What does SKU stand for?

A Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) is an identifier used for management of an inventory.

The acronym SKU is used almost exclusively when talking about this concept. Furthermore, it's pronounced as a word (skyü), rather than three letters, as if you were saying the English word skew.

Merchants assign SKUs to every product they sell (as opposed to the EAN or GTIN bar code number which is assigned by the manufacturer). This SKU is then used to order, locate and manage the inventory of a product.

Successful inventory management systems assign a unique SKU for each product and also for its variants. For example, different flavours or models of product, or different bundled packages including a number of related products, have independent SKUs. This allows merchants to track, for instance, whether blue shirts are selling better than green shirts.