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 Prebuilt Checkout 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 these resources and objects.
Text | Resource or object? | Supported product data | Where the product data is stored | Who manages the product data | How you access the product data | When you reference the resource / pass the object | Product data category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Resource | Basic and compliance | Digital River's system | You | Basic and compliance | |||
Object | Basic | Your system | You | System dependent | Basic | ||
Resource | Compliance | Digital River's system | Digital River | Compliance | |||
Resource | Basic and compliance | Digital River's system | You/Digital River | Basic and compliance |
In the Digital River APIs, SKUs are one option you have to identify and define 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.
Depending on how you send product data in checkout requests or checkout-session requests, your SKUs may only contain basic product data or they may contain both basic and compliance product data.
If you reference SKU's in checkouts or checkout-sessions, then you'll need to use the SKUs API to define and create a SKU for every digital and physical product in your catalog. We recommend you do this prior to deploying.
Once you start checking out customers, for each
items[] that you send in a create checkout or create checkout-session request, you must include a skuId.For more information, refer to:
You can also 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 the object's data is stored in your system.A
productDetails object can only be used to pass basic product data. The compliance data is contained in a referenced SKU group.In other words, each
items[] in a create checkout or create checkout-session request must include a productDetails object and within that object a skuGroupId.For more information, refer to:
A SKU group represents a collection of products with similar compliance requirements. This resource is only used to store product compliance data.
Digital River manages your SKU groups and their data is stored in Digital River's system. You can access the data exposed in a SKU group by using the SKU Groups API.
If you're using SKU groups, you must reference the resource when sending product data in create checkout or create checkout-session requests. This reference to the SKU group is either contained in the SKU or in
productDetails.For more information refer to:
The inventory item resource identifies and defines physical products stored in a warehouse. You only use inventory items in Digital River coordinated fulfillments.
An inventory item's data is saved in Digital River's system and you access that data by 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:
In the Digital River APIs, there exists two broad categories of product data: basic and compliance. The following table lists the specific data in each category:
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 |
Digital River classifies a product as either 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 you're using SKU groups or not 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.
If you use SKUs without SKU groups, then you're responsible for identifying, defining, and managing each or your SKUs'
taxCode(s).Once you create a SKU, its
physical attribute allows you to determine whether the resource is classified as digital or physical without having to reference the tax code table.SKU
{
"id": "db148281-a5a2-4349-baf2-5d9f76025e56",
...
"physical": true
}