Sellers make great use of product options when listing their products. Using model numbers can help ship orders with these more easily.
Many sellers use the orders API or the CSV export to access information about their orders. This is especially the case as a seller adds more products to their store, and more orders come in. The model number is only visible to the seller and appears in the CSV export:
.....and orders API, but is never shown to the buyer.
You can add a model number when you first create your product listing, or by editing your product:
Model numbers can have up to 32 characters and there is no required uniqueness or disallowed characters.
When an order comes in where the buyer purchased a product that has a model number (and all the selected options have model numbers) a combined model number will be generated for the order.
Because unique model numbers are not required, you can reuse common model numbers for options like: KIT, ASSEMBLED, BLUE, and GREEN.
The method we use to generate a final model number for a particular order is as follows:
- If the product or a selected option does not have a model number, no model number is provided.
- If there are no selected options, the product model number is used
- If both the product and all the selected options have Model Numbers then a final model number is generated as: product model number, then a dash(-), then each of the option model numbers alphabetically sorted and separated by a dash
Let’s look at some examples! If the product model number is MM and we have one option where the choices have model numbers; KIT and ASSEMBLED. Then in this case we could have:
- MM-ASSEMBLED
- MM-KIT
If we add an option for colors with choices, “red” and “green”, we could give those choices the model numbers “RED” and “GREEN” respectively, which would result in the following possible combinations:
- MM-ASSEMBLED-GREEN
- MM-ASSEMBLED-RED
- MM-GREEN-KIT
- MM-KIT-RED
It is important to note that the model number is recorded when the order placed, so only new orders will have model numbers. This ensures old orders do not change model numbers if you later edit the model numbers.