Sku me!

[briegull]

I know what a sku is in a drugstore. I do not know what it is in C&P/SF. I know it's a string of text, but how do I relate it to a donation or membership renewal? Are there rules as to how it should be structured?

Secondly, in the virtual terminal, "Payment for" appears to map to "Type" in Opportunities. But Type is a picklist; how do I get the VT to pick up the values there (i.e. Individual - $15, etc) How do I get Payment for to map to Donation rather than Membership? I'm confused. Thanks.

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

Great question considering our clients are not drugstores.

Let's discuss the power that a secondary reference can provide in a system such as ours where forms can come from all directions, e.g. shopping carts, mobile phones, multiple web forms, Salesforce virtual terminal, FaaS forms, etc. As you can imagine a lot of points of entry are available to post transactions to Salesforce.

Now consider each form and imagine they are accepting donations where each donation field is called: "Support Us" - which is a typical scenario.

So you have all these forms accepting donations and all names are the same. Each form may also be part of the same campaign or a different campaign so regardless of how you think about it tracking an item such as donation within each form has the potential to become a bit complex.

An SKU is nothing but an internal tracking number for each of your items. It is a hidden variable that allows you to uniquely identify a fund, a family of funds, a class, donations, products, etc. etc.

How about an example?

A series of classes are offered in Fall 2013 from different departments. The following is a set of SKU's identifying each class:

• Mechanical Engineering: Statics Class- Instructor: John Doe: SKU = ME-ST-JohneDoe-2013
• etc.
• etc.

When a payment is received for the above class the SKU posts to Salesforce and inside Salesforce you can take all sort of actions based on each SKU, for example:

Mary Smith registers for the Static Class with Professor John Doe for Fall 2013 on March 21, 2013.

Autoresponder:

• If SKU Starts with "ME" Send a welcome email from the Mechanical Engineering's Department head will be sent to Mary Smith
• If SKU Includes "John Doe" send the course syllabus from Professor John Doe immediately to Mary Smith
• If SKU Ends with 2013 send a reminder to Mary Smith on August 5, 2013 to not forget to check the classroom assignment.
• etc. etc.

Opportunities:

• If SKU starts with ME change the opportunity name to: Mechanical Engineering [Mary Smith] 2013

& hopefully by now you get the picture.

SKU allows you to take action on a hidden product attribute inside Salesforce and change the entire behavior of how the items appear in Salesforce without affecting your forms.

Let me know if you have any additional doubts about how to use this feature.