In today's fast-paced e-commerce world, managing your product information effectively is crucial for your business to stay competitive and meet customer expectations. There's no room for delays or mistakes in product photos or specifications.
Is your team often looking for the 'right data' rather than doing their core job of bringing products to market? Or are your customer support team overloaded with complaints and return requests?
If so, it might be time for Product Information Management (PIM), a process designed to help businesses handle their product data and get to market faster with accurate product information. But what exactly is PIM, and how does it make things more efficient?
Let's dive into the world of PIM and see how it can benefit your organisation!
Understanding Product Information Management (PIM)
Product Information Management (PIM) refers to centralising and enriching all product-related information in a single place before sending it out to your sales channels. This includes data such as product descriptions, specifications, images, pricing, and more. The term PIM can mean both the process and the software system used to implement the process. With a PIM system, you can collect your information easily, keep it accurate and complete, and ensure it is available for your channels.
A world without PIM - sound familiar?
Whether you are a brand, manufacturer, retailer, or distributor, if you handle many products, managing the data associated with all of them and getting the right data on the right products in your channels can be a huge headache. This is especially true if your product data is stored across multiple spreadsheet files, as is so often the case for businesses without a PIM system.
This scattered data can lead to silos between teams, causing frustration during collaboration and delays in getting products launched, which has negative impacts on your bottom line. It can also lead to significant errors.
If you are using spreadsheets, they are notorious for containing mistakes caused by manual errors during input. It's easy to accidentally type the wrong information in the wrong row, enter the wrong number in a measurement field, or even duplicate data across files (anyone else seen Excel files with V2, V3, etc in the name? How do you know which is the latest one?). All of this increases the chances of the wrong information going out to syndication, which will upset customers, erode trust in your business, cause more support requests, and likely lose you valuable sales.
The benefits of PIM
Implementing a proper process for managing your data in one centralised PIM system will help keep your product information accurate and ensure the correct information is in your public listings on your channels.
PIM systems help keep your data consistent across all channels by acting as a central source of truth. You keep all the essential information about your products in one place with all the attributes you might need across any channel. Then, you can publish the correct attributes to the correct channels with a few clicks or even on a schedule. Now, your customers receive the same accurate information whether they are looking at your website, reading a catalogue, or on a third-party marketplace, resulting in a fantastic customer experience.
Also, PIM systems usually have lots of extra capabilities to improve collaboration across your organisation when working with product information. They often let you manage product lifecycles so everyone knows the state of every product, have helpful features to enrich your product data quickly, workflows to manage approvals on updates to product data, and much more. All these features help you take your products to market faster with the correct content.
Who uses PIM?
Many types of businesses and people use PIM on a daily basis to streamline their day-to-day work.
Businesses
Retailers
Retailers need to ensure they can quickly gather data from their suppliers and push that information out to their channels with minimal effort
Brands
Brands often have many different channels, so consistency and accuracy across all channels is critical for brand perception and customer loyalty
Manufacturers
Manufacturers want to ensure their retail partners get the correct information for the right products to strengthen their relationships and grow the business
Distributors
Distributors need a simple way to take information from suppliers and then send it out to buyers without introducing errors along the way
Teams
Marketing
Marketing teams can get an instant way to track which products still need work before they can launch, helping them prioritise work
Sales
Sales team get a self-serve portal of all the accurate product data they need to have valuable conversations with customers and hit their quota
IT
Once the PIM system is set up, IT teams can let commercial teams manage their own date, freeing time for more valuable activities
Customer service
Customer service teams have an easy place to find the latest product information when a customer needs a helping hand
The components of PIM
There are three main steps in PIM, and you will find that every PIM system has handy features to help you complete each one. The three main steps are:
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Gathering your product data into one database so the whole team can easily manage it in a single location
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Enriching your product data with images, marketing copy, related products, and more
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Publishing your products across multiple channels
But here at Starhive, we think there is a fourth step that hasn't been discussed enough: reporting and analytics.
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Reporting on your PIM efforts. Which products still need to be enriched? What products are in an approval flow but have a launch coming up soon? How many products do you currently have syndicated to Amazon Marketplace? These are some of the questions that businesses need to be able to answer to work more efficiently. Let's go through each step in detail.
