SKU and Parent SKU are terms associated with inventory management in eCommerce. SKU, when expanded as “Stock Keeping Unit,” is a unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to each product in order to track and manage inventory. When there are different variations of the products, each variation will have a unique SKU.
Parent SKU, also known as the “Master SKU” or “Parent Product SKU,” refers to a unique ID assigned to a parent product that has multiple variations or child SKUs associated with it. The Parent SKU is used to group and organize related product variants under a common identifier.
For example
A T-shirt in an online store has its Parent SKU as S01 and has multiple color variations of red, green, and blue. So each variation will have an independent identifier known as SKU; S01-R, S01-G, and S01-B.