Did you know that over 80% of shoppers search for product information online before making a buying decision? This means, if you are in the eCommerce industry, you should provide your customers with enough product information to help increase their shopping experience and boost your sales.
Providing excellent information about your products can be quite challenging if you do not have the right tools. It would be best if you had a single place to collect, manage, and enhance your product information. This is where product information management comes in.
What Is PIM?
Product Information Management (PIM) is a system that provides a company with a single space where it can manage a large amount of information about their products. With the system, eCommerce businesses can also distribute the information they want to share with their customer on various channels.
With a PIM system, you can collect, enrich, and share more information about your products securely and efficiently to websites, online stores, datasheets, printed catalogs, brochures, and any other marketing channel.
A PIM solution will help you give your customers an easier and faster way of knowing more about the products they want to buy. This will help you deliver an exciting product experience. The system can also enable the sales team and digital interfaces to have the best information.
This will ensure that the customer experience is valuable and relevant. Know how to successfully implement a PIM project information management so that you can change your company’s product information source.
PIM and Integration With Other Systems
PIM’s greatest strength is its ability to integrate and exchange data with several other programs. Therefore, the PIM system should have an open API that does not affect its ability to read data and metadata. Its writability to other systems should also not be limited.
The system is integrated into your business’s existing system. It is placed between your sources for product information such as supplier data or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and the external distribution channels like CMS, online store, or datasheets.
PIM can integrate with systems like ERP, CRM, PLM, CMS, supplier portals, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and more. The PIM will give you more control over your information and also ensure that you are consistent.
Why You Should Use a PIM
When you are handling more data, your old way of managing data might be inadequate. You will need a better system or solution. This system comes in very handy when your product data requirements increase.
The ERP system, though good, has its limitations. With the growing numbers of online buyers, this system cannot handle the complexity of product data. Databases and excel sheets that the ERP systems use makes finding information and sending it to the right marketing channels rather difficult.
Why You Should Use a PIM
With Widen product information management, you will have only one source of information, and this does away with the rather chaotic excel sheets and databases. The system will help you streamline the onboarding processes for data providers and suppliers.
This system will help you:
- Reduce wasted resources and overheads
- Reduce errors and redundancies because you will rely on a single source of truth
- Sell more with better content and accessible data
- Get to market faster than your competitors
- Import and sort supplier data quickly
- Eliminate bottlenecks & data silos
- Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Create rich and consistent content
- Eliminate manual data entry and updating
- Expand product offering in a sustainable way
- Create optimized data
By using this system to maintain and streamline large quantities of product information, your business will save a lot of valuable time when selling across different channels.
Who Benefits From PIM
The system offers you a lot, especially when it comes to productivity, and several types of businesses can benefit from it. PIM is for any business that:
- Handles a lot of products
- Sell products via various channels
- Collects data from different suppliers
- Manages complicated product content
- Still deals with a lot of manual processes
- Needs accurate product information
- Alters product prices several times a year
- Has a high number of Stock Keeping Unit
The system will also come in handy for marketing teams who juggle a lot of content. Your customers will shop with confidence because of the quality product information you will offer them.
PIM contains technical data like specifications, measures, ingredients, and emotional data like product stories or detailed descriptions. It also contains sage data such as descriptions, how-to, and media files like images, PDFs, or videos.
Who Can Work With a PIM System in Your Company?
The PIM system collects data, enriches it, and then spreads it across various channels. These functions bring together three different departments in your company.
The Marketing Team
Your marketing team should quickly come up with and share creative solutions to help sell your products. This can become tough if they have to manually find, validate, and edit any information about the products across several channels.
With PIM, they will save a lot of time, and also they will have very accurate information. This also helps save a lot of resources. Your sales team will benefit because they will always have up to date data on the go at all times.
Product Management
Product managers or any other person involved with the product’s journey will find the system an essential tool. It will help them streamline the production processes and reduce errors that are common with manual processing.
IT Department
PIM helps to simplify the IT infrastructure because it eliminates several decentralized systems that the IT managers used to store product data before. The system also solves problems that relate to scalability in your business.
Your IT or eCommerce managers will have the correct data which they can use to improve conversion rates and user experience.
Consider Using a Product Information Management System
Investing in the right product information management system will benefit your business in several different ways. You will be able to give your customers all the information they need about your products. This is one step towards attaining customer satisfaction.
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