Advanced PIM solution enables eCommerce retail giants like Amazon to generate up to 30% of their revenue from personalized client recommendations. Qualitatively, PIM solution integration doesn’t only optimize product data management. PIM solution integration also drives client loyalty, improves higher ranking on search engines, and lowers cart abandonment rates.
Simply put, a PIM solution is necessary for businesses that want to optimize delivery flows in any marketplace.
Here is how a PIM solution can help:
What is a PIM Solution?
PIM solution or PIM tool is an innovative business tool that provides a centralized repository for running, gathering, and enriching product info. Using the PIM tool, your team can generate standardized catalogs and distribute them to multiple sales and eCommerce channels.
To stimulate revenues, a business must use the PIM tool to optimize its info delivery flows to reach more clients. In return, a faster product launch process enabled by the PIM tool translates to extra selling days, where buyers will have more time to compare and evaluate their options. This is proof that a PIM tool gives you an upper hand over the competition in terms of client satisfaction and market share acquisition.
An innovative PIM tool comes with various features to help businesses achieve this. The PIM tool functionalities include automated product info collection and distribution.
With the PIM solution, you can also leverage validation workflows to enrich data and optimize flows to multiple marketplace listings, mobile applications, or eCommerce platforms.
Challenges of running Multiple Marketplaces
While opportunities will drive business growth, the challenges will impact revenues, conversion rates, and even brand reputation. That said, here are the prevalent challenges of running multiple marketplaces and how a PIM tool integration can solve them:
Large Amounts of Data to Manage
A growing business means more products in the line and expanded sales channels. This also implies creating content for all these merchandises and probably making variations as well, given that different platforms have content guidelines and requirements. Unless you have a PIM tool, data standardization and review become challenging in this case.
Moreover, it’s naturally inherent for humans to make mistakes or lose focus when continuously working on the same thing due to boredom. To mitigate this frustrating and confusing eCommerce process, you can leverage an AI-enabled PIM solution to automate manual processes. A PIM tool will also enhance the experience of your team by freeing employees from redundant tasks.
Endless Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets create fraud loopholes that are difficult to test, and hardly complement business agility. That aside, a PIM solution integration gives you a centralized place for running and visualizing all your product data, not to mention customizable workflows with access controls to minimize error possibility.
Inconsistent Product Descriptions
The more market and data your business handles, the higher the chance of associating items on sale with inconsistent or inaccurate descriptions. With the latest trends showing that 22% of clients return products due to inaccurate displays on digital shelves, it’s evident that invalid product descriptions can hurt sales. This is not to mention reputation and market positioning.
The best solution to this challenge is to display valid info at all times, with the help of a PIM tool. A PIM tool allows you to organize all data and implement an error-free management process across multiple channels. The PIM solution makes this possible through its various features that reduce manual processes, such as automated tagging when importing and exporting product tags.
SEO and Marketplace Optimization
Typically, eCommerce store owners should optimize every page for clients to quickly discover the items on sale through search engines. For instance, if your online store has 500 products with individual pages, you should optimize each with a meta description, URL, and title tag, among other elements.
The challenge arises when you have to write thousands of data points even before the product description itself. This means a higher risk of using duplicate materials, a trend that can hurt your visibility and sales opportunities. Fortunately, a PIM solution can regularly update your datasets for greater quality and consistency across all channels. You can also implement SEO strategies after validating product info using your PIM tool.
Key Features and Benefits of PIM Solution
The need to maintain product data in shipshape is at the heart of any business’ struggle, especially in an era where business intelligence, smart technologies, and automation are converging. But, as implied from the beginning, inaccurate product info or poor quality doesn’t make the cut when trying to foster a superior customer experience in an increasingly connected digital world.
And that’s where the importance of a PIM solution kicks in. Here are the key features and benefits of the PIM tool.
All-Around Product Data Management
Innovative PIM solutions come with all the functionalities that a small or big business needs to manage its data efficiently. The PIM tool will include user-friendly editing, data validation, user rights management, custom views, as well as publishing and versioning control functions. On top of that, the data modeling functionality of the PIM solution helps business owners understand the associations and relationships of their data sets.
Product Data Syndication
PIM solution efforts complement cross-channel marketing efforts by allowing eCommerce businesses to connect with external channels for publishing and product flow delivery. The PIM tool makes this possible through the collection, standardization, and syndication of product data to global marketplace listings like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Alibaba, and much more. In other words, a PIM tool can help you get your products to endless marketplaces.
