Amazon: SKU suffix

About this article

This article describes ChannelEngine's SKU suffix for Amazon, how it works, and what you need to know before enabling it.

Table of contents

Introduction

Before you start

Enable the SKU suffix

Create a fulfillment shipment

FAQs

Introduction

ChannelEngine treats each Amazon marketplace as a separate sales channel with separate mappings. However, Amazon synchronizes certain attributes for single offers between different countries (e.g.: stock, handling time, fulfillment type, etc.). Consequently, there can be conflicting settings on ChannelEngine – causing an Amazon offer to switch between different countries.

E.g.: if you set the handling time to two days for your Amazon UK sales channel, Amazon itself also changes it on Amazon DE for that same SKU – even if you set it to one day on ChannelEngine. This situation may not be desirable, therefore ChannelEngine sets a sales channel-specific suffix to your SKUs.

The solution to this problem is to use a unique SKU for each country.

The tables below illustrate two scenarios: an Amazon setup with ChannelEngine's SKU suffix feature disabled and one with it enabled. Note that the suffix follows a certain pattern: CE (i.e.: ChannelEngine) + FBM + [country code].

SKU suffix disabled

SKU suffix enabled

Before you start

Although these are not requirements, it is recommended that you do the following before enabling the SKU suffix:

• Make sure your SKUs are not longer than 30 characters. This feature can add up to ten characters to an SKU, and Amazon rejects SKUs longer than 40 characters.
• Get in touch with your customer success manager at ChannelEngine, so they can switch on the Enable new content export feature.
• Do not configure stock filters. This is required to avoid the constant deletion of the offer, when the stock tied to it goes below a certain threshold.
• Note that deleting the offer deletes its parent-child relationship. When the content export is enabled and all required fields are mapped, ChannelEngine recreates those relationships – and does not returns errors.
• Stop all Amazon campaigns as these are tied to the old SKUs.

Enable the SKU suffix

To enable the SKU suffix, contact your customer success manager or the Support team.

Note that this feature must be enabled across all of your Amazon channels, as SKUs and fulfillment are handled on the server level – not on the country level.

Create a fulfillment shipment

To create a fulfillment shipment, set the product's fulfillment overwrite to FBA – so ChannelEngine can delete the FBM SKU and create the FBA SKU on Amazon. When the FBA SKU is created, you can create the fulfillment shipment on Amazon. The product remains on FBA until Amazon has processed the fulfillment shipment. Once the processing is done, change the fulfillment overwrite back to automatic.

FAQs

Can my customers see the appended SKU?

No, the suffix is only visible within ChannelEngine – and only under the Listed products section. The original SKU is also the one you see in your invoices.

The feature has been enabled and some of my products are returning errors. What can I do?

If you experiences issues with this feature, try deleting the product from Amazon and recreating it. During the initial export, the product is matched via its EAN or GTIN – and once it is matched by Amazon, the ASIN becomes the main identifier.

I have the suffix feature enabled, but one of my products is still available without the SKU suffix. What is wrong?

That is the FBA version of the product. Once the related stock is sold out, it is replaced by the FBM version of it – which should contain the suffix according to the channel. Note that once that the FBA version's stock is replenished, ChannelEngine deletes the FBM version and recreates the FBA version – i.e.: the product without the SKU suffix.