Context

Product identifiers are key when managing product information in the PIM and also in all your PXM workflows. We are making some changes to how we handle identifiers in Akeneo PIM to provide you with more options when creating and managing unique product identifiers.

New features coming next months

One of our users' most popular requests is adding more capabilities to manage product identifiers. We are happy to share some exciting changes that are coming to the PIM.

We have recently introduced our Identifier Generator, to automate the creation of your identifiers directly in the PIM. 

Over the next few months, we will introduce another massive update regarding identifier management, the ability to use multiple identifier attributes to help you manage all your identifier types and improve your search for products in the PIM.

Creating the foundations for our next features

For that purpose, we are giving more flexibility in the PIM regarding identifier management.

1. The SKU is no longer a mandatory field for creating products.
   • You can now create a product without a SKU on the PIM, the API, and imports
   • You can also remove the SKU from a family, meaning a SKU won’t be asked at product creation for those products, and it will disappear from the product page
2. When created in the PIM, every product is now assigned a new technical identifier, called the UUID. The UUID gives you a new way to identify your products and is automatically and randomly generated by the PIM. It cannot be modified.

For more details, please refer to the help center page dedicated to managing your product identifiers and also to the page dedicated to our Identifier Generator.

Start creating products without SKU

If you wish to begin creating products without the SKU in your PIM, please confirm the following steps to avoid disruption to your product catalogs:

• Make sure leaving SKU fields empty will not have any impact on your PXM workflow, especially any synchronization you may have configured with third party systems that might use SKU as a key entry
• Update your API configuration with the new available API endpoints using UUID as a technical identifier. Please read our API documentation updated with the new API endpoints.