Across all channels, retail businesses have two core goals: to drive high-quality traffic to their products and convince customers to make a purchase.
An integral part of meeting these goals is providing accurate and consistent product data. With consumers shopping and researching across multiple channels, doing this is particularly challenging for most retailers.
This is where Product Information Management (PIM) comes into play. PIM enables retailers to centrally manage and disseminate accurate, consistent, and enriched product information across online, offline, mobile, and social media channels.
Retailers that adopt and leverage PIM can improve product launch times, reduce manual labour, enhance customer experiences, and drive business growth.
This article will explore:
Overview of product information management (PIM) in Retail
Components of Product Information Management
Strategies to leverage product information management in retail
What are the benefits of PIM for retailers?
Overview of product information management (PIM) in retail
Retail businesses constantly have to evolve to make sales, and they deal with different degrees of complexities.
Chief of these complexities is managing product information effectively such that customers receive reliable, targeted product data across all marketing and sales channels. That’s where product information management comes in.
Product information management (PIM) is a process that empowers retailers—and other businesses like suppliers and distributors—to store, enrich, and manage all data related to their products across all categories and SKUs.
This data can be anything product-related, including product names, universal product codes (UPCs), product content like videos and pictures, specifications, descriptions, pricing, customer reviews and testimonials, and much more.
PIM solutions help retailers centralise all product information into a single source of truth that serves your customers, as well as internal sales, marketing, and product teams.
As the single source of truth, these tools integrate with other systems to ensure real-time access to up-to-date product data by all teams.
This integration is a two-way street: the PIM solution ingests data from multiple sources, mostly internal, and it, in turn, egests the data to destinations like social media, online marketplaces, and e-commerce platforms.
Why PIM matters in retail
To understand why PIM matters in retail, it’s important to examine the history of the industry to see how changes in the retail space led to the need for PIM.
Cast your mind back to the early 1990s, before the internet became mainstream. Back then, it was easier for retailers to control product information, and they relied mostly on product catalogues to share it with customers. Since then, much has changed. The internet became mainstream, and e-commerce became a thing. Customers now leverage multiple channels (omnichannel selling)for research before making purchasing decisions.
Retailers learned the hard way that effectively managing product information was crucial to meeting the demands of this new paradigm. Retailers need accurate, consistent, and up-to-date product information across all touchpoints. But that can be very difficult when coordinating multiple teams like product management, marketing, logistics, and more. Many organisations rely on multiple, scattered spreadsheets from different teams to ‘organise’ this data, which inevitably leads to mistakes.
Providing a single source of truth for product information helps you deliver a cohesive, omnichannel experience that meets customers wherever they shop.
This experience includes providing the appropriate messaging and marketing materials to the right audience, location, and channel.
In a way, the term “product information” doesn’t fully capture the essence of PIM. It’s beyond centralising details like product pricing and colour; it has become an essential part of selling effectively.
Components of product information management
An effective and robust PIM system consists of several essential components that work together to ensure efficient product data management.
These components are crucial for maintaining data quality and accuracy, consistency, and accessibility internally and across various sales channels. They include:
Centralised storage or repository
This is a data repository or database that contains all product information, including marketing data, basic product data, digital assets, technical specifications, localised information, pricing and sales data, product taxonomy, and more.
Retailers can build an internal PIM system or subscribe to any of the available third-party PIM systems in the market.
Data ingestion
We mentioned earlier how PIM tools integrate with other tools. It’s an integral part of the PIM ecosystem, ensuring critical product data is pulled from various sources into the central repository.
Through these integrations, you can ingest data from:
- Internal systems such as ERP, CRM, supply chain tools, internal databases, and other enterprise systems.
- External sources like product information from suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors. External sources may also include data from social media.
- Manual data input and import. Your PIM team can also directly enter data into the repository, for example if the marketing team is updating copy for a product line.
With a PIM tool like Starhive, create and build a centralised product information database in a way that works for you. You can decide the type of data the repository will store, and then add attributes and relationships between your data objects.
Data management and governance
Data governance and management are critical components of a PIM system, ensuring that product information is accurate, consistent, and accessible. Key aspects include:
- User access and permissions: Control who has access to what. Based on their roles and responsibilities, different users should have different levels of access to the PIM system.
- Standardised taxonomy: This includes defining a standardised set of attributes to describe products to ensure customers can easily make apples-to-apples comparisons while shopping. It also includes organising products into clear categories and hierarchies, making it easier to search.
- Consistent data structure: This enforces consistent data formats, such as date, currency, and measurement units.
- Data cleaning and deduplication: This involves enforcing data quality standards, such as mandatory fields, data formats, and character limits, as well as identifying and fixing errors, inconsistencies, and missing data.
