Skip to main content
When you ship a few orders a day, almost any warehouse setup works. As volume grows, the time spent finding items, picking the wrong variant, and correcting shipping mistakes scales with you, and the cost of a disorganised warehouse compounds. Good warehouse management is the foundation for keeping picking, packing, and error handling fast and predictable as you grow. This page covers three building blocks that pay off early and keep paying off: barcodes, SKU design, and bin locations.

​
Barcodes

A barcode is a machine-readable identifier printed on a product or package. Globally standardised barcodes such as EAN (used internationally) and UPC (used in North America), as well as ISBN for books, are assigned by the manufacturer and are usually already on the product packaging when it arrives at your warehouse. Using barcodes during picking and packing reduces errors dramatically. Scanning a barcode is faster than reading a label and confirms the right product is being picked or shipped, instead of relying on visual inspection alone. A few practical points:
  • Reuse the manufacturer barcode when one exists. There is no need to print your own.
  • For products without a manufacturer barcode (private label, bundles, custom items), assign your own internal barcode.
  • Make sure the barcode on the product matches the barcode stored on the product record in your shop or inventory system.
For a deeper look at barcodes in an e-commerce context, see Shopify’s guide on barcodes for products and variants .

​
SKU design

A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is the internal code you use to identify a specific product variant in your own systems. Unlike a barcode, the SKU is yours to design. A good SKU scheme makes it immediately clear which product and which variant a code refers to, both to a human picker and to the systems that move the data around. Principles for designing SKUs:
  • Distinguish product and variant. Two different products should never share the same SKU, and the same product in different sizes or colours should have clearly different SKUs.
  • Keep them readable. Short, structured codes are easier to scan, type, and discuss over the phone than long random strings.
  • Use a consistent structure. A pattern such as CATEGORY-PRODUCT-VARIANT (for example TSHIRT-LOGO-RED-L) lets staff infer what a SKU represents without looking it up.
  • Avoid characters that cause trouble. Spaces, slashes, and characters that look alike (O/0, I/1) lead to mistakes when SKUs are typed or read aloud.
  • Stay stable. Once a SKU is assigned, do not reuse it for a different product later. Historical orders, returns, and accounting records refer back to it.
A SKU is not a barcode. The two often coexist: the barcode identifies the physical item at scanning time, and the SKU identifies the same item in your shop, inventory, and order systems.

​
Bin locations

A bin location is the address of an item inside your warehouse. A clear bin-location system tells a picker exactly where to walk, in what order, and what to grab when they get there. A common scheme combines area, aisle, shelf, and bin: 
A-12-3-B
│ │  │ │
│ │  │ └─ Bin within the shelf
│ │  └──── Shelf level
│ └─────── Aisle number
└───────── Area or zone
Guidelines for designing a bin-location system:
  • Make it predictable. Pickers should be able to walk to any location given only its code, without a map.
  • Make it dense enough. Each location should be small enough that a picker quickly finds the right item, but not so small that you create thousands of nearly-empty bins.
  • Order locations by walking path. Numbering aisles and bins in the order a picker walks them lets you sort a pick list by location and finish the route in one pass.
  • Allow multiple locations per SKU. Fast-moving products can occupy a primary forward-pick bin and a bulk reserve bin elsewhere.
  • Keep the system in your shop or inventory tool. When the bin location is on the order or pick list, the picker does not need to memorise where things live.
As your assortment grows, a deliberate bin-location system is what keeps picking time roughly constant instead of scaling with the size of the warehouse.

​
Putting it together

Barcodes, SKUs, and bin locations work together. The pick list tells the picker which SKU to pick and where to find it (bin location). When the picker arrives, they scan the barcode to confirm the right item is being picked. At packing, scanning the barcode again verifies the right item goes into the right order before the shipping label is printed. Investing in these basics early is far cheaper than untangling them later, when every change has to be applied to thousands of products and historical records.