SKU: Inventory unit, the minimum available unit for inventory control.
SPU: standardized product unit, which is a combination of a set of standardized information.
Category: classification tree. There are two types commonly used in e-commerce: front-end display and back-end goods. Prospect category refers to the category displayed to consumers, which will change according to the season, sales strategy and activities; The background category belongs to the basic data and cannot be changed at will. When adding a SKU, you need to select a background category and bind it.
Attributes: divided into key attributes, sales attributes and non-key attributes. Key attribute refers to the attribute that can uniquely determine the product, and must be entered. Sales attribute is a special attribute that constitutes SKU, or specification attribute. The following figure shows the composition of the commodity module:
Second, category management and brand management.
Category management
The background category is oriented to merchants or supply chain personnel, and manages a lot of data such as commodity attributes, sales attributes and brands on the basic category; The foreground category is user-oriented, which is convenient for users to find goods and can be adjusted according to the needs of operation.
The role of category management:
(1) It is convenient to publish and manage goods quickly, and supply chain personnel or platform merchants can manage goods better.
(2) Standardized goods and services. For the e-commerce platform, the category definition basically determines the scope of goods and services of the platform.
(3) It is beneficial to warehouse management, and reasonable commodity category management can also facilitate the warehouse to manage goods by location.
(4) Daily operational requirements. In the operation of e-commerce, commodity clustering is needed, and scientific category management can reduce the work of operation management.
From the perspective of channel dimension:
(1) The foreground category can support settings of different clients. Due to the differences of all users, PC/H5/APP and other channels can set the foreground category and operate independently.
(2) Support platform merchants to customize store front-end categories. Each merchant has different products and positioning, and has different category operation requirements.
Dimensions defined from the foreground category:
(1) The foreground category corresponds to the background category, which can be freely combined and dynamically adjusted.
(2) The prospect category directly corresponds to brands and commodities, which is suitable for small businesses with fewer commodities.
(3) The foreground category corresponds to the combination of background leaf category and attribute.
The foreground category is different from the fixed background category, which is flexible in editing, overlapping, deleting, changing at any time and taking effect regularly.
brand management
Brand management process:
We should pay attention to the following two points.
(1) For a new brand, the relevant fields generally include: Logo, Chinese name, English name, place of origin, remarks and status (available or unavailable).
(2) The relationship between brand and category is also one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one.
The advantages of brand-related categories are: improving the convenience of releasing goods and avoiding mistakes; Standardization of brand management; It is faster when searching and filtering goods.
Third, attribute management.
(1) Key attribute: an attribute that can identify a unique "product". A key attribute can be one attribute or a combination of multiple attributes.
(2) Sales attribute: also known as specification attribute, it is a special attribute that constitutes SKU, which will affect the buyer's purchase and the seller's inventory management.
(3) Non-key attributes: attributes other than key attributes and sales attributes.
The definition of attributes is of great significance to a good consumption experience and plays a vital role in search, indexing and screening. The ability to search commodities and handle titles and categories depends largely on commodity attributes, and the basic data of conditional screening 1 are also commodity attributes and specification attributes. Perfecting commodity attributes is very important for a good user experience.
Attributes include attribute names and attribute values, which are generally set as required or not selected under a specific category.
Design of Commodity Attribute System
Attribute editing:
Attribute editing is mainly used to define the attributes of the currently classified goods. In attribute management, there are two product methods, attribute grouping and attribute inheritance.
Fourth, SKU and SPU
Example of relationship between SKU and SPU:
There is also a special concept: combined SKU, which mainly solves the sales problem of combined goods. All attributes of the combined SKU inherit from the independent SKU. Combination SKU is different from packaging promotion. Package promotion will display multiple products in the order, and the combined SKU is a product at the front desk. The application scenario of combined SKU is mainly to add gifts and combined sales, which is different from the commodity packaging at the front desk. When an order is parsed into an invoice, the merged SKU needs to be parsed into a SKU, which is convenient for warehouse delivery and inventory update.
Coding problem
What flows in the e-commerce system are the SPU codes and SKU codes generated by the system.
There are two barcode schemes in the warehouse. When editing goods, there is usually a bar code field to fill in, that is, the SKU in the system corresponds to 69 codes. This bar code is mainly used for purchasing and warehousing.
(1) All self-built barcodes. Using our own SKU code to manage goods needs to be relabeled before warehousing, which is very expensive.
(2) Goods with 69 yards continue to use 69 yards, and goods without 69 yards and goods that cannot be assigned to a single code are re-labeled with SKU codes. Do the corresponding barcode mapping in warehouse management.
Verb (abbreviation of verb) commodity editor
When adding goods, SPU and SKU are related through sales attributes. When the same SPU is displayed in the foreground, it can use the same product details, but it is mapped to a specific SKU through canonical attributes. Associate purchases through suppliers, and then affect the inventory of SKUs in the warehouse. Suppliers cannot choose when adding SKUs, but they can add associations in the purchasing system. Key attributes and attribute values of many commodities can be added in the procurement system. The key attributes and attribute values of commodities can be used for commodity search and screening, and a good attribute definition plays a vital role in shortening the customer decision tree.
SKU composition:
The most common shopping contact of users is the product display page, and the basic information of the product list page and the product details page are obtained from the commodity center. The product structure of e-commerce websites is similar. The goods on Taobao and Tmall websites are displayed in SPU form, while the goods on JD.COM are displayed in SKU form. The two processing methods have their own advantages and disadvantages (when Taobao switches specifications, the product details remain unchanged, while when JD.COM switches specifications, the title and details page will change).
When editing commodity information in the background, these contents are also set and stored: category, title, brand, commodity attributes, specifications, price, inventory, SKU information, commodity map, detailed description of commodities and logistics information.
Specification and price information
It should be noted that when setting specifications, it mainly includes color and size. In order to support different user needs, specifications can be edited after selection. After the specifications are determined one by one. The price can be set separately. After the specifications are determined, the price, inventory and business SKU can be set separately. Taobao or Tmall can also add bar codes, or unify pricing and inventory. The main purpose of filling in the merchant SKU is to facilitate the corresponding to the specific SKU. For self-operated e-commerce, the SKU code is filled in here, and the inventory cannot be set. You can directly synchronize the SKU inventory of the warehouse. SKU name and commodity name in the system are different. SKU names are convenient for management and circulation in the system, while commodity names have certain marketing properties.
The products on the platform will set the platform price and market price. Platform price mainly means that when goods have different specifications and prices, only one price appears in the search filter list, which is equivalent to the average price of goods. Gross weight, length, width and other data are mainly set for logistics. Self-operated e-commerce companies that build their own warehouses generally enter these data in the SKU data layer and call them directly. The product number is the product code, and the barcode that will be scanned when shopping in the mall is the product number. The article number and SKU code are different, and the goods with the same commodity code may be different SKUs with different specifications, so we can't directly manage SKUs with article numbers.
Commodity map, detailed description of commodities, logistics information.
In addition to the thumbnail images of commodities with different specifications, the commodity map also includes the main map of commodities, which generally requires high quality pictures, including the overall map and the detailed map. Commodity master map is a necessary weapon to attract customers' attention. Whether it is a list page or an activity page, customers are concerned about the price, mainly the main picture of the goods. When putting it on the shelves, we should carefully choose the main picture of the goods.
The product details page now generally distinguishes between the computer version and the mobile version. Because their usage scenarios and devices are different, the key pages are different. In order to better display product features, we can provide different product detail page templates and support rich text editing.
When selecting freight service, you should select the corresponding logistics template. In order processing, freight is calculated according to a specific logistics template.