Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
I am assuming the following. SKU's are not part of key elements like H1 tags. You are not going to change the URLs (happens if you have included SKUs as part of the URL). SKU's are not part of users' search queries . In the above-described scenario changing shouldn't have a noticeable impact. Experienced members can correct me if I am wrong. If the site is too large and you are too much concerned about the SEO impacts, you could pilot a few " less risky " pages first (the products which rank reasonably well but don't bring in much ROI), observe the traffic for those pages for a few months, and decide for the whole site later. P.S: There is another thread that raises a similar issue like...
Full answer by Kannan: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/131422 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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