevant, or incorrectly formatted data. What this means, in the retail world, is cleaning your product catalog of items that have inaccurate details, are no longer relevant to your business, you’re no longer selling, or items that have structural issues. 

Why is it important to resolve these kinds of errors? Having clean data ultimately increases your overall productivity and improves any analytics that you’re using to see how your store is performing. You’ll spend less time “fixing” products that don’t match properly or have incorrect information after the first pass through cleaning your data. However, data cleaning is still something you should do regularly, especially when you have items you will no longer be carrying in store or online. We recommend cleaning up your inventory list at least once a season.

How to Clean Up Your Inventory

It can be easy to clean up your inventory! With bulk editing features, you can easily delete products you will no longer be carrying in your inventory, changing product data and descriptions to fit naming conventions, and make sure that your quantities are up to date. This may involve doing a manual count of your inventory. 

Each eCommerce and Point of Sale we work with offers different ways of doing bulk edits. Check out these related support articles for each platform for more details.

 

How to Resolve Inventory Structural Differences

To use SKU IQ, it’s important that your inventory be same-for-same. That means that if you have a product with variants on one side, you’ll need to have that item structured the exact same way on the other side for linking to be possible.

For example, in the image below, the Gold Braided Frame is a parent product on the eCommerce, with three shape variants (square, rectangle, round). On the other side, on the Point of Sale platform, they are set up as individual items. Even though these items may have the same SKU numbers, they will be unmatchable due to the structure of the product.

The best way to resolve inventory format differences is to delete or archive the item(s) that are not structured properly. You can either do this on your Point of Sale or on your eCommerce platform. If you have the item in separate products on your eCommerce platform, we recommend archiving or deleting those products from your eCommerce platform rather than on the Point of Sale. This is entirely dependent on how you want your products to look on your website. If you would prefer the items to be listed individually on the website, delete or archive the items on the eCommerce and re-add the products as individual items. Once done you can rerun the link report from your SKU IQ Dashboard.

Alternatively, you may delete from one side or the other and then PUSH the remaining item(s) over to the opposite platform to save time. Pushing an item using SKU IQ will automatically create a link with the matching copy. See more about how to push items here.

Keep in mind that there can be multiple ways that variants can be determined - either by Size or Color, or a combination of the two attributes. If you have an item that has different sizes on one platform, but it is listed by size and color on the other, you will need to change the structure of one of them to match appropriately. 

Naming Conventions

This part is entirely optional, but can increase your productivity and organization of your inventory. Many merchants will have naming conventions for their products. This may include having the brand or manufacturer name, the model number of an item, and the actual title or description of the item. For example, this Nike shoe could be named like this:

Nike DH2925-001 Blk/Blk

With this naming convention, you have the Manufacturer/Brand of the item, the style code, and the coloration of the item as the description. This would be a good way to name this particular shoe, while having the size of the shoes be the variants. 

You can certainly have the items named completely different on your Point of Sale versus your eCommerce as well. A good title on your website should be eye-catching, but still helps a customer identify what they’re looking for. The same example of the shoe is titled “Nike Force 1 LE” on Nike’s website. While this title explains to some what the shoe is, adding more information like a subtitle (in this case “Little Kids Shoes”) can help a customer more easily identify the product. A more descriptive title would be “Nike Force 1 LE Kid’s Shoe in Black”.

 

Let’s look at another example. This is named “Nike Sportswear Tech Fleece Windrunner” on the Nike Website.

The title of this product on the website is a bit more descriptive than the shoes are. It lets the customer know that they are looking at a Fleece item, more than likely an item of clothing - as indicated by the “Sportswear” part of the title. How you could title this in your Point of Sale could be:

Nike CW4298-602 PnkOx/Blk 

You could also title the product on your website something like “Nike Women’s Sportswear Tech Fleece Windrunner in Pink Oxford & Black”. This is a descriptive name, letting the customer know that the brand is Nike, it’s a Women’s product, that the product is a tech fleece windrunner, and that it comes in the pink oxford and black coloration. 

Ultimately, naming conventions are entirely up to how you want your items to appear in both your Point of Sale and on your eCommerce website. 

 

 

Generating Your Own SKUs

Generating your own stock keeping units can be extremely important for organization of your products. If you choose to generate your own SKUs, having a general naming convention for SKUs is important as well. SKUs, or stock keeping units, are unique identifiers that you can generate yourself! Unlike barcodes or UPCs that are set by manufacturers, you can create your own SKU numbers to fit your business needs.

SKU numbers can be any length, use any alphanumeric character, and are free to generate yourself! Not only can you use SKUs to help identify a product, you can also generate them in a way that helps you map out where the items are in your store - this can be very helpful when you don’t have back stock of products and need to find an item quickly to ship off for an online sale.

Here’s a handy way to generate your own SKU numbers!

1. Start with a high level identifier

This should be the first 2 to 3 characters of your SKU number. It should represent a high level identifier like the overall category of the product, what department it would be found in, or where you’ve purchased the product from. You could also use the vendor of the product, the manufacturer, or product type (e.g. a book versus a toiletry item).

2. Assign unique Identifiers to the middle characters

This part of the SKU could be the style number of an item, the color, item type, any subcategories or subdepartments you may want to use, etc. This is anything that makes sense to you for your business.

3. Finish the SKU with Sequential Numbers

Using sequential numbers is helpful when it comes to identifying different variants or for helping you identify whether a product is older or newer. You could also use a shortened version of a color or size here as well. 

 

To put this into practice, we’ll take this generic black shirt.

Let’s take some notes about this shirt:

Brand - Gildan

Color - Black

Available Sizes - S, M, L, XL

So how should we make a SKU out of this? 

Here’s an example:

GLBLKMD

The GIL part comes from the brand of the item, Gildan. The BLK part is the color of the item and the SM indicates that it’s a small size. Similarly, a medium could be written GILBLKMD and a large as GILBLKLG. 

Like naming conventions, generating your own SKUs is entirely up to how you think the organization should go and what is best for your business. Some merchants will populate the UPC number into the SKU field instead, and that is perfectly fine. While the UPC is just a number, it can be more intuitive for you to use that instead. It's entirely up to you!