Shopify - Formatting Product and Variant SKUs

If you are syncing your Shopify account to your Point of Sale System for the first time you may need adjust some of your product and variant SKUs in Shopify to ensure they are unique and match back to the correct item in your POS.  If you have received a data audit report from a member of our team or have used our self onboarding tool, this article will go over the different types of adjustments you may need to make. 

Things we will cover in this article:

How Accumula Handles an Initial Sync.

Types of SKU formatting issues: 

1. 1. Missing or Non Matching SKUS
   2. Duplicate SKUs in Shopify
   3. Duplicate SKUs in the Point of Sale System

If you do not address these formatting issues before syncing Accumula, you may run into inventory discrepancies later down the road since these items will not sync properly. 

How Accumula Handles an Initial Sync: 

Accumula reads the Shopify Variant SKUs and Barcodes and compares them against the following: 

Lightspeed Retail:

• System ID
• UPC
• EAN
• Custom SKU 
• Manufacturer SKU

Lightspeed Onsite: 

• Product P-# issued by Onsite
• Product Code

Heartland: 

• Item Number
• Custom Field (Typically the UPC)

Each SKU or Barcode must be unique both in the POS and in Shopify to ensure a unique match to the correct end points. 

Missing or non matching SKUs

Problem: 

This happens when a product in Shopify is either missing a SKU or the SKU it has cannot be traced back to a matching ID in your point of sale. If this is not addressed prior to syncing your account these items would remain unlinked and they will not be updated. 

This can also mean that if a product with a non matching or missing SKU is sold on Shopify, the order downloaded to the POS will have a line item that says "No Product Found". The order total will be correct but the inventory in the POS will not be subtracted because the system cannot find a matching product based on the SKU provided. 

How to correct this: 

Review the product in shopify and make note of the SKU. If the item exists in the POS make sure the SKUs match and are unique. 

Example: 

Your Shopify SKU

The Product in Lightspeed Retail: 

*If you have a product in your point of sale system that is inactive or archived but the sku is correct, you can either unarchive the product in your POS or delete the item in Shopify

Duplicate SKUs in Shopify: 

Problem: 

This happens when two or more products in Shopify share the same SKU.  The system will read the first item with the SKU and match that product accordingly, the secondary items sharing the same sku will remain ignored. This will cause unpredictable matches in the database because it is not guaranteed the first item visible on the product list is the first product that will be addressed by the system so it is recommend addressing all duplicates in Shopify whenever possible.  

How to correct this: 

Review the duplicate SKUs in Shopify. If an item is a legitimate duplicate you can delete the one you do not wish to keep. If the items should be unique, please update the SKU to make it unique. Be sure to update the SKUs in your POS as well so that Accumula can sync the items appropriately. 

Example: 

In this example, we can delete the "Copy of Arbor 37" Fish Bamboo Longboard - Wolf" 

Duplicate SKUs in the Point of Sale System: 

Problem: 

It is possible that a SKU in Shopify is found multiple times in your Point of Sale system. Similar to Duplicates in Shopify, this can cause unpredictable product syncs since the system will match to the first matching sku it finds and not search for additional matches. It is essential that each SKU be unique in order for the system to sync items appropriately. 

How to correct this: 

Review the duplicate SKUs in in your Point of Sale System. If an item is a legitimate duplicate you can archive the one you do not wish to keep or make the product inactive. If the items should be unique, please update the SKU to make it unique. Be sure to update the SKUs in your Shopify as well so that Accumula can sync the items appropriately. If you do not have a unique SKU, you can use the automatically generated product code from your point of sale system. 

Example: 

In this case we can either Archive one of these items in Lightspeed Retail or adjust the SKU if these two products are not the same. If you are using Lightspeed Onsite or Heartland, the process will be similar and changes will need to made in your POS directly.