How should e-commerce SKU coding rules be set up to avoid chaos?

If you just pick SKU codes randomly at the beginning, operations, the warehouse, and customer service will all suffer later. When there are few new products, names like "red-small" or "A001" might suffice, but once you have many SKUs, mixing colors, sizes, sets, channels, and versions makes it hard to reconcile picking and reporting, and leads to counting errors during inventory checks. I…