productIDs

Productids refers to identifiers assigned to individual products to uniquely identify items across catalogs, inventories, and commerce systems. These identifiers can be created internally by a company or issued externally by standards bodies, and they support processes such as listing, pricing, ordering, and tracking through the supply chain.

External product identifiers include standardized codes that enable interoperability across retailers, manufacturers, and logistics providers. The most common standards are GTINs, which come in several formats: UPC (12 digits, primarily used in North America), EAN (13 digits, used internationally), and GTIN-14, which encodes items at higher packaging levels. Other specialized identifiers include ISBN for books and ISSN for serial publications. Global availability and consistency of these identifiers are coordinated by GS1, a global nonprofit standards organization that assigns company prefixes and maintains the naming system.

In practice, many organizations also rely on internal IDs, such as SKUs (Stock Keeping Units), to manage inventory and storefront catalogs. Large retailers may use retailer-specific identifiers (for example, Amazon’s ASIN) in addition to external standards, which creates a need for canonical mapping between different productids to ensure data consistency across platforms.

Productids are often represented as barcodes or other data carriers; GTINs are encoded in barcodes scanned at points of sale, while digital product ids may be embedded in licenses or digital storefronts. The use of productids facilitates accurate pricing, stock management, analytics, and cross-channel consistency, but can introduce complexity when multiple identifiers exist for a single product or when regional variations arise.