Users are seeking a way to automatically populate Supplier SKU and cost fields in Shopify Purchase Orders (POs) from product inventory data, rather than manually entering this information each time.
Current Limitation:
No native field exists in product settings to store Supplier SKUs that would auto-populate in POs
Multiple users report the same issue across different Shopify plan levels
Shopify staff confirmed this feature doesn’t currently exist and submitted feedback to the development team
Discovered Workaround:
When Supplier SKU and cost are manually entered in a PO, Shopify saves this data and auto-populates it in future POs for the same supplier-product combination
This association is supplier-specific, allowing different Supplier SKUs for the same product across multiple suppliers
However, there’s no accessible interface to view, edit, or bulk-import these saved Supplier SKUs in advance
Remaining Pain Points:
Users with thousands of products cannot pre-set Supplier SKUs, requiring manual entry on first PO creation
No help documentation explains this hidden functionality
No bulk management interface exists for viewing or editing saved Supplier SKU associations
Status: Unresolved. The workaround addresses immediate needs but doesn’t solve the core request for upfront, bulk Supplier SKU management.
Summarized with AI on October 28.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
When creating a purchase order I can see that there is a field from for the Suppliers SKU to be inputted, however i can not find this field in the product itself, surely there is a way for this data to be pulled across from the product inventory, and the Supplier SKU to be auto generated considering the product is being chosen/linked in the purchase order anyway.
Am I missing something?
Please provide guidance on how this can be input and automatically generated. I note that you can provide meta fields with additional information but this would not be displayed on the purchase order form generated within Shopify?
The same applies to the costs per product. The costs per product can be set in the product itself. Why are at least these values not pulled when creating a purchase order?
Same question. Has this been resolved? My suppliers need an SKU number for my PO to be useful. I have used that in the product setup but it is not reflecting in my PO.
+1 Same question. I understand the price not showing because it’s up to the supplier to fill in this bit with their most up-to-date price, but supplier SKU seems important because the description of the product I use may not match the description the manufacturer or intermediary supplier use and this could lead to the wrong product being supplied.
Same issue - looking for a solution here. I’m quite sure this can be edited as a prior employee did it, but I can not find where to edit the Supplier SKU. In my case we have some products that are purchased from multiple suppliers, so it would be really nice to save a separate SKU and separate price for each Supplier.
Thank you all for your feedback for letting us know this is something you’d like to see added to Shopify. It is not currently possible to add a second SKU number to products, be it the supplier’s or otherwise, but I appreciate why this would be beneficial. I have submitted your feedback to our development team.
Thanks Victor. But, how does one add the first Supplier SKU into a product? I’m struggling to figure that out. However, it’s clearly possible to have a Supplier SKU saved as being associated with a product in Shopify, just like the supplier cost for the product. See screenshot from a PO that has Supplier SKU information populating when a product is added to the PO. Is there a help article that shows how to add the first Supplier SKU? Someone that’s no longer at my company knew how to do this, but I have been unable to find any place to add that information to be saved to a particular product.
Thank you for sharing that with me. I’ve taken a look via our Help Center documentation and internal resources we have here at Shopify and I’ve been unable to find specific information about suppliers SKUs and how to save or add them. However, as you’ve mentioned, there does seem to be a way to associate supplier SKUs with specific products. My recommendation would be to contact our support team directly as we can authenticate you on your store and review this in more detail, and also reach out to an escalated team with your example if necessary.
Update for anyone else struggling as I was. The feature being requested in this thread appears to be already functional but I’m unable to find reference in a help article. I’m on Shopify Plus (in case it’s different for other plan levels). I have a product ordered from 2 different suppliers. I found that if I edited a prior PO to add the Supplier SKU or entered the Supplier SKU as I created a PO, then the next time I created a PO for the supplier and added this product, the Supplier SKU field is pre-populated. So, it appears to be saving the Supplier SKU for a product and associating it with a particular supplier. What I can’t find is a way to see a list of all SKUs for a particular supplier and the associated Supplier SKU. But, this discovery solves my immediate need - saving a Suppler SKU to be associated with a particular product SKU (my company SKU) and a different Supplier SKU for each supplier of the same product. The closest help article found is this one about Purchase Orders. It also appears that by entering the cost associated with the Supplier SKU, that gets saved and pre-populated as well. An update to the Purchase Orders help article would be nice to clarify that the Supplier SKU and Cost is saved unique to each Supplier.
