Understanding Product Center Concepts: SPU, SKU, Attributes, Pricing, and Inventory Management

Terminology

Key terms in a product center include SPU (Standard Product Unit) as the minimal unit describing a product, sales attributes that affect pricing and inventory, non‑sales attributes that do not affect sale, attribute values, SKU as the stock‑keeping unit, and concepts such as on‑shelf/off‑shelf status, cost price, base price, temporary price, selling relationships, and bundles.

Main Functions of the Product Center

The backend management system handles product configuration, on/off‑shelf operations, and price definitions for merchants, while external query services provide searchable product information to end users.

Configuration Steps

Virtual inventory is used to uniformly control sales quantity, with various warehouse services underneath.

System Architecture

External query services are designed for high concurrency, keeping each query simple and avoiding heavy aggregation; backend management focuses on comprehensive and easily configurable product definitions.

Scheduled On/Off Shelf

This feature addresses the pain point of operators manually handling shelf changes by allowing multiple time points to be configured at once; the system determines the current state based on the latest operation record relative to the current time.

Base Price and Temporary Price

These mechanisms solve the pain point of manual price adjustments and post‑event price restoration, enabling batch configuration of multiple base prices and time‑range temporary prices, with queries matching the current time interval.

SKU Query Optimization

To retrieve a multi‑dimensional list of on‑shelf SKUs and prices with a single query, a table storing only currently on‑shelf SKUs and prices can be used; historical on‑shelf data can be kept in a mirrored table, allowing time‑based single‑table queries.

Overall Mall Design

The design integrates all the above components into a cohesive e‑commerce system, supporting flexible product definition, inventory control, pricing strategies, and efficient query performance.