Gathering product information
The first step in effective product information management is gathering all relevant data from various sources. Data can come from many sources, like your ERP (enterprise resource planning), PLM (product lifecycle management), or DAM (digital asset management) systems, extra internal sources like spreadsheets, or external sources from suppliers or manufacturers.
Any new data should be added to your PIM system immediately so it becomes your single source of truth. You can have your PIM system sync automatically with each source of data. However, spreadsheets are usually uploaded once to the PIM system and retired.
What to look for in a PIM system
You should ensure there is a way to connect your existing sources of data and your PIM system. Most PIM software will let you import data from files and have a way to connect with existing ERP and PLM systems or even suppliers via an API.
Some PIM systems (Starhive included) have built-in PLM and DAM capabilities, so you can substantially simplify your setup.
Enriching product information
Once you have gathered all your necessary product information, the next step is to enrich it. Enriching product data involves adding additional details and enhancing the quality of the information. What you want to enrich your products with will be specific to your business, the types of products you sell, and where you sell them.
Data to consider adding to your products at this stage include:
- Taxonomy/category information
- SKUs and UPCs
- Prices
- Customer reviews
- Digital assets - images, videos, PDF manuals
- Specifications
- SEO content
- Translations
- Channel-specific details like Google categories or Amazon titles
What to look for in a PIM system
Enrichment is where PIM systems come into their own, so there are many things to consider. Look for a PIM system that can handle various types of data. Not every PIM system can handle every piece of information above or even does the opposite and requires you to have attributes you may not need. Choose a PIM system that gives you flexibility with the data you want to store.
If you want to have cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, check that your PIM system can handle relationships between different products so that you can easily indicate related products.
To speed up enrichment, find a PIM system that can keep track of how enriched your products are. That way, you can easily see which products are in the enrichment state and what data they are missing before they are ready to be launched.
Finally, look for a system that can handle approval workflows. If everyone is working in the same system, you will get much better collaboration and accurate product data, so requesting copy approval or checking product specifications from your PIM system can be very helpful.
Publishing product information
The final step is to publish your product information across all your channels. Here, every PIM system will work a little differently. Some PIM systems will have direct integrations with specific channels or allow you to build your own connections. This can be helpful if you have a small number of channels or products.
Other PIM systems will connect with a channel syndication tool like Channable or ChannelEngine. This is helpful if you have a large number of channels, as these syndication tools are experts in delivering data to your channels. They tend to support a very wide range of channels and leave the PIM system vendors to focus on PIM features, not building integrations to hundreds of channels.
What to look for in a PIM system
The critical thing to check is that there is some way to connect your PIM system to your business's channels. If your product data changes frequently and/or you have many products or channels, we strongly recommend that you use a third-party syndication tool in collaboration with your PIM system, as it will automate everything and reduce the chances of mistakes.
If your product data stays fairly static and you don't have too many channels, you may not need such an automated system. You could work with a limited set of direct channel integrations and then build your own connector for anything not supported. Or even export data from your PIM system and import it to your catalogue tool, for example. It's a little more manual but manageable if you do not need to do it regularly.
Reporting on product information and processes
With any data-related processes, being able to analyse your data to answer specific questions can be a real asset to a business as it helps them make better decisions. PIM is no exception. Being able to slice and dice your product information, along with approval workflow stages, product lifecycle stages, and channels, gives your organisation the ability to answer critical questions to work more efficiently and sell more products. For example, being able to answer the questions 'How many products haven't had a refresh in the last X months?' or 'How many products are missing key information?' helps you and your team optimise your processes. With all the data in one place, finding out will be easier with a PIM system than working with scattered data sources.
What to look for in a PIM system
Traditionally, data analytics has been less of a focus with PIM systems. Our recommendation is to find a PIM vendor, such as Starhive, that allows you to create dashboards on your data so you can get quick overviews and look for opportunities to become even more efficient.
Summary: what is PIM?
PIM is a robust methodology that helps your business centralise, enrich, and distribute accurate product information effectively. With correct, enriched product details and no missing fields, you can provide a better customer experience and grow revenue while making it easier for internal teams to work together.
Investing in a PIM system is not just a smart move; it's necessary in today's competitive market. So, if you haven't already, it's time to explore the benefits of PIM and take your product processes to the next level.
Starhive is a data management platform that has a big focus on PIM. With the flexibility to define the data you need, your workflows, and your product stages, plus advanced reporting, you can build a PIM process to suit your business.
