You will see many mentions that GroovePacker requires that every product and product variant has a unique SKU and Barcode, but what exactly does this mean? Why is this necessary?
GroovePacker needs to be able to distinguish every item you sell from every other item you sell to ensure your team can get the correct items in every order.
The key piece of data that is used to identify products in GroovePacker is the SKU. No two items that are different, meaning GroovePacker will need to distinguish between them, should share the same SKU. This is what is meant by "unique".
A concrete example will help here. If you are selling "Ringer T-Shirts" and you have 3 sizes and 2 colors, you'll need 6 unique SKU's. These six SKUs might look like:
RINGERT-S-BLU
RINGERT-S-RED
RINGERT-M-BLU
RINGERT-M-RED
RINGERT-L-BLU
RINGERT-L-RED
You'll often hear the term "variant" used to describe the different variations of a type of item, in this case, the Ringer T-Shirt is the item and each size/color combination is a variant.
When a customer places an order for a small, blue Ringer T, GroovePacker will need to receive a SKU that is unique to this specific variation. If instead, the order showed the SKU "RINGERT" any time a Ringer t-shirt was ordered there would not be enough information to distinguish one from another.
Each unique SKU will need to have at least one unique barcode assigned. It will be unique because no other item in your product catalog will share the same barcode. (There are some super rare exceptions where different SKUs will share a barcode but this is nearly always true.) It's more common to have a case where the same item has multiple SKUs or aliases under which it is sold. These likely all share the same barcode.
The barcode can be any string of numbers and letters. The two most common barcodes we see are Registered UPC codes and SKU-Barcodes. Registered barcodes are guaranteed to be unique, not just unique in your own inventory, but unique across the inventory of other companies as well. This ensures that there are never conflicts when a retailer uses your barcode in their system. If you are not planning to distribute to other retailers you do not need to use registered barcodes for your own QC and Inventory purposes.
GroovePacker makes it possible to generate barcodes from your SKU's and print any barcode you have saved with your items very easily.
If you have a large inventory and you're trying to see where you stand with regard to having unique SKU and Barcodes assigned a common place to start is with a CSV or Excel export of your data. Once the data is exported you can find the relevant column and check to see if any of these values are missing.
You can identify cases where the same barcode has been used for multiple items by importing your product data into GroovePacker. You'll find the items that were sharing a barcode in the "New" list. The wind up there because after the barcode was assigned to one item it was not possible to assign it to a second. The "New" list contains items that do not yet have a barcode associated.