Will Etsy support SKUs in the near future?

[R. S.]

We're integrating Etsy with other systems and need to keep inventories in sync. The SKU is a necessary field for that since that's the only reliable shared "key". But of course Etsy doesn't support SKUs. Will it in the future?

[Chipit Prom]

Suggestion: use the listing_id as the SKU?

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On Jul 26, 2012, at 3:54 PM, R. S. wrote:

We're integrating Etsy with other systems and need to keep inventories in sync. The SKU is a necessary field for that since that's the only reliable shared "key". But of course Etsy doesn't support SKUs. Will it in the future?

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[R. S.]

Using the listing_id as SKU is bogus -- that assumes that you aren't using a SKU in other systems or as part of your existing processes. To force businesses to use the arbitrary listing_id as a SKU for how a company manages its products AND to force them to change the SKUs on their other systems (think eBay, Shopify, etc) to use the Etsy Listing ID is doubly bogus. Every other shopping cart platform supports the notion of a user-settable SKU. I know, I know. Etsy isn't a shopping cart platform. This is one of those things that makes that obvious.

[Chipit Prom]

Man, use your imagination. All you need is a place to store a string. How about storing the SKU in a tag "SKU_blahblah"

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[pierre lengow]

Hi,

To use SKU I change title to "title - SKU"
When I want to update products I do something like that (php) :

$sku = explode('-', trim($title));
$sku = $sku[sizeof($sku) - 1];

And I can know if it's the good product, but a realy sku field would make more sense...

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[david olick]

I don't believe it's really possible for Etsy to "manage" it's products as users can change details at any time.  Etsy is all about hand-made items, which don't usually have duplicates on other websites.  I'm not sure why you would need a shared key of a product on Etsy's website with another website.

Am I missing something?  I'm not sure what you're envisioning.  How do you think Etsy should manage it's inventory?

- David

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David Olick
Oriku Inc.

[MON KEY]

On Friday, July 27, 2012 3:40:50 PM UTC-4, david olick wrote:

Am I missing something?  I'm not sure what you're envisioning.  How do you think Etsy should manage it's inventory?

If I understand the OPs request correctly he has SKU (a unique identity) associated with a physical object.
He uses these uids to track identity for the item across different environments.

The Etsy environment doesn't have a canned way to let its users say,
 "This item i'm sharing on Etsy has an identity independent of the Etsy
 environment that identity is 1db089a9f84e14e95f11dcb5c57fa10d60aa84bb "

FWIW When manually listing items on Etsy I'm putting a uid at the bottom of the
description (something a regex can easily match) that I also put at the bottom
of eBay listings for the same item.

I too would like to have the ability to record uids when listing items via the API.

[david olick]

Ah, so in other words, a user would specifically put in a SKU if they were planning on selling the same object on a different website.

[MON KEY]

On Monday, July 30, 2012 11:45:49 AM UTC-4, david olick wrote:

Ah, so in other words, a user would specifically put in a SKU if they were planning on selling the same object on a different website.

A user would specifically advise Etsy of a SKU if they were (or were planning on) tracking the same object in one or more _environments_.
In this case, OP's use-case was tracking object identity across different website environments.
For others, an environment may include any one or more of the following:
 RDBMS, website, shelf in a garage, pencilled entry in notebook, iphone app, accounting program, etc.
The important thing being that for each of these environments that there be a mechanism for recording the unique identity of the object according to a common scheme.

[R. S.]

David - yes, exactly. That's our exact use case. We need to track this same item in another ecommerce system (yes, people also sell on eBay, etc.). So, the Listing ID doesn't work. The idea of using a "SKU_" string tag might work as long as we can query by tag. I'll have to look that up.

On Monday, July 30, 2012 11:45:49 AM UTC-4, david olick wrote:

Ah, so in other words, a user would specifically put in a SKU if they were planning on selling the same object on a different website.

[R. S.]

We're now trying this approach where we use the Materials field to includes the SKU with a special identifier "SKU:". but it seems that the Materials field only accepts alphanumeric + space and is not a general string field? According to the documentation, the Materials field should be a general string, but it looks like it's not accepting hyphens and other characters. Is this right?

On Thursday, July 26, 2012 4:54:48 PM UTC-4, R. S. wrote:

[Matt Graham]

Hi, yes, there are currently limitations on the characters allowed in the materials fields.

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[R. S.]

