PIM in Digital Commerce Industry - All You Need to Know
For the growth of the business, every organization needs to keep its products and services updated to benefit its customers. The organization has to generate and manage the catalog for the product. The catalog includes all the necessary details regarding the product. This catalog leads in the development and management of the product and is essential for its sales and distribution.
Features and Functions of a PIM Solution
Product Information Management (PIM) helps in collecting, compiling, managing, and enriching the product information. All these details are essential for the distribution and sales of the product.
PIM helps in streamlining the process, guiding the data providers and suppliers. It provides the true details regarding the product to their customers. PIM helps to improve the quality of the product and maintain the consistency of the data.
Collection and importing data
One of the most important features of PIM is data import. This is essential when multiple devices are in use and when the company has the number of products on its list. It is easier when all the available products are made available to the clients in one place for quick access.
Product data analysis
PIM should be able to analyze the data efficiently. The tools help in aggregating the product data from various data views, purchase listings, and cart product details. All these modules need to be available on the dashboard and user-friendly. It should allow the customers to categorize and compare.
Bulk editing capabilities
PIM allows editing across various platforms simultaneously. This allows the customers to provide attributes for multiple products at the same time. Bulk editing saves time.
Create and manage categories
PIM allows their clients to manage the products and data while categorizing them. These categories depend on segment lists, specific traits, post data, and new launches. It also allows clients to customize their categories, import, export, and manage data.
Filtering options
This allows the clients to focus on the product of their interest. It helps the client to find the product, meeting their specific criteria in less time. Saving these filters for later use helps save time.
Integration with allied channels and systems
PIM solutions provide access to other shopping platforms and systems to take care of their customer’s needs. It helps the customer to compare the products based on the cost and specifications.
To learn about the highly advanced features of PIM, you can visit Must-Have Features of the Product Information Management System.
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Reasons Why PIM is Important For Your Digital Commerce Journey
In the most basic essence, PIM is a software tool that is designed specifically to gather all your product information into a single place and you can optimize the data and get it ready to distribute it across your different organizational channels.
It keeps the data all updated and uniform. You will not have to keep going back and forth into different spreadsheets and folders and will make your system more efficient.
Let us check out the reasons why PIM is important for the digital commerce journey!
Centralize all your company’s product information in one place
PIM allows companies that handle a lot of product information. It creates a single source of truth for all the products you sell. Instead of having different information spread across your employee’s computers and in different departments and systems, it will all be in one place.
It conveniently merges data across the organization in every location. The media and links that you use to sell your products will directly be connected and can be updated together at the same time.
1. Effectiveness between different departments
You can use it across all your teams and everyone in your organization can benefit from it. For instance, the sales team can get digital catalogs and product sheets on the fly and be confident that it has the most accurate and up-to-date information.
E-commerce managers that need to constantly prepare data for distribution can do so from where the data is kept. Brand managers or product data officers can stop worrying about having to track down outdated spreadsheets or that very last spreadsheet that needs to be updated.
A marketing team that needs to maintain a lot of content and modify campaigns across multiple channels can have the confidence in them that the information is accurate and they can retain it, right there in a certain allotted place.
2. Provides a fuller view of your product
It gives a full view of your product so you can optimize and enrich your product data. It keeps track of every single piece of information about the product, its quantity, its shipping information, its collaborations, product management workflow, etc.
Product management information keeps the product competitive in the market. Decisions are made effectively and it balances all of those needs without compromising on the vision of the company’s product.
3. Ensures the consistency of the information
It makes sure that the information you’re distributing across various channels is consistent which will emit a more trustworthy image to your clients. It provides a well-updated description of your product across all markets and channels.
When using a traditional way, the information was inconsistent and sometimes the data was compromised. Through PIM, it makes sure that all data is centrally channelized and offers a great performance to the organization.
4. Quick entry of the product inside the market
When you are listing your products in the market, your competitors may have already listed the same product. In this case, you will tend to lose both times as well as money.
To gain the first-mover advantage, you can get your product data and description prepared through the use of PIM and your product will be all set to release in the market. It will be advantageous and easy to get all your information about the product organized especially when you don’t have the time to look down for product specifications.
5. Enriching a great experience to the customers
It improves the overall experience for your customers and will help them see as much accurate and up-to-date information as possible before they buy, which will mean that they will know exactly what they are purchasing before they hit the ‘checkout’ button on the screen.
And most importantly your customers, they can buy with confidence that they can rely on your brand’s high-quality product information.
