Product basics

Learn the basics of SKUs, product details, SKU groups, and inventory items.

In the Digital River APIs, you can use SKUs, product details, SKU groups and inventory items to identify and describe your goods and services.

Whether you integrate with Low-code checkouts or Direct Integrations, these resources and objects allow you to define each of your product's basic and compliance data.

Except for SKU groups (as well as inventory items used in the distributed model of Digital River coordinated fulfillments), you're responsible for managing the data contained in them.

Additionally, with the exception of product details, their data is stored in Digital River's system.

	Resource or object?	Supported product data	Where the product data is stored	Who manages the product data	How you manage the data	When you reference the resource / pass the object
SKUs	Resource	Basic and compliance	Digital River's system	You	SKUs API	POST /checkouts, POST /checkout-sessions
Product details	Object	Basic	Your system	You	System dependent	POST /checkouts, POST /checkouts, POST /checkout-sessions, POST /shipping-quotes, POST /shipping-labels
SKU groups	Resource	Compliance	Digital River's system	Digital River	SKU Groups API	POST /checkouts, POST /checkouts, POST /checkout-sessions, POST /shipping-quotes, POST /shipping-labels
Inventory items	Resource	Basic and compliance	Digital River's system	You/Digital River	Inventory Items API	POST /fulfillment-orders

SKUs

In the Digital River APIs, SKUs are one option for identifying and defining your goods and services.

This resource holds data on the most important characteristics of a product. SKUs aren’t meant to be universal. Instead, they should be unique to your business.

You manage SKUs, and their data is stored in Digital River's system.

Depending on how you send product data in create checkout or create checkout-session requests, your SKUs might only contain basic product data. Alternatively, they can contain both basic and compliance data.

If you reference this resource in checkouts or checkout-sessions, you'll need to use the SKUs API to define and create a SKU for every digital and physical product in your catalog.

For more details, refer to:

• The Managing SKUs page

• The Sending product data in checkouts section on the Describing line items page

• The Product data section on the Checkout-sessions basics page.

Product details

You can use productDetails to identify and define your goods and services. This object holds data on the most important characteristics of a product.

You manage productDetails and its data is stored in your system.

A productDetails object can only be used to pass basic product data. Its compliance data is stored in a referenced SKU group.

In other words, each items[] in a create checkout or create checkout-session request must include productDetails and nested within that object should be a skuGroupId.

For more details, refer to:

• The Using product details page
• The Grouping SKUs page
• The Sending product data in checkouts section on the Describing line items page
• The Product data section on the Checkout-sessions basics page.

SKU groups

A SKU group represents a collection of products with similar compliance requirements. This resource is only used to store compliance data.

Digital River manages your SKU groups, and their data is stored in Digital River's system.

If you use SKU groups, you must reference the resource when sending product data in create checkout or create checkout-session requests, and the reference must either be in the SKU or in productDetails.

For more details, refer to:

• The Grouping SKUs page
• The sending product data in checkouts section on the Describing line items page
• The Product data section on the Checkout-sessions basics page.

Inventory items

The inventory item resource identifies and defines physical products stored in a warehouse. You only use inventory items in Digital River coordinated fulfillments.

The data for an inventory item is saved in Digital River's system, and you can access it using the Inventory Items API.

How you interact with inventory items and how you ensure that data contained in the shared attributes of SKU-inventory item pairs remains synchronized, depends on whether you're using the distributed model or the orchestrated model.

For more details, refer to:

• The Managing inventory items page
• The SKU-inventory item pairs page

Basic versus compliance product data

In the Digital River APIs, there exist two broad categories of product data: basic and compliance. The following table lists the specific data in each category:

Additional compliance data beyond what is listed here may be stored in the SKU group to which a product belongs.

Basic product data	Compliance product data
Name and description	Export control classification number
Image and URL	Harmonized system code
Weight and weight unit	Tax code
Country of origin	Dangerous goods classifications
Part number and manufacturer identifier	Signature requirements

How products are classified as physical or digital

Digital River classifies a product as physical or digital based on its designated tax code. This code plays a role in determining a checkout's address requirements, its assigned selling entity, and whether the landed cost feature is triggered.

Who assigns a product's tax code depends on whether or not you're using SKU groups.

Using SKU groups

If you (1) associate a SKU group with each of your SKUs or (2) reference a SKU group in productDetails, then Digital River sets the SKU group's tax code.

As a result, you're not responsible for identifying, defining, or managing your products' tax codes.

Not using SKU groups

If you use SKUs without SKU groups, then you're responsible for defining and managing each of your SKUs' taxCode(s).

How to identify a physical or digital SKU

A SKU's physical attribute allows you to determine whether the resource is classified as digital or physical without referencing our supported tax code table.

SKU

{
    "id": "db148281-a5a2-4349-baf2-5d9f76025e56",
    ...
    "physical": true
}