Help! How do I combine duplicates with different counts of inventory?

Hello everyone! I'm new to this forum so I'm hoping I can find some help here! Thanks in advance for your time!!

Here's my situation:

I'm doing an inventory count on my company's sold product for the past two years. The only way to look this up is to compile all of the data (copy from our software and paste to an excel sheet). I've completed this step. The problem is that there are duplicates of the same item, but with different usage counts. It looks like this:

ITEM (Column A) # of times sold (Column B)

abc 3
abc 7
def 1
ghi 4
ghi 1
ghi 1

I need this to 1) combine the # of items sold column in correlation to the item #, and 2) to remove the duplicates. So it should look like this:

abc 10
def 1
ghi 6

Does anyone have a solution to this? After (if) I can solve this, I think I can do a vertical lookup to weed out the target items I am trying to locate. Again, thank you so much for your time and effort! I REALLY appreciate it!

-tybles

Thank you so much for your help, benishiryo! I still don't quite understand how to operate the pivot table, but the formula worked like a charm! You're a lifesaver!