Data syndication enabled by a PIM tool also facilitates product catalog distribution to any channel, regardless of the underlying format. Moreover, this approach powered by a PIM tool also allows your team to implement auto-generative creatives and include them dynamically in logos or titles to maintain brand messaging consistency.
Seamless Integrations with Other Systems
Given that most PIM tools in today’s market are API-driven, you can achieve endless connections with a PIM solution, whether it’s Amazon integration, Walmart integration, or EPR. Other systems you can easily connect to your PIM solution include existing catalogs, electronic data interfaces, logistics tracking platforms, and business intelligence tools, among others.
With effective, all-around PIM tool integration opportunities, your business can implement two-way, real-time interactions for greater efficiency and productivity at all times. This approach also eases the process of searching, retrieving, or importing info, especially if your team knows how to integrate products with the PIM solution.
Digital Assets Management
Modern PIM solutions have a complementary digital assets management (DAM) platform. In a PIM solution, this functionality is instrumental in overseeing a myriad of digital assets powering your eCommerce operations, including images, videos, graphics, or even GIFs. Thus, you won’t have to invest in a separate DAM if you have a PIM solution.
The DAM functionality enables enterprises to disseminate matching assets with the intended targets via the right channels of interaction. The DAM in the PIM tool is also handy for delighting buyers with appealing imagery and visions to strengthen brand outlook, voice, and value.
Faster Time-to-Market
A PIM tool is built with multiple features to reduce the time to market of product launches on digital shelves. For instance, the PIM solution enhances the ability to build data structures and hierarchies at remarkable speeds and enables a seamless workflow for greater operational efficiency. This PIM tool function creates an ample way for real-time collaboration and product description enrichment.
As a result of this PIM tool function, your business can deploy products for multichannel delivery and distribution to reach intended targets in no time. In return, your PIM tool will enhance client engagement and sales opportunities to drive revenues.
PIM Solution for Improved customer Experience
A PIM tool can help you enhance customer experience and much more in the following steps:
- Using a PIM solution you can create a centralized repository for all your images, texts, videos, or any other visual content for effective merchandising.
- A PIM solution facilitates automation of unique product info generation using source master data.
- A PIM solution allows the implementation of data governance, management, and quality assurance processes.
- With a PIM tool, you can distribution of product data to multiple channels and marketplaces that leverage individual product taxonomy
- PIM tools enable generation of actionable insights through real-time data analysis
In the long haul, PIM tool processes ensure that you deliver accurate content across all channels, positioning your brand to earn trust and loyalty from buyers. Most importantly, analytics into their eCommerce behavior and comparison with product info with the assistance of a PIM solution can help you to make personalized offers for a greater customer experience.
Real-World Examples of Businesses Using PIM Tools
Businesses from all over the world are integrating a PIM solution into their operations to streamline product flow to marketplaces. Here are two use cases that elaborate on real-life applications of PIM solutions and their business results.
GS1 Fashion Base Portal for Dutch Suppliers
GS1, a Dutch-based fashion supplier, integrated a PIM tool to provide a functional and safe platform where resellers could import and enhance seamless product data delivery at all times without additional resources. All that retailers need besides the PIM tool connection is integration with Icecat content provider to automate data export, as well as receive updated, complete, and accurate descriptions of product attributes.
The technical business benefits of PIM tool integration in this case include the ability to leverage multiple import file types, including CSV, XML, and JSON. Resourcefully, the resellers now enjoy faster time to market and don’t require resources to upgrade the data model.
AFS eCommerce Connector for Enhanced Product Feed
Amazon introduced its standard Amazon Feed Specifications (AFS) in 2018, requiring retailers to use a data format that follows the JSON schema. Moreover, the standard requires a safe and functional platform to automate the import processes. Therefore, vendors Denver and Jumbo integrated PIM solution to perform product data syndication to adapt to the new format.
With the eCommerce connector integration powered by a PIM solution, the vendors now enjoy increased mapping speed, as well as time and cost saving on manual tasks. On top of cutting maintenance and overhead costs, the vendors also have access to multiple languages and GEOs support.
Conclusion
Having a PIM solution is a necessity for any retail or eCommerce business that wants to solve the prevalent challenges of running product info across multiple channels. The PIM tool automates processes to save time and reduce errors, syndicates product data for consistency and allows you to stand out amid the competition by delivering a superior customer experience. In other words, the ROI of PIM solution integration is worth the initial investment.