Amazon glossary
What is a SKU?
SKU — Stock Keeping Unit.
By AIAdKing Editorial Team · Reviewed
- SKU — Stock Keeping Unit
- A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is your own internal code for one specific product variant you sell — a given size, colour or pack. You assign SKUs; Amazon assigns ASINs. Tracking profit and stock per SKU is how you see which exact products make money.
In depth
SKUs are seller-defined codes that let you manage inventory, cost and profit at the variant level — one ASIN on Amazon can map to your SKU, and your internal scheme is entirely up to you (most sellers encode product, size and colour). The reason SKUs matter beyond warehouse tidiness is that money is made and lost per variant, not per product: fees differ by weight and size, ad spend lands unevenly across variants, and return rates vary wildly between colours of the "same" item. Blended, account-level profit hides all of that — the classic discovery when sellers first see fee-accurate per-SKU profit is one or two variants quietly losing money on every unit while the headline number looks fine. Per-SKU cost data (COGS) is also the input that turns ad reporting from revenue-based into profit-based, which changes which campaigns look good.
Worked example
You sell one insulated bottle in three variants: BOT-500-BLK, BOT-500-BLU and BOT-750-BLK. Blended, the product "makes money". Per SKU: the 750ml black earns $6.10 a unit after fees and ads; the 500ml blue loses $0.85 on every sale — its ad spend is higher (worse conversion) and its return rate double. The blended view hides the leak; the per-SKU view says pause ads on BOT-500-BLU, fix its images, or kill the variant. Multiply across a 200-SKU catalogue and per-SKU profit is the difference between guessing and managing.
When to use it
Design SKUs once, consistently, before the catalogue grows — renaming later is painful. Review per-SKU profit monthly, and any time you consider killing or scaling a variant; the blended number cannot make that call.
Common mistakes
- Confusing SKU with ASIN — you control SKUs, Amazon controls ASINs; deleting and recreating a SKU can orphan history your tools rely on.
- Tracking COGS as one average across variants — a $2 cost spread between sizes makes small variants look profitable when they are not.
- Never allocating ad spend down to SKU level — campaigns fund specific products, and unallocated spend hides which variant the ads are actually feeding.
How AIAdKing handles SKU
AIAdKing computes true profit per SKU after fees, returns and ad spend, and forecasts restock per SKU — so you act on the exact products, not an average.
SKU — quick answers
What is a SKU?
How does AIAdKing handle SKU?
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