Thanks for this additional info, Mike. Good to know someone is in the same boat! I’d spotted that a Supplier SKU previously entered in a PO would show up the next time that same product is ordered. In fact, I’m 99% sure I saw this info pop up in a message box when trialling POs, but haven’t seen it since.
What I would LOVE to know—as would you!—is how these Supplier SKUs could be accessed and ideally set in advance. We’ve got thousands of products and I’d really like to find a way of setting the Supplier SKU for each product variant so our staff don’t have to manually copy these codes across. (We’re on Advanced Shopify, but planning a move to Shopify Plus. Shame this isn’t even a feature on the higher tier.)
It’s so strange Shopify doesn’t provide a way of accessing this info…
Hi Victor - do you know if this has been resolved yet? We would like to do the same - we have thousands of SKUs and would like to have the supplier SKU and cost price in the product when creating POs and then our SKU in the product also so that is what our customers see. We don’t have the time or resources to input the Supplier SKUs and costs on every PO. Any help or direction to an additional plug in for this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I have the answer: Once you create a PO and manually add the Supplier SKU and Price - it will auto-populate next time.
Seems ridiculous – but apparently this is the case.
From my Support Conversation Today:
It will only autofill if it was manually entered in past Purchase Orders from the same supplier. If you haven’t entered the cost for those specific items previously, they won’t populate automatically.
“Am I understanding you correctly?”
“You’ve got it right. If you manually enter the Supplier SKU and Price for those items in the current Purchase Order draft, they should autofill in future orders from the same supplier. This is because the system relies on previous entries to recognize and pull the relevant information automatically. So, making sure to enter the details this time will help streamline the process for your next purchase orders.”
Is there seriously no solution to this yet, Shopify?! All we need is a way of accessing the Supplier SKU field so we can a) populate it and b) edit it once populated.
As I explained above, we have thousands and thousands of products. Currently, we have to manually populate the Supplier SKU field when creating a Purchase Order, if it’s not already populated. This is a total pain for our team and typos are inevitable. But we also need to be able to edit this field.
Want to know the horrendous workaround to edit an existing Supplier SKU? We create a fictional Purchase Order, add the product(s) we need to edit, change the Supplier SKU, go through all steps of the Purchase Order, and then archive the fictional Purchase Order!!!
I contacted Shopify Support yesterday about this ongoing issue. Errors have inevitably crept into our Supplier SKU field over time and there is currently no way for us to access, edit or manage it in bulk. (FYI, in our business process, the Product SKU and Supplier SKU must match. All our products are made-to-order by our in-house workshop, so the workshop is the ‘supplier’.)
Although the Supplier SKU can be manually edited on an individual Purchase Order at the time it is created, the change does not persist to the next Purchase Order. So, if we spot an error in a Supplier SKU, we can correct it in the current Purchase Order, but we would also need to correct it in subsequent Purchase Orders! Shopify appears to store and reuse previously entered data, with no ability for us to change them.
Shopify Support confirmed there is currently NO WAY for us to bulk edit or bulk delete Supplier SKU values across a store (which I knew already). Shopify Support also confirmed their own technical team apparently can’t do this either (which I very much did not know). I find this incredibly hard to believe. How can a field exist that can’t be edited?!
So, our only option is to manually adjust the field EACH TIME a Purchase Order is created, which is impractical at scale. Shopify Support acknowledged the limitation and said the issue has been passed on to developers as feedback, but there is no guarantee of a future fix. I even asked them to simply delete all Supplier SKUs associated with our store, as I’d rather they were deleted—and we stop using them—than continue to use them with known errors, but I was told this couldn’t be done!
I’m a Shopify Plus customer and I’m annoyed. I’m also incredulous, which is far too big a word to be using this early in the working week.
