Creating Your FBA SKU

Your next move is up to you.

When you list your products on Amazon, you have the option of inputting a SKU. A SKU is a stock keeping unit for an item. It's an internal number that only has meaning to the seller. You can use numbers and letters in your SKU.

You can embed information in your SKU by creating your own code. You might want your SKU to show category, source, expiration date, purchase date, price, or any number of things that will help you to manage your inventory.

Here is a really cool trick that will help you to sort your inventory in seller central by category. Assign each category three letters.

Examples:

GRO - grocery
TYS - toys
BYB - baby
BEA - beauty
HPC - health and personal care
LAG - lawn and garden

I think you get the idea. Now for the best part. Put the category letters at the beginning of your SKU for each product. If you have a box of crackers your SKU would begin GRO.

Go to Inventory and type GRO in the search box for active inventory. All of your groceries that are in your inventory will show up on your list. You can do the same thing under inactive inventory (now you can see if you've run out of anything that you want to replenish). See the awesomeness in this?  I thought you would.

One thing that you should know: you can't change a SKU, so if you replenish an item relist it through "Add a Product" so that you can create a new SKU for the product. This is a great way to figure out to keep track of replenishables and see how many items that you have in stock in a particular category.