Grouping SKUs
Understand the purpose of SKU groups as well as how they're defined, managed, and associated with products
Last updated
Understand the purpose of SKU groups as well as how they're defined, managed, and associated with products
Last updated
A represents a collection of products with similar compliance requirements. SKU groups store product compliance data to use when calculating taxes, determining landed cost, identifying goods at international borders, creating invoices, and numerous other downstream operations.
Tax codes, export control classification numbers, dangerous goods handling requirements, and delivery confirmation requirements are just some of the product compliance data held in SKU groups.
You can use SKU groups to:
SKU groups minimize the complexity of product compliance. You're no longer solely responsible for researching and defining product data with SKU groups.
When you use this resource, you don't have to know your product's tax code, country-specific tariff codes, or other arcane data. Digital River uses its product classification services to help you identify these values.
SKU groups can also simplify the process of managing product data.
If you use product details and SKU groups in or , you don't have to persist any basic product data in Digital River's system.
SKU groups allow you to open new markets with less effort.
Similarly, new data added to existing SKU group fields can also be used to open markets.
At some point, Digital River will identify product compliance data needed to ship goods into Indonesia. We can add this data to your SKU groups if you're interested in pursuing this market opportunity.
After that, whenever a customer in Indonesia purchases on your site, this new compliance data is passed downstream to the appropriate logistics services.
In this case, Digital River only needs to add product tariff codes specific to that country to your SKU groups (along with any other required compliance data) to make your products eligible for export to this country.
Before launch, Digital River works with you to analyze your product catalog and understand your trading patterns (i.e., what products you're selling, where you're shipping these products from, and where you're shipping them, too).
We then help classify your products and determine the compliance requirements for each category. That information is used to define and create your SKU groups.
Once created, you can access each SKU group's unique identifier and alias.
Digital River exposes a SKU group's unique identifier and alias.
A SKU group's unique id reflects the products that are associated with it. For example, if your site sells computer accessories, your SKU groups might have some of the following id values:
wireless-keyboards
wireless-mice
memory-cards
docking-stations
A SKU group's alias is meant to provide a more detailed description of the SKU group. For example, a SKU group with an id of wireless-keyboards might have an alias of wireless keyboards with lithium-ion batteries.
Digital River and you are responsible for:
Defining product compliance data in your SKU groups
Ensuring that the compliance data in your SKU groups remains up to date
Digital River is responsible for:
Creating SKU groups
Updating SKU groups
Deleting SKU groups
You are responsible for:
Dissociating SKU groups from your products
Informing Digital River of changes to your SKU group requirements
Depending on how you send product data in create checkout or create checkout session requests, you need to either (1) associate your SKU groups with SKUs or (2) associate your SKU groups with products in your system.
You could use this returned data to run a job that associates each SKU group with the appropriate SKUs in our system or products in your system. (e.g., For each of your SKUs that describe a wireless keyboard, set its skuGroupId to wireless-keyboards).
You could also use a GET/sku-groups to help you build a GUI widget in your admin portal that allows users to associate and disassociate SKU groups with SKUs and products.
This prioritization logic applies to any differing tax codes, harmonized system codes, and export control classification numbers in the SKU and its associated SKU group.
For example, let’s say an items[] in a checkout contains a reference to a SKU whose taxCode is 4323.310_A and that same SKU is associated with a SKU group that stores a different tax code.
In this case, Digital River’s tax service uses the SKU group’s tax code when computing that line item's taxes. The service also uses that same tax code to determine whether the item’s products should be treated as physical or digital goods.
For more details, refer to:
Instead, at run-time, you simply retrieve this basic product data from your system and send it to us. This means you're not required to keep product catalogs in your system synchronized with data in our system.
As Digital River adds product compliance fields to the SKU group resource, you can use the data in these fields to access new markets. In other words, your application sends the same basic product data in or . However, due to internal modifications made to the SKU group by Digital River, your products become compliant in new markets.
Your may currently configure your products for sale in ten countries. At some point, however, you may identify another country where you'd like to export your products.
You can use this identifier to (1) associate SKU groups with products and (2) .
You can associate SKU Groups with SKUs by specifying skuGroupId in the body of a , , or request.
A request provides a menu of your available SKU groups:
If you’re currently using and are considering a migration to SKU groups (or are in the process of doing so already), then you should be aware that for every items[] you add to a checkout or a , SKU group data takes precedence over SKU data.