November 25, 2009
>SKUs are retailer defined stock keeping units. A “SKU” is the unique identifier that you, merchants, place on your inventory to distinguish an individual item/product_ID within your accounting, warehousing and inventory systems. When you send inventory to Shipwire, each unique shippable item needs to be labeled with the SKU ID. Your Shipwire account includes a product catalog wizard that makes it is easy to inform Shipwire of new SKUs and tell us attributes such as description, dimensions, weight and value (for customs, international shipping and insurance).
Shipwire made improvements to the product catalog to make it much easier to edit SKU level details.
Now most description and value information can be changed in real-time. So if your description changes or your retail or wholesale costs change, you can quickly make a change. If a SKU change involves the product’s dimensions or weight, it will be submitted for a quick review by Shipwire Merchant Services. We do this to ensure that the values you input in the product wizard match what the actual dim/weight of the item is. If there is not a match you could get incorrect shipping rates or display incorrect shipping rates in your shopping cart if you have our real-time shipping rates integrated.
If you do B2B or wholesale shipping, we recommend you familiarize yourself with our Master Carton FAQ. Shipping in bulk can save you a mountain of cash on your warehouse handling.