6. Minimizes omission and faults
Conventionally, guessing the material of the product and measuring them on their own was very common. This leads to high chances of inaccuracies, mistakes and the organization had to deal with product returns which caused a financial burden on the business.
PIM system syncs with all other systems like financial systems and even inventory systems. It keeps the inaccurate stock numbers low. It automatically updates your inventory and lets the customers know about it too before looking to buy any product.
7. Uplifts productivity and saves time
Through Product information management (PIM), you can keep a track of products like the life cycle stage. You can use it to see if a product is in stock, out of stock, or discontinued. Product information management lets your teams work together more efficiently.
It reduces manual labor and promotes automated tasks with higher accuracies and product worth of great value. Employees will spend less time doing unimportant tasks that require repetitions and focus more on the chief ones.
If you want to explore more benefits of the product information management platform, don’t miss to read What Are the Benefits of PIM Systems?
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Common PIM Challenges in Digital Ecommerce
PIM allows managing the product and taking it for e-commerce. As the product reaches out to the various platforms, tracking the data becomes difficult and inaccurate, and the chances of missing out on some data increases.
The various challenges faced while integrating the PIM with different e-commerce platforms include:
Weak data
The success of using PIM depends directly on the data included in it. The data defines the strength of the PIM.
Data Collection
The data collected is important and should be of good quality. Improper data of poor quality will not help in building a good and stronger PIM. It is important to make sure that the data collected is correct, complete, and reliable. The main aim of the PIM and digital e-commerce integration is to focus on stronger data.
Multiple companies involved
Some organizations have a multi-tiered system and include several companies under its head. As the number of companies increases the product list also increases. The organization should take time to decide if they want to include all the products of different companies under the same PIM. The efforts taken to pool all the data individually or separately will remain the same. It becomes beneficial when the company’s operation spreads out to various countries.
Expensive
PIMs are the best tools used for aggregating all the available product information. It also helps in identifying the inaccuracies and holes at a proper time thus allowing taking quick and optimized measures. Stacking new features to the core functionality leads to an increase in the cost of the PIM. To make the PIM cost-effective it is important to use the PIM for the actual intended purpose instead of stacking new features.
PIM complexity
As the complexity of the PIM increases, its cost and its inefficiency also increase. The PIM should be simple, flexible and this makes it capable of doing what it is intended to do. PIM integration can lead to the clutter of the PIM and may lead to distraction of the aim. Keeping the PIM simple will lead to the intended objective.
Speed and memory
As PIM integration takes place, the PIM gets complex. As the PIM complexity increases, the load on the cloud memory increases. Managing these increased data becomes cumbersome. As the data increases, the time is taken to export the data also increases, making the process slower. To maintain the speed of the PIM loading, it is better to keep the PIM simpler.
Get insights about the most crucial challenges that products information can resolve for you by reading Most Common Product Information Management Challenges.
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PIM Implementation – A Complete Guide
There are different steps involved in the implementation of the PIM and these include:
Gather data
The basic step while implementing the PIM is gathering adequate data. It is essential to understand the type of data required for PIM, finding the hidden information, organizing the available data, collecting the high-resolution images of the products, naming all the files and images as attributed to the product. The file and image labels should be easily linked to the concerned product.
Understanding data capabilities
Data mining helps to remove unnecessary data. The next step involves incorporating the data into the system to fit properly. For this, it is essential to understand the selected platform’s capabilities. It is also important to define the standard naming structure for all the products, assets, attributes, etc. Recording the type of data required for PIM and matching the available information to the right data type is crucial. Selecting the number of attributes is essential for proper management.
Detail cleaning
This step helps in identifying and removing the smaller errors. A properly made PIM will remove the duplicate data. It will also help in identifying the wrong characters and can be formatted to correct the data.
Test run
Once the PIM is in place, it is important to have a test run to check for its efficient working. For this, a small chunk of data is tested. This test helps in understanding the compatibility of the data with the system and its effectiveness. Taking some small tweaks can lead to the efficient working of the PIM.
Migration
Once when the test run succeeds, it helps to have a clear long-term picture. There are different ways for migration like all at once migration, incremental migration, and parallel migration. The organization can select the best suitable way for migration based on their requirements.
To get a better understanding of PIM implementation, you can read Do’s and Don’ts to consider while Product Information Management Implementation.
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Bottom line
Every organization needs to have PIM for the benefit of the growth of their business. PIM helps to collect and categorize the product data while setting up the priorities. It also helps to enrich the product description, translate the product into information and manage the product lifecycle. Using the PIM, the organization can manage the sale through multiple channels to enhance the business.
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