WooCommerce SKU & Xero Item Product Codes

WooCommerce Product SKU Codes

By default WooCommerce does not create the commonly used SKU’s.  SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit and is a unique product identifier.  Instead WooCommerce leaves the SKU field blank and uses the ID which is a unique identifier from the database and is NOT the SKU.  To add SKU’s you need to edit each product individually.  Just to confuse matters even more there are also UPC (Universal Product Code), MPN  (Manufacturers Part Number) codes or GTIN (Global Trade Identification Number) which are all globally unique and verifiable bar codes that are needed for listings on Google and Amazon.  These are issued by the manufacturers who purchase them from the global industry players.  SKU’s can be created by yourself in whatever format you wish but should not contain any spaces or special characters eg”/\>< ” etc as these will cause problems when used and parsed in WooCommerce, Xero and Xeroom.

Xero Product Item Codes

Any product listed in Xero must have an Item Code.  You can use your SKU for this purpose.  You need to design an SKU numbering system that is easy to use and remember.  The easiest way is to set a numbering scheme that takes 2 letters for the product category, model, colour and size. This can done in a spreadsheet and then uploaded into Xero from a CSV format file.  The same codes can also be loaded into WooCommerce using one of the many dataloading plugins that are available but beware most of the free ones are no good and the decent ones you have to buy.  If you have an existing install of Xero of WooCommerce then you can download what you have already, modify/correct the codes to be consistent with your number system and then reupload them.

Xeroom Use of Product Codes

When Xeroom posts an invoice to Xero it looks for the product item code for each line in your WooCommerce order.  If the code exists then it will pick up the information in Xero for that product (ie price, description, inventory etc) and use it in the invoice or copy across information from WooCommerce depending on the Master setting in Xeroom.  If the code does not exist in Xero then Xeroom will create a new code using the product ID from WooCommerce and then go on to complete the invoice creation process.  This means that you don’t have synchs failing due to missing codes which can easily happen if you add new products in Xero or WooCommerce and forget to update the other system.  Xeroom does this order by order and does not do a full bulk synchronisation which is why it is best, though not essential, to do this as part of the install process.

How We Can Help You

We can assist you with a low fixed-price bulk product upload process and data transfer process by downloading all the existing codes as a spreadsheet for you to edit and then re-uploading the new/revised SKU codes into both Xero and WooCommerce.  Order here.