Product SKU Generator for WooCommerce for WordPress Plugin Directory

Requires: WooCommerce 3.9.4 or newer

Automatically generate a SKU for parent / simple products, variations, or both when the product is published or updated.

IMPORTANT: The SKU field will be disabled for SKUs being generated by the plugin. Your own previously created SKUs will be overridden if you update a product while generating SKUs, and they will change if you change your product slug (while using this to generate them). Be sure you want to complete automate SKUs if you leave this enabled all of the time.

You can also selectively enable and disable the plugin if you don’t want to override existing SKUs when saving products. You can view product documentation for help.

Automated SKUs SKUs for simple, external, or parent products can be generated from the product’s slug (hyphenated name) or ID. For example, a product with the slug wp-tee-shirt can have a SKU of wp-tee-shirt or 192 (whatever the product’s ID is). This SKU will be generated any time the product is published or updated.

If the product is a variable product, this plugin can also generate SKUs for the product variations if desired (these typically inherit the parent SKU). Variation SKUs can either append attribute slugs or variation IDs for each variation to the parent SKU.

Here are some samples of different SKU formats that can be created with this plugin.

You can also manually set simple / parent SKUs, or manually set the variation SKUs, if you don’t want the plugin to generate them for you.

Features This plugin provides options to:

automatically generate simple / parent product SKUs when the product is published or updated

generate simple / parent product SKUs using the product slug or ID

automatically generate SKUs for product variations when the product is published or updated

generate variation SKUs using the attribute slugs or variation ID

use the bulk product update action to easily force SKU generation for more than one product — handy to bulk-generate SKUs for products created before installing this plugin

SKUs for all product types The Product SKU Generator for WooCommerce lets you determine which SKUs should be generated automatically, and whether these SKUs should use product slugs or IDs. If a SKU is generated, the input for that SKU will be disabled since you cannot adjust it.

If you choose not to generate a SKU, then you can enter your own SKU. For example, if you only generate variation SKUs, then you can enter a parent product SKU. This will be used as the base for your generated variation SKUs, and slugs or IDs will be appended to it.

If you only create parent / simple SKUs, you will be able to manually create your own variation SKUs, as these will not be overridden by saving or updating a product.

Bulk Updating You can bulk add SKUs to products that you’ve created prior to installing this plugin. If you select the products you want to update, then bulk edit them, all you have to do is hit “Update”. When the products are saved, SKUs will be generated for all products.

This action will also automatically generate the SKUs for product variations if you have them enabled.

More Details

See the product page for full details and documentation

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Translations The plugin text domain is: woocommerce-product-sku-generator

Attribute Names By default, if you have an attribute name with a space (such as “Burnt Marshmallow” for color), the SKU will use this exact formatting. A SKU for this variation would look like: parentSKU-Burnt Marshmallow

If you enable the setting to replace spaces, this will instead look like: parentSKU-Burnt_Marshmallow or parentSKU-Burnt-Marshmallow — depending on which setting you’ve chose. This is helpful if your external fulfillment service does not allow spaces in SKUs.

Attribute Sorting In very rare cases, you may find that variation SKUs do not sort attributes in the same order. For example, one variation may be tee-shirt-large-black, and another could be tee-shirt-black-medium.

If this occurs, you can force attributes to sort themselves consistently before generating the SKU, which will resolve this problem. You could also consider this for new installations.

Be sure you want to enable this if you have existing SKUs, as variation SKUs that were generated previously could be overridden while updating a product – they’ll be re-generated with the forced attribute order.

To force attribute sorting, add this code snippet where you add your site modifications, such as a custom plugin or theme’s functions.php:

add_filter( 'wc_sku_generator_force_attribute_sorting', '__return_true' );