A handle does two jobs: it becomes part of the product URL, and it groups variant rows into one product. Both jobs are damaged by careless editing.

Rules

  • Lowercase, hyphen-separated, no trailing punctuation.
  • Unique per product — never reused for a different product.
  • Generated from the title, then checked for collisions.
  • No volatile data: not price, not stock level, not season.
  • Stable across supplier refreshes. A changed handle creates a new product instead of updating the old one.

Common mistakes

  • One handle per variant, splitting one product into several.
  • Reusing a retired product's handle for a new product, merging their history.
  • Embedding the year, which guarantees a change later.

SKU & Handle Generator produces handles from a title and gives you a place to check for collisions before an import.