At it's heart, an Alias is just another SKU for the same physical item. If you have a product with 3 SKU's you can choose one of them and say it's the "real" SKU or "Primary" SKU and the other two are Aliases for it. In GroovePacker all SKU's for a product are basically interchangeable. The only thing that sets the primary SKU apart is that it's the one displayed in lists and in Scan and Pack. Often the primary SKU will be the one used in your own online store and SKUs used in other marketplaces and manufactures SKUs are added as aliases.
We've given each product in GroovePacker an internal product ID so that we can keep track of it while SKUs are added and changed. Each ID number represents a physical item. Normally this ID isn't thought of or mentioned. In fact, it only really comes up when we talk about aliases.
We can associate as many skus (and barcodes) with an ID as we like.
The only restriction is that each SKU and Barcode assigned must not already be associated to another product ID.
This makes it impossible to have two different product ID's with the same barcode. This is a good thing, because if two items that were actually different shared a barcode it would be impossible to know which was scanned and shipped and which to deduct inventory for etc. There is actually an exception to this rule. If a "shared barcode" may be required for your case you can learn more about that here.
If you have two SKUs that are really aliases for the same product then they will need to be scannable using the same barcode. In this case, the barcode and both SKUs are added to the same product ID. Now when either of those SKUs appear in an order you can scan them using the same barcode.
The only case where this approach will not work is when you actually have two physical items, requiring separate IDs, and separate inventory counts. In that case, a "shared barcode" would be required.
If you're creating or editing a CSV to import your products you'll want to setup your file with columns for each SKU. The column headers will appear as follows:
SKU1 | SKU2 | Barcode | Other data | Other data
More info on importing Aliases via CSV and be found here.
In addition to adding alias SKU's in bulk using a CSV it is also possible to add them manually. You can use the links at the top of a product's detail page to either make the currently visible item an alias of another by using the "Make this product an alias of another" link , or you can select "Choose products that are aliases of this product" and you'll have the option to search for and select one or more items that are aliases of the current item.
Video Transcription
Let's look at product aliases and GroovePacker and how they work. Aliases are used in GroovePacker when you have multiple skews that reference the same physical item. In the ideal world you don't only have one skew per item, but a lot of times you'll find that other marketplaces call your items by different names and you don't always have control over it. Opt aliases allow you to have any of these skews reference the same item so that inventory gets deducted correctly when those items are sold. You'll often recognize the need for product aliasing when you add new items to your inventory or begin selling in new marketplaces and orders come in and are put on hold. When you look at the on-hold order, you might see new items in the order that have a skew that's different than your normal skew and often they won't have a barcode. This is a typical case right here. I know that I have this item selling under a different skew and I've been selling it for some time, but this skew is new to groove packer so it recognizes it as a new item. All I need to do is alias it to the existing item. So groove packer knows it's the same thing. So to do this we open up the item and we say make this product an aliase of another product. It's possible to do the exact same thing by opening up the master product and saying choose aliases of this product then we would go and select this item. When you create an alias essentially what you're doing is copying the skew and barcode over to the master product or the one that you're going to keep. You could actually do the same thing by copying and pasting, but the aliasing makes it really quick, especially if you have several aliases for the same product. In this case, if I search for this product I find three different items. The original item is the one that I was shipping before. It has a status of active and it does have a barcode. These two new items came in with different skews and no barcode. So what I can do is open up the master item and then select these two alias items from the list. Let's do that real quick. We'll say choose aliases of this product and then we start our search. We can verify that they're both new and they don't have their barcode. We select both of these and then we hit save and close to do the aliasing. You can see that those other items didn't have barcodes so nothing is brought over in that field, but their skews are brought over here to complete this item. So now when orders come in with any of these three skews they'll all reference this same item. If I search for the same supplement product again we now only see one result, the master product that we created. And if we go back to the orders list and we look at the order that was on hold we see that it's now awaiting. And it's referencing the new master item. And that's pretty much all there is to aliasing and groove backer. Thanks for watching. Bye.