What is PIM?
PIM means product information management, and a PIM solution is a business app that handles material like data and content, for marketing and selling products, ensuring that quality data is generated for both internal and external use. A PIM solution provides a central location for the collection, handling, and enrichment of information related to your product. You can also build your catalog and share it with your sales and eCommerce channels. Codilar can craft a robust PIM system for you, helping you to build and deliver exceptional product experiences quickly, easily, and efficiently.
What are PIM Tools?
Businesses eager to undergo digital transformation can cheer; several PIM tools are available that help organizations to amalgamate and operate their whole product catalog and information database in a central location. The tools can be on-premise setups, customized, hosted cloud solutions and so on. Here are some of the most commonly used PIM tools:
- Item master
- Product information manager
- Product content manager
- Product image manager
- Product resource manager
- Product data manager
All the tools serve the same purpose – that of centralized management of product content or information, in a database or library, enabling standardization of information for use across the organization. Let’s take a brief look at what PIM tools do:
- Concentration and refinement of distributed data
- Product specification and description enhancement
- Monitoring progress and product completion
- Linking products with media, documents, and pictures
- Classification of files and products
- Formatting product information for multi-channel broadcast
- Administering upstream data and its preparation for sales avenues
- Managing product relationships
- Creating bespoke product feeds
- Building and publishing product sheets
- Automating the creation and maintenance of brand portals
- Analysis of product performance
- To centralize all information in one database
What is PIM for E-commerce?
PIM is a vital element of digital commerce strategy, as the application helps to both build and store product catalogs which you can distribute across your various sales channels. An E-Commerce PIM solution easily integrates with business systems like ERP and CMS, and 3PL as well. It manages product content, builds automatic workflows, handles multiple SKUs, and contains several fields to customize products. A PIM system for eCommerce enables you to handle all the information you need to market and sell your products through the different sales channels, online and physical locations included.
What are the Benefits of PIM Solutions?
With a Statista report indicating that Amazon is the top destination for online shoppers to find inspiration, retailers must ensure consistent product information across all customer touchpoints. As a leading Pimcore development company, we can say with confidence that your business can enjoy these benefits with a PIM solution:
Reduced Product Lead Times
A PIM system can significantly reduce product lead times by enabling your team to administer and amend all the product information simultaneously. With a good PIM solution in place, your go-to-market will not only be accelerated but also streamlined. This will help you save time and money, and give you a competitive edge as well.
Consistent Cross-Channel Product Information
A PIM solution can help you in building, amending, and managing your product information simultaneously. This way you can minimize errors while revising references, item numbers, SKU info, catalogs, and so on, regardless of how many platforms you are handling your products on.
Enhanced UX with Improved Product Descriptions
When product organization is streamlined and your descriptions improve, you can provide better customer experiences as well. With efficient and smart product layouts, thorough descriptions, and categorization, your users will find it super easy to search for and find the products they want to engage with.
Gain a Competitive Edge
In today’s competitive business environment, you can gain an edge by just providing more information and easily accessible data.
Increased Cross Selling and Up Selling
PIM solutions are a great way to boost your cross-selling and up-selling activities – as they reduce the time you need to spend wading through your data, you can be more active and energetic in your selling, and have more time to craft strategy. Pick the products to cross-sell, and the PIM system can help you devise methods to cross sell more seamless . It can also help in linking products to upsell and grow your business.
Reduced Product Returns
With detailed product descriptions and information, customers are aware of what exactly they are buying and are therefore not as likely to return products post-purchase. This reduces the time you need on processing the returns and streamlines the process. Moreover, it helps boost customer satisfaction and gives them a great buyer experience.
How to Implement PIM in Your Business
You have seen what PIM is and what benefits it can offer. If you are thinking of a Product information management solution to streamline your business operations, you should get in touch with a Pimcore development company like Codilar. Before that, let us understand a few more details. At Codilar, we can also help you decide whether it’s time to implement PIM in your business, and will discuss the required steps with you.
