To facilitate business-to-business e-commerce, the United Nations created the Standard Product and Services Classification Code (UN/SPSC), an eight-digit commodity code standard that classifies more than 10,000 products and services worldwide.

The UN/SPSC enables companies anywhere, regardless of language, to communicate electronically about the products and services they're buying or selling.

The UN/SPSC classifies products and services at the two-, four-, six- and eight-digit levels, e.g. [31] manufacturing components, [3110] castings, [311015] die castings and [31101501] aluminum die castings.

A ninth and tenth digit can be added to indicate a business relationship to the supplier such as rental/lease, wholesale, retail or original equipment manufacturer.

CustomCommerce supports product hierarchical trees that use the UN/SPSC classification scheme.