Products
How to manage multiple product units
Updated 2026-09-11
Why shops need box, pack, piece, kg, and liter on the same product — and how selling units should relate to stock.
Retail almost never buys the way it sells. You purchase a box of screws and sell four pieces. You receive a carton of oil and sell one liter bottles. If the POS only knows one unit, staff convert on paper, and stock becomes fiction.
Two ideas to keep separate
Stock unit is how you count what is in the shop. Selling unit is how the customer pays. Multi-unit selling is the POS feature that lets those differ on the same product instead of duplicating the SKU.
Examples shops actually use:
- Box and piece
- Pack and piece
- Kg and gram
- Carton, bottle, and liter
Do not create a second product for every pack size unless it is truly a different item
A 1L bottle and a 5L bottle are often different products (different barcode, different cost). A box of 100 screws vs a loose screw may be the same product with two units. The test: if selling one should reduce the same pile of goods, it is units. If it is a different pack on the shelf, it is a different product.
Bulk catalogs
Parts and grocery lists are too large to tap one form a hundred times. Use bulk entry and XLSX so units are part of the import, not a cleanup job later.
Get the units right before you rely on stock value. Wrong units make a beautiful, wrong number.