Every channel has a standard set of product fields, and then it has yours. The care instructions you added as a Shopify metafield. The country_of_manufacture and warranty_months attributes your Magento store has carried for years. That data is real, it's maintained, and until now SKU.io imported none of it — it read the fields every channel has and dropped everything else on the floor, leaving you to re-enter it by hand or accept a catalog that knows less than your storefront does. Channel attributes closes that gap. SKU.io now discovers the attributes your channel actually sends, shows you how many products carry each one and what the values look like, and lets you point them at any SKU product field — either once, when a product is first created, or on every sync, with drift detection watching for changes.

Importing a product from a channel has always been a one-time snapshot. Someone retitles a listing in Seller Central, swaps in a better photo, corrects a weight from pounds to grams — and SKU.io never hears about it. Months later your catalog and your channels have quietly drifted apart, and nobody can say which side is right. The usual workaround is a spreadsheet and a lot of squinting. Living Catalog replaces it: SKU.io now watches the content on your mapped listings, records exactly which fields changed on the channel side, and hands you a review queue instead of a mystery. Nothing is overwritten behind your back — you decide, per field, whether your catalog or the channel is the source of truth.

The same physical part often lives under two SKUs: the official part number customers search for, and the identical equivalent you actually keep on the shelf. Until now those orders just stalled — the listed SKU sat backordered while the interchangeable item was in stock a few feet away, and "fixing" it meant editing order lines by hand. Product substitutions links equivalent SKUs so those orders flow: swap a stalled line to the stocked substitute in one click, or select the whole backlog and release it at once. The customer still sees exactly what they ordered — the invoice and packing slip keep the original SKU — while the pick list tells your warehouse which part to actually pull.

Your demand-planning forecast has always turned recent sales into a reorder quantity — but it treated every product as if it sold at one steady pace. A SKU that has tripled over the last quarter was still planned off its flat average, so you under-bought your fastest movers and over-bought the ones winding down. And when you wanted to plan for a promotion you'd run before, you had to eyeball last year's numbers and mentally scale them up. Trend-aware forecasting changes both: the baseline can now follow a product's trend instead of a flat mean, every recommendation shows exactly how it was built, and a promotion you measured once becomes a reusable lift that automatically scales with how much your business has grown.

Your suppliers rarely reach every one of your warehouses in the same number of days. The same vendor might land stock at your main warehouse in two weeks but take six by sea to a warehouse in another region — yet SKU.io applied a single lead time to every destination, so one of those reorder recommendations was always built on the wrong number. Per-warehouse lead times let you set a default lead time on a supplier and then override it for individual warehouses, and demand planning automatically uses the right one for each destination you forecast.

Your demand-planning forecast has always given you a reorder quantity — but not a way to tell whether that number was built on two years of steady sales or two days of noise. A brand-new SKU with almost no history looked exactly as authoritative as a proven bestseller, and once you exported the results, the reasoning behind each number disappeared. Forecast confidence fixes that: every recommendation now carries a confidence level, a likely range around the quantity, and a plain-English explanation of how it was calculated — right in the results table, in the calculation detail, and in the export you hand to finance.

You tweak a kit's recipe — swap a component, bump a quantity — and suddenly your history and your forecasts look different, as if the previous version never existed. Worse, you can't answer a simple question: what was actually in this bundle back in the spring? Until now, a bundle or kit had exactly one recipe — whatever it happens to be right now. Recipe History changes that. Every bundle and kit now keeps a full, dated history of its recipe, so you can see what it contained on any date, edit it without rewriting the past, schedule a change ahead of time, and correct a past recipe when something was recorded wrong.

If you sell regulated, high-value, or warranty-backed goods — electronics, medical devices, cosmetics, anything with a recall or authenticity requirement — "how many do we have" was never enough. You needed to know which one, and where it went. Until now SKU.io tracked quantities but not the individual units behind them. Serial Number Tracking closes that gap — and now follows each unit end to end: opt in per product, capture a serial as stock arrives, choose the exact units when you fulfill, print them on your pick lists and packing slips, and trace any serial's full history.

Adjusting stock used to be a leap of faith. When you removed units — for damage, loss, a recount, or a correction — you couldn't see what that stock was already promised to. Take a few units, and a customer's order could quietly slip into backorder with nobody the wiser. Add stock, and you had no idea which waiting orders it would unblock. Now every inventory adjustment shows its impact before you commit — the exact orders it will fill or backorder — so nothing happens behind your back.

When a product comes in five colours, "Red", "Blue" and "Green" in a dropdown tell you almost nothing — is that red a crimson or a brick? And for anything with a pattern or texture, a word can't describe it at all. Shoppers pick with their eyes, and so do the marketplaces you list on. SKU.io now supports swatches — give each option of a product attribute a colour chip or a small image, and that swatch shows up on your variant products and flows out to the channels that support variant swatches, like Walmart and Shopify. No more guessing which "Red" is which.