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General Resources
Grouping SKUs
Understand the purpose of SKU groups as well as how they're defined, managed, and associated with products
A SKU group represents a collection of products with similar compliance requirements. SKU groups store product compliance data so that it can be used when calculating taxes, determining landed cost, identifying goods at international borders, creating invoices, as well as numerous other downstream operations.
Product compliance data in SKU groups
- Tax codes
- Export control classification numbers
- International level harmonized system codes
- Country specific harmonized tariff codes
- United Nations product and service classification codes
- Dangerous goods handling requirements
- Delivery confirmation requirements
Why use SKU groups?
Reduce compliance burdens
​SKU groups minimize the complexity of product compliance. With SKU groups, you're no longer solely responsible for researching and defining product data.
When you use this resource, you don't have to know your product's tax code, country specific tariff codes, and other arcane data. Digital River uses its product classification services to help you identify these values.
Simplify catalog management
If you decide to use product details and SKU groups in checkouts or checkout-sessions, then you don't have to persist any basic product data in Digital River's system.
Instead, at run-time, you simply retrieve 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 SKU data in our system.
Open new markets
As Digital River adds product compliance fields to the SKU group resource, you can use the data contained in these fields to access new markets. In other words, your application continues sending the same basic product data in checkouts. But, due to internal modifications made to the SKU group by Digital River, your products become compliant in new markets.
Similarly, new data added to existing SKU group fields can also be used to open markets.
Example one
At some point, Digital River identifies product compliance data that is needed to ship goods into Indonesia. If this is a market opportunity you're interested in pursuing, we can add this data to your SKU groups.
After that, whenever a customer in Indonesia makes a purchase on your site, this new compliance data is passed downstream to the appropriate logistics services.
Example two
Your SKU groups may currently configure your products for sale into ten different countries. At some point, however, you identify another country that you'd like to export your products to.
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.
Defining and managing SKU groups
Prior to 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.
The SKU group
Unique identifier
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-keyboardswireless-micememory-cardsdocking-stations
Alias
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.Managing SKU groups
Digital River and you are responsible for:
- 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 with your products
- Informing Digital River of changes to your SKU group requirements
Associating SKU groups
Depending on how you decide to 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 can associate SKU Groups with SKUs by specifying
skuGroupId in the body of a POST/skus, POST/skus/{id}, or PUT/skus/{id} request.1
{
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"hasMore": false,
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"data": [
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{
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"id": "wireless-keyboards",
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"alias": "Wireless keyboards with lithium-ion batteries"
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},
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{
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"id": "wireless-mice",
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"alias": "Wireless mice with lithium-ion batteries"
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},
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{
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"id": "memory-cards",
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"alias": "Compact flash memory cards"
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},
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{
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"id": "docking-stations",
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"alias": "Port replicator/hub docking stations"
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}
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]
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}
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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.