- Data enrichment: Many PIM systems let you automatically add extra information to your products based on other information you have entered. For example adding a tag based on price, or calculating volume from the entered dimensions.
- Compliance: Compliance with regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) is particularly important if you depend heavily on third-party data.
Many PIM systems have automation and workflow features that automatically perform routine tasks, such as data cleaning, deduplication, and synchronisation.
Data syndication or distribution
Data distribution is the process of exporting product information to various sales channels, ensuring that accurate and up-to-date data is available to customers wherever and whenever they shop or research a product you sell.
Channels for data syndication:
- E-commerce platforms: Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Magento.
- Social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest.
- Marketplaces: Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, Etsy.
- Mobile apps: iOS, Android.
- Web sites: Product detail pages
A core part of this distribution is data synchronisation, which ensures that product data is the same across all the channels you support. And the good part about this synchronisation is that it can happen almost instantaneously.
That said, you can equally schedule batch updates periodically or set up updates when triggered by specific events. Testimonials and product reviews are examples of product data suited for batch and on-demand syndication.
Strategies to leverage product information management in retail
Some strategies to implement and extract the maximum benefit from PIM include:
Create a PIM implementation roadmap
To leverage PIM effectively, it’s imperative to create a structured plan that guides implementation and ongoing use. A roadmap ensures that there’s strategic alignment between PIM and your business goals.
This roadmap sets the stage for choosing the right PIM software, defining measurable goals, and designing workflows and processes that align with your specific business objectives.
The first step in creating a PIM roadmap is conducting a thorough assessment of your current business processes and data needs. Ensure you get feedback from different teams, particularly marketing, sales, and product. Analyse your current product information framework, identify any pain points, and outline key areas for improvement.
The next step is outlining clear PIM objectives. Depending on the maturity of your existing PIM strategy, these goals can enhance customer satisfaction, accelerate product launches, or support your omnichannel strategy.
The roadmap should also contain details such as timelines, responsibilities, and checkpoints for evaluating progress so you can track improvements and make adjustments as you go.
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Foster collaboration between internal teams
Effective cross-functional collaboration is essential in retail, where product launches, promotions, and sales tactics all hinge on joint effort.
For example, the SEO team ensures product descriptions use the right keywords, and the marketing team crafts persuasive copy to convince customers to make the purchase.
This collaboration depends on shared, current, and accurate information. When internal teams work in a system that encourages data silos, it leads to inconsistencies in messaging and potentially missed opportunities when the product information fails to convert.
The right product information management system is critical to facilitating this collaboration.
For example, PIM systems support collaborative review processes, enabling your teams to review and approve product data or content before they go live, ensuring consistency and brand alignment across all channels.
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Build customer trust by adopting brand guidelines and data governance framework
Inconsistent product information across sales channels can confuse customers and erode trust in your brand.
Imagine a customer goes to your website and then to your Instagram page and finds conflicting pricing or product details. It’ll likely force them to pause.
Adopting clear brand guidelines and a data governance framework can help standardise how product information is managed and presented.
The choice of a PIM system plays a role in this. Some PIM systems allow you to turn guidelines into validation rules that get flagged once product data drifts away from established standards.
You must also ensure that the data governance framework you follow is comprehensive and aligned with your brand to ensure that only verified, quality-checked data goes live.
Make faster product launches part of your PIM goals
Retail trends and customer demand often shift quickly, and delays or errors while launching new products often lead to missed revenue opportunities. And this is especially true if you sell seasonal or trend-driven items.
A PIM system inherently streamlines product onboarding by centralising the setup process. However, there are steps you can take to encourage faster product launches further.
For starters, take advantage of automated workflows to eliminate redundant tasks. An example we gave earlier is the use of validation rules to ensure product data that goes live conforms to guidelines, without manual intervention.
Another strategy to streamline the launch process is to have standardised product templates for different product categories. This also includes creating pre-configured templates for different channels to accelerate the distribution process.
For example, dimensions vary across different social media platforms. Creating a template ensures that content creation is almost plug-and-play.
Embrace personalisation
Personalisation is key to engagement, driving both customer loyalty and higher conversion rates. You can leverage data and relevant product information to deliver personalised product information and recommendations.
Personalisation requires segmented data, and a robust PIM system certainly offers ways to create and store segmented product information.
You can segment product information based on various attributes, such as customer demographics, location, purchase history, or channel destination.
A simple example is creating localised product information and providing an avenue for customers to choose which language they want to read a product description.
Invest in rich product content
Retail customers rely on product content to make informed purchase decisions, regardless of the channel they’re shopping or researching.
Detailed descriptions, high-quality images, video demonstrations, and even user-generated content such as reviews and testimonials are essential for pushing customers along in the buying journey.
Rich product content enhances the shopping experience and also reduces the likelihood of returns due to unmet expectations.
