This article describes the standards required for a harmonious marriage between your POS and the Run Free Project platform.

Our platform is powerful because it automates the painful aspects of traditional eCommerce so you don't have to spend time manually...

Although technology and clever design can overcome many obstacles and abstract away the complexity of certain functions, the fact remains that in order to achieve this level of automation, a degree of data cleanliness and standardization is required.

In this case, the data we're talking about is the product information you have entered into your POS.

In the run specialty retail industry, SKUs are used by manufacturers to identify items at the "product" level.

When you log into a shoe brand's B2B site, you'll see that they arrange their products by SKU (often referred to as Style ID or some variation of that term). An example of SKU use in the retailer's view of the Brooks B2B site is shown below (the SKU is circled in red):

Another example of a manufacturer's SKU usage is shown in the retailer view of Hoka's B2B site:

To connect the dots, let's look at an example at the product-level.

Hoka uses the SKU 1110518 BMMO to identify the Men's Bondi 7 in Blue Moon/Moonlit Ocean, regardless of size. Even though each of the 16 different sizes of the Men's Bondi 7 available in Blue Moon/Moonlit Ocean has its own unique UPC, they all share the same SKU, 1110518 BMMO.

When it comes to shoes, most manufacturers use style (Men's Bondi 7) + color (Blue Moon/Moonlit Ocean) as the product SKU. Others may include a width as well.

Ultimately, each manufacturer uses a standardized combination of these characteristics when defining their SKUs (learn more about manufacturer's SKU formats here).

At this point, you're probably asking, "why would Run Free use SKUs when UPCs are, by definition, universal identifiers?".

Great question. The answer is because a SKU-based system gives us a means to auto-grid all of your products and save you thousands of hours of manual effort.

It all boils down to math and scale. The Hoka Men's Bondi 7 was made available in 12 colors. Each color was produced in 16 different sizes with three different widths. In other words, there were 576 different UPC codes to account for all the colors, sizes, and widths of the Men's Bondi 7.

In a UPC-driven eCommerce platform, you would have to manually sort through and group each of the 576 unique UPC-level items and connect them to each other in order for the product to display properly on your site. In Run Free, that's done for you automatically.

(Please note, we do use the UPCs, but they're behind the scenes and out of view)

To accomplish all this automation, the Run Free Project platform uses a clever proprietary automated gridding system we call Stacks, which as you may have guessed, is based on the convenient and natural hierarchy of SKUs that we just discussed.

Stacks automate inventory management between your POS and your eCommerce store. A Stack is comprised of a hierarchy with three layers. The item name is the upper-most layer, the SKU is the second, and the UPC is the third, most granular layer.

The image below, which represents the Stack for the Men's Cayd, illustrates how these layers are related:

As you can see, an item is comprised of a number of SKUs which have many sizes and widths that "belong" to it, each with its own UPC code.

In Run Free, when the Item Name for a group of SKUs is the same (in this case "Men's Cayd"), Stacks will auto-group those SKUs together as a single product in the customer's view as shown below:

When the customer clicks the product tile for more detail, they are presented with three available colorways as shown below:

Each selectable colorway represents a separate SKU and each size/width combo represents a UPC-level physical product.

Ultimately, UPCs belonging to the same style and color share a SKU, and when SKUs share an Item Name, they become a Stack.

In most cases (especially RICS), the data in a retailer's POS already includes the manufacturer's SKUs. As long as your POS data has manufacturer's SKUs as defined previously, there's nothing more you need to do. The image below shows how a SKU/UPC hierarchy might look in a bulk import for your POS.

In the rare event that your data doesn't include SKUs, you have them but they're made up (such as BONDI 7 M BLUE instead of 1110518 BMMO), or your SKUs include sizes (such as 1110518-BMMO-080 instead of 1110518 BMMO), you will need to "cleanse" your POS data so that each product has a manufacturer's SKU that's presented in the aforementioned format.

Once your data has been cleansed and synced, be sure to adjust your internal buying and inventory management processes to ensure the inclusion of the manufacturer's SKU on each new item added in the POS going forward. For quick reference, the fields that contain the SKU in each POS are:

Failure to adjust company processes to account for inclusion of the manufacturer's SKU moving forward will result in inaccurate/incomplete product data and functionality in your Run Free eCommerce store.

Lightspeed provides a great deal of flexibility to its retailer admins when it comes to data entry, which means that Lightspeed databases are most commonly in need of cleansing.

By default, the Run Free Project platform references Lightspeed's "Manufact. SKU" field at the product-level to obtain SKUs (circled in red below).

However, if you prefer, we can reference the "Custom SKU" field just above it for this information instead.

The easiest way to cleanse your SKU data in Lightspeed is to navigate to your admin dashboard, then click Inventory as shown below.

Then, click item search. Once the item search page loads, click the Export button on the far right side of the ribbon as shown below circled in red.

