How can I add unique serial numbers to each product?

Retail & Point of Sale

Topic summary

A merchant seeks functionality to assign unique serial numbers to individual products for self-checkout, warranty tracking, returns, and inventory management. They emphasize this goes beyond standard SKUs or barcodes—each item needs a distinct identifier tied to orders.

Current Shopify Limitations:

  • Native Shopify supports SKUs and barcodes per variant, but not unique serial numbers for identical items
  • A Shopify representative initially suggested using SKU/barcode fields and the Retail Barcodes app, which doesn’t fully address the need

Community Demand:
Multiple merchants confirm this is critical for their businesses, particularly those selling:

  • Electronics (phones with IMEI numbers)
  • Luxury watches
  • Products requiring warranty validation and historical tracking

Some merchants report migrating away from Shopify (e.g., to Lightspeed) specifically due to this missing feature.

Available Solutions:
Several third-party apps have emerged:

  • Fakesburster (announced in the thread)
  • Serializer - Product Tracking (most recently updated, allows serial number assignment to order line items, warranty tracking, and custom templates)

Developers continue soliciting feedback to build or improve serial number tracking apps. The discussion remains active with ongoing requests for native Shopify implementation, though no official timeline has been provided.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
5

Our Company is looking for the same thing! We need to be able toapp assign the serial numbers from the product sold to a field within shopify’s Order Summary.. When a customer contacts us for support at a later time we need to reference the serial number to confirm it is their product. We offer a complete replacement guarantee and it depends on accurately tracking and verifying the serial number assigned when purchased..

How can I use a Shopify app that assigns the serial number to the Order and not just to a customer so that if the Customer orders more than one time the serial numbers are attached to the order so warranty time periods can be tracked.

Thank You

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