As we discussed earlier, data enrichment is a critical component of PIM. You can enrich product data by integrating various forms of media and supplemental content into product pages.
PIM systems also support real-time updates, so if a product’s specifications need to be modified suddenly or warranty information added, you can easily effect those changes across all channels.
Leverage Starhive’s in-built digital asset management to bring all product-related files under one tool, enhancing your marketing workflow.
What are the benefits of PIM for retailers?
Implementing a PIM system can bring tremendous benefits to retailers by streamlining operations, improving data accuracy, and supporting growth and expansion.
Here are some core benefits PIM offers retailers:
Better conversions and increased sales
PIM enhances product pages with rich, accurate, and consistent information, providing customers with a comprehensive understanding of what they’re buying.
This can greatly help convince them to make the purchase then or further encourage them to continue their research on your other channels.
We mentioned earlier how PIM facilitates personalisation. Research shows that using personalised experiences can increase sales by as much as 20%.
Powers omnichannel strategy
Maintaining consistent, accurate product information across multiple channels is challenging.
Yet, in today's world, where the customer journey is non-linear and multi-dimensional, accurate product data is essential for building a seamless omnichannel experience that meets customer expectations.
With PIM, you can ensure consistent product information across online, offline, mobile, and social media channels. This consistency delivers the same ideal customer experience regardless of the channel.
Improves data accuracy and reliable data
Inaccurate product information can mislead customers, leading to higher dissatisfaction and return rates.
For retailers, ensuring data accuracy across all customer touchpoints is critical to maintaining credibility and building trust.
Product information management systems improve data accuracy and reliability by establishing a single source of truth for all product information.
These systems help enforce data quality standards through data validation rules and regular cleaning and deduplication processes.
Reduces manual labour
With PIM, much of the manual workload is automated, allowing retailers to eliminate redundancies and save valuable time.
Data is updated in one place and then automatically synced across all platforms.
Many PIM tools also come with AI features and automatic workflow to further help keep things ticking with minimal human input.
Improves scalability
As retailers grow, they often expand their product range, add new sales channels, or enter new markets.
This growth leads to an increasing volume of product data across multiple touchpoints that can quickly become overwhelming without a scalable solution.
PIM systems are perfectly able to handle these increased complexities. Whether you’re adding more SKUs or expanding to new territories, PIM enables efficient product data expansion and localisation.
Takeaway: Unlock the full potential of PIM for retail success
Product Information Management (PIM) systems are indispensable tools for modern retailers.
PIM enables retailers to improve data accuracy, consistency, and accessibility, leading to increased sales, enhanced customer experiences, and a competitive edge in the market.
Further adopting a customer-centric approach to PIM, such as focusing on accuracy, personalisation, and cross-functional collaboration, you can build trust, support your expansion goals, and ultimately drive conversions.
Streamline your product information and enhance your customer experience with Starhive’s powerful Product Information Management (PIM) solution. Keep data consistent across all channels with Digital Asset Management built right in for access to images, videos, and other media. Get started with Starhive today!
FAQs
Here are the answers to some common questions about PIM:
What types of information are managed by a PIM system?
PIM systems manage all kinds of product-related data, including basic data like SKU and product names, digital assets related to a product like pictures and tutorials, technical information, marketing info like SEO keywords and Amazon titles, product pricing, localised information, and much more.
Why is product information management essential for e-commerce?
Product Information Management (PIM) is essential for e-commerce as it centralises product data, ensuring accuracy and consistency across all digital channels. This improves customer experience, boosts SEO, accelerates time-to-market, and makes it easier to scale, ultimately helping e-commerce sellers deliver a cohesive, high-quality shopping experience.
In what way does PIM improve customer experience?
With centralised data, customers find the right specifications, high-quality images, and relevant descriptions that can help them make informed decisions about their purchases. This increases the probability that customers would be satisfied with their purchases. PIM also enables personalisation, allowing retailer to tailor product content to individual preferences, creating a more engaging shopping journey.
How does PIM ensure data accuracy and uniformity?
PIM ensures data accuracy and uniformity by centralising product information, enforcing data quality standards, and automating data validation.
It standardises data formats, eliminates inconsistencies, and reduces human error, which guarantees that product data is accurate, consistent, and reliable across all sales channels.
How do product data management (PDM) and PIM differ?
Both Product Data Management (PDM) and Product Information Management (PIM) focus on managing product data under an umbrella master data management strategy. The former primarily focuses on managing technical product data used in the design and engineering phases, while the latter focuses on managing product information for marketing and sales purposes.
What is a product information management (PIM) strategy?
A Product Information Management (PIM) strategy outlines how an organisation will manage and utilise product information across channels, systems, and departments. The primary goal is centralising product data to ensure its accuracy and consistency across all channels.
