UNSPSC

The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) is a taxonomy of products and services for use in eCommerce. It is a four-level hierarchy coded as an eight-digit number, with an optional fifth level adding two more digits.

Version 16, released in 2014, contained over 50,000 commodities. The latest release of the code set is 17.1001 (as of March 2015).

The UNSPSC competes with a number of other product and commodity coding schemes, including the European Union's Common Procurement Vocabulary, Germany's Eclass, and GS1's Global Product Classification.

Description

The four primary levels of the code are: Segment, Family, Class and Commodity.

Each level is coded in two decimal digits, with '00' treated specially to give segments, families and classes their own eight-digit codes.

Thus 'Cats' are coded as 10101501, 'Dogs' are coded as 10101502 and 'Cattle' as 10101516. The class of 'Livestock' is 10101500; the family of 'Live animals' is 10100000, and all in the segment 10000000 of 'Live Plant and Animal Material and Accessories and Supplies'.