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.
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I moved our POS over to LightSpeed it was a little bit of a learning curve
but we now have a script that is running every 10 minutes to update from
LightSpeed to Shopify
The guys at Lightspeed recommended if you people but the system that they
had for syncing was too complicated so I had one of our guys create a
script and we just kept it really simple as soon as we sell something on
our POS it would update Shopify

Now he’s creating some thing that will take orders from Shopify and update
LightSpeed

The serial numbers in lightspeed is really easy to us and follow
we scan our own sku’s
The we just look at the serial number that’s on the item and we pull it
from a drop-down list that’s already populated when we did our purchase
order
I hope that helps :call_me_hand:t4:

Also Lightspeed just today released an update on label creator so you can
adjust it unlike Shopify pos