New product alert! We’ve released another free WooCommerce extension out into the wild – the WooCommerce Product SKU generator provides automatic SKU management for WooCommerce.
We had a request from a customer to ask if there was a way to automatically generate SKUs for products rather than manually set them for each item in your shop catalog. Some 3rd part fulfillment services (such as Shipwire) require your products to have SKUs, and it can be tedious to manually set each and every one – especially for variable products. Rather than provide a functions.php snippet to do this, we turned it into a stand-alone plugin in case someone else wants the same functionality for Shipwire (or a similar service).
Installing the plugin and activating it will disable the SKU field so that you can no longer edit it for products (or variable parent products). This is because updating a product will cause a new SKU to be generated from the product slug, so your SKU will be overridden anyway. Only use this plugin if you don’t need to manually manage SKUs.
All products will have SKUs generated when published or saved, and you can enable unique SKUs for variations of a product as well under WooCommerce > Settings > Products. Variation SKUs will be created from the parent SKU + the variation’s attributes.
Bulk editing is also supported. If you want to generate SKUs for products created previous to installation of this plugin, simply bulk edit and update the products. Saving the bulk update will force SKU generation.
Have questions? Ask in the comments and I’ll be sure to answer them!
