Every retail store that you walk into has thousands of items that are available to buy, and every retailer has multiple locations. How is it possible to track all of these items in order to create a product strategy for your business? Let’s take a look at a few facts.
There are 3,527 Walmart Supercenters. Each Walmart has around 142,000 products—this means that there are 507,224,000 products in Walmart in the United States.
There are 2,298 Home Depot stores that each carry 36,000 products. Home Depot has to manage 82,728,000 products across all of its stores.
There are 1,737 Lowes stores with around 40,000 products in each store. Lowes needs to manage 69,480,000 products.
How do we catalog, track and inventory all of these products? We use product identifiers. Every single product in Walmart, Home Depot and Lowes has 3 main product identifiers. These are different sets of numbers that have different meanings. It’s important to understand the distinctions between each of these numbers. Every retailer is slightly different, but in this article we will look at a few of the main product identifiers that the retail world uses.
The 3 most commonly used product identifiers are Retailer Item Numbers, Manufacturer Model Numbers and UPCs
Retailer Item Numbers
When a retailer decides to put a product in a store, they assign the product an item number. This number is specific to the retailer—and every retailer has its own unique number sequence that they use. If you become familiar with a retailer’s item number pattern, it is possible to look at a product’s item number and determine what retailer that item is connected to. The main thing to note is that there could be a national branded product that is sold across several different retail chains and yet that product would have multiple different retailer item numbers that are specific to each retailer chain that it is in. In summary, this is the most common product identifier that one product can have that will be different across all of its distribution outlets. The image below is a Stanley planer at Home Depot. The Home Depot item number is directly below the price and is 0000-185-558
Manufacturer Model Numbers
This is the number that is assigned to the product by the manufacturer. This number identifies a product and will never change. If a manufacturer changes the specifications or color, or flavor or finish of a product, the model number will change—even if the product’s title doesn’t change! This number is the same across all channels where the product is sold. Most manufactures have a specific number and letter format that they use for their products. If you are searching for a product and want to see all of the place that it is sold, it’s best to search by the manufacturer model number.
UPC’s
UPC’s are a product identifier that is managed by the international agency GS1. UPC stands for Universal Product Code and retailers require that products have a UPC. The UPC was invented to standardize product identification and allow products to be scanned at the register for faster checkout. UPCs are tied to a product and not to the retailer—this means that similar to manufacturers model numbers, the UPC will be the same for a product no matter where it is sold. Here is a picture of a UPC on a Libman dustpan at Home Depot.
Putting it all together
The picture below is a Lowes outlet cover. The price sticker contains all three of the product identifiers that have been mentioned. The Retailer Item number #4896619 is listed at the top. Below that is the Manufacturer's model number Z35800-EORB and at the bottom is the UPC 0854880018749. Every sticker that you find in major retailers such as Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart and Target will all have this information contained on the beams and shelves. It's a lot of information that is often overlooked by millions of shoppers, yet it gives us great insight into the product, who makes it and where else it is sold.