Can you change this back to a string? Or can you change your documentation for the API? It indicates all string values are accepted.

Are there any other fields (other than name and description) that are available for use as we suggest below? It's a bummer that Etsy doesn't have a SKU field and has these restrictions on the Tags and Materials fields as well. I just don't get it.

[Graeme Grant]

I've made the same request, even this week, for all string field with restrictions on lengths and legal characters many times but it goes unanswered.
 

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Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:01:21 -0700
From: rschme...@gmail.com
To: etsy-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Will Etsy support SKUs in the near future?

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[R. S.]

It is for this reason (lack of SKUs or any field that can support SKUs) that Etsy won't get any serious inventory management apps supporting it. Yes, we support it now, but we tell people they can't use SKUs, which is a HUGE problem given they use other inventory management systems that require a SKU field.

Can Etsy please allow arbitrary string in some field we can use? I don't understand the objection.

[Graeme Grant]

 Why so formal? Does it really require a special seperator character to be part of a marker?
 

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Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:28:11 -0700

From: rschme...@gmail.com
To: etsy-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Will Etsy support SKUs in the near future?

It is for this reason (lack of SKUs or any field that can support SKUs) that Etsy won't get any serious inventory management apps supporting it. Yes, we support it now, but we tell people they can't use SKUs, which is a HUGE problem given they use other inventory management systems that require a SKU field.

Can Etsy please allow arbitrary string in some field we can use? I don't understand the objection.

On Wednesday, August 22, 2012 5:15:51 PM UTC-4, Graeme wrote:

I've made the same request, even this week, for all string field with restrictions on lengths and legal characters many times but it goes unanswered.
 

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Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:01:21 -0700
From: rschme...@gmail.com
To: etsy-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Will Etsy support SKUs in the near future?

Can you change this back to a string? Or can you change your documentation for the API? It indicates all string values are accepted.

Are there any other fields (other than name and description) that are available for use as we suggest below? It's a bummer that Etsy doesn't have a SKU field and has these restrictions on the Tags and Materials fields as well. I just don't get it.

On Wednesday, August 22, 2012 4:54:20 PM UTC-4, Matt Graham wrote:

Hi, yes, there are currently limitations on the characters allowed in the materials fields.

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 8:38 PM, R. S. <rschme...@gmail.com> wrote:

We're now trying this approach where we use the Materials field to includes the SKU with a special identifier "SKU:". but it seems that the Materials field only accepts alphanumeric + space and is not a general string field? According to the documentation, the Materials field should be a general string, but it looks like it's not accepting hyphens and other characters. Is this right?

On Thursday, July 26, 2012 4:54:48 PM UTC-4, R. S. wrote:

We're integrating Etsy with other systems and need to keep inventories in sync. The SKU is a necessary field for that since that's the only reliable shared "key". But of course Etsy doesn't support SKUs. Will it in the future?

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[R. S.]

Many SKUs use non-alpha characters, especially hyphens. You can't even enter a SKU that looks like ABC-123 in any of those fields! As long as it looks like ABC123 then it would work, but ABC-123 ABC_123 or many other SKUs like that won't. It's not about the separator between the keyword SKU and the SKU, it's about the SKU! Looks like many folks here have never used / heard of SKUs...

[Chipit Prom]

You can base64 encode it to get pure alphanum

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[Matt Graham]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 9:28 PM, R. S. <rschme...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can Etsy please allow arbitrary string in some field we can use? I don't understand the objection.

We are considering adding such a field, but it would be as part of a larger inventory management effort. We don't want to add something quickly for this request, then have to change or remove it later because it doesn't fit with the other work we're doing.

[R. S.]

That's not a bad idea, but the problem is that our users have to enter the SKU data themselves (they know the SKUs, we don't)... we don't enter it for them. So we would have to tell them to Base64 encode it on their own in that field, which is not really an option. We just need a place where our users can enter the SKU and we can pick it up, but it sounds like that will be a long time coming for Etsy, and in the meantime, they've restricted all the other string fields so that we can't enter non-alphas. Even though I understand why the SKU field won't be added, I still don't get why Materials and Tags fields are limited to only alphas.

[david olick]

My guess is that it's so the materials and tags are searchable.  By forcing it to only be letters, you make it much more likely that someone searching for a product like yours will find your product.

There may be other reasons, but I'm sure they could tell you themselves.

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[R. S.]

At the very least, they should enable hyphens, periods, colons and commas. That will work for us.