What Happens When SKUs Collide
Every product and product variant in your store should have a unique SKU. When two different products share a SKU, your systems get confused — and the confusion shows up in the worst possible places.
Inventory miscounts: Your inventory management system thinks you have 50 units. In reality, you have 30 of Product A and 20 of Product B, but they're counted as one.
Wrong items shipped: A pick-and-pack workflow triggered by SKU may pull Product A when the customer ordered Product B. Returns, refunds, and angry reviews follow.
Financial reporting errors: Revenue and COGS reports aggregated by SKU show blended numbers that are meaningless for either product individually.
Vendor confusion: If you share SKUs with suppliers for purchase orders, a duplicate SKU creates ambiguity about what you ordered and what was received.
Sohovi automatically finds every duplicate in your dataset — including near-matches — and shows you exactly which rows are affected.
How Duplicate SKUs Happen
Duplicate SKUs are almost never intentional. They accumulate through:
- Manual data entry by different team members with no centralized SKU assignment process
- Platform migrations where SKUs from two systems got merged without a uniqueness check
- Import errors where a SKU field was left blank and defaulted to a placeholder
- Variants of one product sharing a parent SKU without a size/color suffix
Finding Duplicate SKUs in Your Catalog
Export your full product catalog to CSV. Isolate the SKU column. Use a COUNTIF formula:
=COUNTIF($A:$A, A2)
Copy this formula down for every row. Any value greater than 1 is a duplicate. Sort by this helper column to bring all duplicates to the top.
Fixing Duplicate SKUs
For each duplicate group:
- Identify which product the SKU "belongs to" — typically the first one to use it or the higher-volume product
- Assign a new, unique SKU to the other product(s)
- Update all connected systems: your platform, your warehouse management system, your supplier POs, your accounting software
Document the old and new SKU for every product you rename. This is your audit trail for reconciliation.
Preventing Future Duplicates
Centralize SKU assignment: One person or one system assigns all new SKUs. No one generates their own.
Use a SKU formula: Many brands use a format like [Category]-[Brand]-[Size]-[Color]. Consistent structure reduces collisions.
Check before import: Before importing any new products, check the incoming SKU list against your existing catalog.
Sohovi validates your dataset before it enters the warehouse — catching format errors, nulls, and duplicates at the source.
Run a monthly duplicate check: A COUNTIF or SQL query against your product table takes 2 minutes and catches problems early.
