invalid or duplicate sku warning on every page

Hi @craftspeed,

The behavior which you describe is not a bug in WooCommerce as none of my test sites are displaying any similar behavior to what you describe with regards to duplicate SKU details displaying.

This indicates that something on your site other than our WooCommerce plugin is having a negative effect and causing this behavior which you are experiencing. Usually, isolated behaviour like what you describe and which are not displaying on any other installs can be related to code with another plugin or a theme which is activated on a site and which is causing a conflict of some kind.

Have you tested on your site by disabling all other plugins aside from WooCommerce along with switching to a theme like Storefront to try and locate what software you have installed which could possibly be causing this behaviour?

Once you have disabled all other plugins and switched theme if the behaviour is resolved you can then enabled your theme and sites plugins testing after each one is enabled until the behaviour returns to locate the culprit.

We’re now striking the same problem. Each of our products has two attributes Yes/No.

The NO attribute, uses the default SKU and is no problem.
When we add the YES variation, we enter a different SKU.
NOTE: when the variation is saved, the changed SKU is NOT saved,and the default product SKU is saved instead. It’s that not saving the custom SKU that seems to be causing the “Invalid or Duplicated SKU” error.
The really strange thing is that this started while we were updating products on a new site. The first 7 products were updated OK, a few minutes later and 8th got this error. No plugins were changed or updated in between.
We’ve disabled ALL other plugins – WC related or not. It’s still appearing.

Why is the variation custom SKU not being saved?

IMHO, I see this error keeping appearing for WC users over many years and more so since WC 3 was released. Even if this is not a WC bug, perhaps WC could provide a better and more detailed error message? For example, showing the duplicate SKU’s etc – the current error message isn’t a lot of help.

Thanks,

Update:
I tried SKU error fixer for WooCommerce. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/sku-error-fixer-for-woocommerce/ and it solved the problem.
There were ‘old’ variations in the db that caused the error.
I was a little wary of the plugin since it’s about a year old, so I did a full backup first. But it did the trick.
Hope this helps others.
My comment to WC still stands — a better and more detailed error message would help WC customers a lot.