Does SKU have to be unique across all stores?

[white-lukas]

What happened?

Description

We have a multi store setup with 2 sites/stores that have a separate product catalog (same product type but only propagated to 1 site), but they do have a few products that are the same and so have the sku, but this is giving errors as Craft expects the sku's to be unique across all stores?

Products are imported from their system, so creating a separate product type that is shared is not really an option.

Is this expected behavior that the sku's can't be the same for different stores if they are basically completely separate?

Or would I need to prefix the sku's in craft and removing the prefix again when adding to the cart?

Steps to reproduce

1. Setup multi store with separate products
2. Create a product in site 1
3. Create a product in site 2 with the same sku

Expected behavior

Sku's to be only unique on store level

Actual behavior

Sku's need to be unique across all stores

Craft CMS version

5.6.9.1

Craft Commerce version

5.3.3

PHP version

8.3

Operating system and version

Ubuntu 24

Database type and version

MySQL

Image driver and version

No response

Installed plugins and versions

[linear[bot]]

PT-2497 [5.x]: sku has to be unique across all stores?

[lukeholder]

Currently, the SKU is unique across the whole system as it represents a real stock product for inventory purposes.

We will discuss internally whether this is something we can support in the future. I will leave this issue open and give an update soon. Thanks.