Product

In manufacturing, products are purchased as raw materials and sold as finished goods. Commodities are usually raw materials such as metals and agricultural products, but a commodity can also be anything widely available in the open market. In business, a product is a good economics and accounting good or service which can be bought and sold. In marketing, a product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need.

In general usage, product may refer to a single item or unit, a group of equivalent products, a grouping of goods or services, or an industrial classification for the goods or services.

Product may refer to a unique product, such as a single carton of brand X milk, a single customized interior design, a single piece of lumber, or a single hour of technical support. Serial numbers are used to identify certain unique products. A vehicle identification number identifies a unique motor vehicle.

The term defective product usually refers to a single instance or a few instances of unique products not meeting specifications or standards.Every product is unique in the sense that it cannot be sold to customer A and customer B at the same time, or sold twice at the same time to a single customer. An invoice is a business document requesting payment for actual product delivered.Double billing is the error of charging a customer twice for the same unique product.

[edit] Equivalent or interchangeable product
The specific meaning of generic product names varies over time and location. Some products such as bread, milk, and salt have been bartered or sold for centuries, but the meaning of "bread" or "milk" as a product varies. The technologies were not available for pasteurization and homogenization of milk until the 20th century, and these food processing technologies are not used worldwide. Bread varies by type of grain, specific recipe, and size of loaf. In 1924, Morton Salt introduced iodized table salt, a product previously unavailable. Since 1961, pork bellies have traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but due to selective breeding and changes in hog feed, today's pork belly is not exactly equivalent to a 1960s pork belly. Certain products may be considered equivalent or interchangeable for the purposes of trade, record-keeping, and reporting, despite gradual changes in the product or variations among geographical locations.

The distinction between a new product and a minor modification to an existing product is not always clear. Certain products have a product life cycle in which the supply and demand for the product increases then decreases over time. The demand for certain food products such as bread will tend to increase with population, but the supply and demand for a specific brand of bread may decline over time. In the United States, a patent for a product is recognition that the product is new in a legal sense.Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof; design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and, plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant. In business an equivalent, interchangeable or fungible product is defined by a company and its customers. A company's inventory is comprised of physical products, or goods, that are usually recorded as counts of equivalent unique products, such as 50 8-oz cans of salsa. The equivalent unique products may be assigned a product code or item code, such that "50 8-oz cans of salsa" is recorded as "50 17766443" on the company's records. If the company carries two brands of 8-oz salsa, it may assign separate item codes to the brands, or it may use a single item code for both brands.

Product identification codes such as Universal Product Code, Global Trade Item Number and International Standard Book Number allow multiple businesses to use a single product identification code to indicate one unit of a mass-produced product.

Lot numbers, batch numbers or control numbers are used in manufacturing to sub-divide equivalent product by its manufacturing batch or run. The publishing page of a book lists the printing run that produced that unique book. Industries such as pharmaceuticals, food processing, and petroleum use some form of control number to sub-divide equivalent product for product testing or expiration dating. See also shelf life. Two separate lots may vary slightly, but they are not assigned separate product identification codes because the variation does not give them significantly different features or uses as products.

Barcode labels on vaccines contain a product code but do not currently contain the batch number or expiry date. Inventory records of controlled substances in Malaysia, for example, must include a batch number or other appropriate identifying number. For each controlled substance in the process of manufacture on the inventory date, the inventory shall include; the physical form which the substance is to take upon completion of the manufacturing process (e.g., granulations, tablets, capsules, or solutions), identified by the batch number or other appropriate identifying number, and if possible the finished form of the substance (e.g., 10-milligram tablet or 10-milligram concentration per fluid ounce or milliliter) and the number or volume thereof.

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