This will trigger your browser to start downloading a file called item_listings_local_matches.csv or something similar. Once that file downloads, you can open it in your favorite spreadsheet software and begin adding SKUs to the Manufact. SKU fields (shown below in column E).

Once you've added your SKUs, save and import the CSV file by using Lightspeed's inventory import function detailed here.

Since RICS groups products using SKUs in a similar way Run Free Project does, it is less likely for there to be a need to cleanse product data there. However, that's not always the case.

RICS will not allow the user to change a SKU once it has been created. However you can edit the Supplier SKU field after-the-fact.

In cases where RICS customers require data cleansing, we advise exporting your inventory using the Export UPCs report. It is located in the RICS Report Creator under the File Printouts subsection.

The CSV file produced will contain all the necessary information to cleanse your data, however you will need to create a new column titled Supplier SKU as shown circled in red below.

Your new Supplier SKU field will contain any SKU updates you make to your data and will be used to match your edits to existing products in RICS by UPC.

Once you've completed your data cleanse, adding the manufacturer's SKUs to the Supplier SKU field for all products, email support@runfreeproject.com, let our team know you're ready to import SKU data to RICS, and attach the CSV file. Run Free Support will connect with the RICS team and ensure your SKUs are imported, updated, and the product feed to the Run Free platform is turned on.

One of Heartland's most powerful features is called gridding. Heartland Retail’s inventory gridding features allow you to create one, two, or three-dimensional grids for any type of 'item' you can think of. When you have several items that are part of the same family, but have different attributes (e.g., colors, sizes, widths.), you’ll want to create a grid to link them together. By creating item families, it is easier to see the whole inventory group and their on-hand values in Heartland, as well as add large groups of items quickly.

Think of items in Heartland as the most granular level of products, like a UPC for a specific shoe box. An example item would be a Brooks Adrenaline GTS 20 in Black/White/Multi, D Width, in Size 10, with the grid level parent in this case being the 'Adrenaline GTS 20' style.

When pushed to Run Free through automation, in order for this particular item to display as one color shoe with various size and width options, a SKU is required. Without an SKU, there is no way for the system to group the sizes and widths together into the correct colorway.

While gridding makes it possible to create lots of items with various dimensions quickly, it's critical to be sure to include the correct SKU for each color in the grid. An example is below, highlighting this in detail.

*Note the skus should be entered on each individual 'item' in the grid, NOT on the parent grid page. Doing so would apply the same SKU to every color/style in the grid and create a mess of inventory from all the colors.

Luckily, fixing SKUs in Heartland is very easy and is as simple as finding the grid for the style and copying and pasting the SKU appropriately per item in the grid. While exporting and importing is possible in Heartland, it is usually just as fast to fix via their grid UI, which allows you to make mass edits fairly quickly. A little work upfront to be sure you have the correct SKUs and dimensions can save you a ton of time down the road.

Lightspeed acquired Vend in 2021, then rebranded it to Lightspeed Series X in late 2023. As of early 2024, it seems as though Lightspeed is leveraging Series X as the default POS for net new sales, effectively sun-setting net new Series R turn ups. As such, it is (and will increasingly be) common to hear Lightspeed Series X referred to simply as Lightspeed by their company representatives.

Series X users have a great degree of freedom when it comes to field assignment, so these instructions may vary from your deployment. If you have questions, please reach out to us using the chat function on the bottom right of this page. For the purposes of this article, it is assumed that the UPC data exists in the UPC field within Series X. Ideally, for each product there will also exist a SKU field that holds manufacturer SKU information in the format described previously. Many stores do not have SKU information in their Series X deployments, making data cleansing a common requirement for its users.

The target format on a per product basis should mirror the screen shot below:

It is key to ensure the field that holds the manufacturer's SKU (in this case, the field labelled "custom") is first in the list of SKU codes. This will ensure that the top-level SKU code for each item is expressed as the manufacturer's SKU. This top-level SKU code will automatically display whatever data exists in the SKU code field that is first in the list, hence our emphasis on the field order in the POS.

If you don't have manufacturer's SKU data in you Series X instance, the most efficient route to add them is to export your inventory, add the SKU field, enrich your POS data with manufacturer's SKUs, and import the augmented data back into Lightspeed. See below for an example of exported data with an added SKU column and associated SKU data:

It is worth noting that attempting to import SKU data with spaces in it will cause Lightspeed's import process to error. Although Run Free does not differentiate between space, ., -, or /, it may be a good idea to do a find and replace in Excel to eliminate any spaces in the SKU data you add to minimize the potential for import errors.

Once the SKU data is imported and presented in the aforementioned format, please be sure to notify the onboarding team so we can pull the data into the Run Free platform for use in your eCommerce store.

If you have additional questions, please contact support@runfreeproject.com or send us a message using the platform chat feature in the lower right corner of this page.