Why Do I Need Product Information Management (PIM)?
In today’s business scenario, delivering exciting product experiences is critical for beating the competition and succeeding. Customers demand trustworthy, in-depth, and updated information about products, regardless of which channel they see your products on, and at what touchpoint they are on; without that, they will be unable to make an informed purchase decision.
Unfortunately, however, product information is not complete; it’s patchy and lacks consistency across various business units, apps, channels, and siloed systems. Product management, digital marketing, eCommerce, or merchandising departments are not able to get full visibility into product information, and consequently, they waste time in manual product data management, internal and external (vendors and advertisers) email exchanges with regard to product content, and so on.
When you’re unable to collaborate on or handle your product information properly, you stand to lose income and market share and will fail in delivering exciting consumer experiences, essential for developing brand loyalty.
PIM solutions help in the standardization of product content demands which are becoming more demanding by the day. PIM also facilitates the distribution of enriched, quality product info to various sales and marketing channels. The appropriate product information management strategy and a steady, available product information source can help you quicken workflows and the time to market. It can also help in the speedy identification and evaluation of problems with the quality of product data, and help you leverage trending opportunities in the market. Eventually, all these combined together, help you to deliver a great product experience to consumers.
Industry experts opine that both B2C and B2B customers increasingly want seamless, tailored, and convincing eCommerce experiences, forcing retailers and manufacturers to deliver precise and relevant product data across distribution channels to present the best picture about their products. They predict that the importance of PIM solutions is all set for a meteoric rise, as businesses race to build more solid relationships with customers by leveraging the appeal of product stories.
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When Is It Time to Implement PIM?
It is not necessary that you must wait till the product data work becomes too cumbersome for manual effort, to implement PIM. Even small businesses can significantly benefit from PIM system implementation at the outset. To know if your business is ready for the PIM solution, answer these questions:
- How many products am I selling at the moment?
- What is the complexity of my product information, including technical details and structure of the category?
- Do I want to add new products now?
- Does my product information need to improve – with more in-depth info, better quality media, and descriptions to help customers visualize themselves using the products?
- Why am I unable to devote sufficient time to ensuring great product information?
- How many channels am I selling my products across- Facebook, website, Amazon, etc.?
- I’m selling only through my site now, but do I want to add more channels soon?
- Is my business growth rapid enough that will necessitate my scaling up in the near future?
- Do I have the budget to hire a Pimcore development agency?
You see we’ve kept the cost factor for the last because it should not be the primary deciding factor. Even if you do spend a bit now, the returns that it will bring you in the near future will more than justify the expense. As your eCommerce business grows and you add more sales channels, your business will become complex, and messy if not handled well. At Codilar, we can provide cost-effective PIM solutions aligned with your business goals.
A Good PIM System can Simplify your Life
As an eCommerce business operator, you can now appreciate how a robust PIM solution can benefit your business. We can help you reduce product lead times, decrease returns, boost cross-selling and up-selling, enhance data information and deliver engaging user experiences to help your E-commerce business achieve rapid growth and success.
Why should you opt for Codilar? Yes, there are sure to be several companies out there offering Pimcore development services. But Codilar has an edge over most of them, as we were named one of the finalists in the Pimcore Data Hero of The Year Award event held last year. This is a prestigious and highly competitive event where over 140 companies participate, and it was a great honor, and recognition of the stellar work we did for our partner, the Lals group. We built Mom Store, an E-Commerce platform for them. They sell over 80,000 products with more than 90 attributes: everything babies, new moms, and young kids might need. We made use of Pimcore to help them manage these products efficiently.
To be considered for the award, the project scope, customer reputation, time for implementation, and so on are evaluated by the Pimcore community. They also consider the manner in which the case study was created and presented and then pick the best and most innovative data management systems.
Sounds exciting? Just get in touch with us, and let’s talk about your PIM solution!
