Products and variations
A product is what a customer recognises. A variation is what they actually buy: a size, a colour, a voltage, a length of cable.
Why the split matters
One product page shows one story — photographs, description, documents — and offers several things to buy. Without variations you either publish one page per variant (and repeat the description forty times) or you sell "a cable" without saying which one.
| Lives on the product | Lives on the variation |
|---|---|
| Name, description, photographs | SKU |
| Category and tags | Price and currency |
| Datasheets and manuals | Stock |
| Manufacturer | Weight and dimensions |
SKU
The SKU is the identifier the rest of the business uses — stock, orders, invoices, the scanner.
One SKU field, one meaning
A SKU is unique across the whole catalogue within an organization, however many types carry one. Two records sharing a SKU means a stock movement that cannot say what it moved. The platform refuses the duplicate rather than accepting it and being wrong later.
The uniqueness is scoped to the organization, like everything else. Two firms
may each have a part called A-100; they are two different parts.
Addresses
A variation is addressable but not public: it has a real address a customer can be linked to, but it does not appear in public listings.
That is not a limitation, it is a decision. A listing of variations is exactly what would publish your cost prices and internal codes; a link to one variation is what a salesperson needs to send.
The address usually follows the product: the product's own path plus the variation's SKU.
Prices
A price belongs to a variation, in a currency. The platform is multi-currency throughout: prices, orders, invoices and reports all carry the currency they were made in, and exchange rates are a register you maintain rather than a constant somebody typed.
Stock
Stock is per variation and per location. See Inventory.
Publishing the catalogue
A product appears publicly when it is published and its type is public. A category page is a listing with a path filter on the category term, usually including children.