Best practices for product SKU configuration

To maximize performance, the recommended maximum for effective product Stocking Keeping Units (SKUs) is 242 million. This effective product SKU maximum is calculated as:

Effective SKU = N[SKUs] x N[Stores] x N[Customer groups]

Where:

  • N stands as the number of items for that category
  • Customer groups include shared catalogs, as it creates an additional customer group.

Having more than the maximum number of effective SKUs slows down product data retrieval and increases the time to complete Admin panel operations or indexations.

Affected products and versions

All supported versions of:

  • Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure
  • Adobe Commerce on-premises

Reduce the number of products

Use the following strategies to reduce the number of products (SKUs):

  • Minimize multipliers—
    • Consolidating websites reduces the multiplier. If you have 50,000 SKUs, ten Websites, and ten Customer Groups, the Effective Number of SKUs is 5 million. Removing five Customer Groups reduces the Effective SKUs to 2.5 million.
    • Use alternative product features for custom pricing to replace shared catalog and customer groups multipliers.
    • Both customer groups and shared catalog function as multipliers for the number of effective SKUs in a store.
  • Restructure the catalog—
    • Reduce the number of products assigned to categories.
    • Decrease the number of SKUs by decreasing the number of websites, customer groups, shared catalogs, number of products, or number of configurable product options
  • Provide more product variations by using custom options instead of creating separate products.
  • Taking into account that an Effective SKU could include a number of potential permutation of prices, because prices can be specified differently per each store or customer group.
  • Deactivate or remove unused system components like modules. (See Uninstall modules.)
  • Manage products in an external Platform Management System (PMS).

Additional information

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