A PIM or product information management is a software that enables businesses and organizations to collect, organize and enrich complex product information. PIM tools centralize product-related data and streamline the process of managing and updating accurate and complete product information across multiple sales and marketing channels. As a whole, a PIM solution helps in delivering compelling product experiences.
Why Your Organization Needs a PIM Solution?
If your organization deals in thousands of products, you must be aware of how difficult it becomes to manage such high amount of product attributes, such as product name, description, dimension, color, size and so on.
To alleviate this pain point, many businesses leverage a Product Information Management software to make the process of managing product information fast, efficient and productive. Using a PIM, everyone in the organization can collaborate to prepare products for sale on time and on budget.
What You Can Do with A PIM Tool?
- Improve product data quality across all channels
- Manage product information from a single platform
- Manage and update relationships between products
- Sort and centralize scattered data
- Publish accurate, complete and relevant product data
- Improve time to market of your product information that drives more conversions
- Translate product information into desired languages
- Link media content, such as photos, videos and documents to relevant products
- Deliver persuading user experiences across multiple platforms
- Analyze and improve product performance
What Kind of Product Information Needs to be Managed?
A product goes through a lot of product data throughout its lifecycle.
An efficient PIM makes easier to deal with crucial product content like:
Basic product attributes
Name, title, SKU, description, price, etc.
Sales information
Customer reviews, testimonials, currency, etc.
Technical specification
Material, measurements, color, ingredients, size, guarantee/warranty, etc.
Design specification
Designer notes, user manual, assembly instruction, style sheets, etc.
Digital assets
Photos, videos, graphics, animation, documents, etc.
Marketing information
SEO elements, keywords, personas, etc.
Account information
Purchase bills, sales invoice, return orders, etc.
What are the Benefits of Using a PIM Tool?
- Ensure completeness and accuracy of data
- Create a single source of truth for all product content
- Get your products faster in the market than competitors
- Reduce data errors and redundancies
- Increase employee efficiency and productivity
- Eliminate tedious manual data entry tasks
- Reduce cost overhead and waste of resources
- Drive more return on investment
- Reduce product returns
- Increase customer satisfaction
When You Should Consider Using A PIM Tool?
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from a PIM system. However, it becomes essential to implement PIM when your company:
- Wants to promote and sell products on multiple channels
- Manages complex product content and relationships
- Communicates in multiple languages
- Empowers marketing activities
- Has too many manual processes
Who Can Benefit from a PIM Solution?
Product and Inventory Management Team
Product and inventory management team manages and ensures high-quality product data. Their primary role is to make sure the same product information is displayed on all the channels. PIM implementation enables them to maintain accuracy, consistency and completeness of product data in a fast and efficient way.
Sales and Marketing Team
Marketers can leverage this amazing tool to access the latest product information and create engaging campaigns. All marketing professionals, including SEO experts, content creators and marketing managers can run online and offline marketing campaigns with accurate and up-to-the-date product information and deliver great customer experiences.
E-commerce Department
The e-commerce department needs to manage a large number of products and even larger product attributes in their online store and marketplaces. Using PIM, e-commerce managers can constantly update the product data, which can improve user experience and ultimately leads to higher conversion.
IT Team
For operations to run smoothly, the product data needs to be as accurate and consistent as possible across the entire company. A PIM system enables the IT team to integrate their existing systems and eliminate the need of maintaining product data on separate systems. This can greatly improve their productivity as everything can be managed from a single system.
The Best PIM Solution for Your Business
Fortunately for companies that are ready for a digital transformation, there are certain PIM solutions available, such as
Pimcore and Akeneo. These tools enable organizations to consolidate and manage product data from a single source of truth, which can be hosted on cloud or set up on-premise.
Akeneo
Akeneo is one of the best PIM solutions that cater to the product collaborative teams who want to manage a large amount of product data residing in multiple systems while keeping up with its consistency and high-quality. This easy to use and secure PIM tool allows online retailers to deliver cutting-edge shopping experiences on all points of sales.
Akeneo comes with interactive and sleek UI design that makes easy for the users to switch between product information management, task management and digital asset management. Akeneo is a free,
open-source PIM platform for startups as well as offer custom plans for businesses that need access to exclusive features.
Pimcore
Pimcore is a data and experience management platform that is particularly known for its product information, digital asset and web content management. This tool offers real-time sync between digital and physical stores, so if you operate your business both online and offline, this tool is an ideal choice. Hence,
Pimcore is great for retailers with fast growth.
Pimcore also comes with DAM, MDM, CDP and PIM solutions if you want to completely upgrade your brand’s data management. It allows you to centralize and harmonize all product information, enabling you to send data to any output channel, and deliver quality user experiences across all customer touchpoints.
A
PIM solution can be a real game changer that offers a variety of tools that solve common product information and data management issues. Implementing a
PIM solution early can support your organization’s growth and support future expansion, along with improving user shopping experiences, customer retention and brand image.
