15 Best Practices for Successful Product Information Management (PIM) Solutions

The eCommerce domain is growing by leaps and bounds each year, allowing manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers to sell products regardless of geographical limitations. To sell products online, you can either sell on marketplaces or develop your own PIM eCommerce solution.

But, in both cases, the product information is the key. You need to ensure customers receive relevant, up-to-date product information so they can make the right decision at the right time.

That is where Product Information Management (PIM) comes in. Let’s start exploring the core aspects of Product Information Management.

What Is Product Information Management?

Product Information Management manages massive product data in a centralized platform. It lets entrepreneurs collect, manage, enrich, syndicate, and distribute product data from a single place.

It allows brands to create a product catalog and keep it updated with the latest product information. So, when you distribute the catalog across online and offline platforms, your target audience gets access to the latest information only.

Moreover, PIM lets you manage product information such as names, titles, descriptions, SKUs, UPCs, materials, measurements, warranties, ingredients, certifications, spreadsheets, assembly instructions, designer notes, style sheets, videos, images, documents, and more. To get exclusive insights on PIM, read What PIM is? – An Ultimate Guide for Product Information Management.

Rise of Product Information Management Market

According to MarketsandMarkets, “It is expected that the global Product Information Management (PIM) market size will grow from USD 7.0 billion in 2019 to USD 11.4 billion by 2024. Businesses that want to centralize product information, restrict data access to authorized personnel, increase productivity, and enhance data experiences prefer PIM implementation.

Thus, it is expected that the PIM market will reach new heights by 2024. Before moving ahead, consider the practices you need to follow before, during, and after PIM implementation.

By following these practices thoroughly, you will see the tremendous success you expect from a Product Information Management system.

10 Best practices for Effective Product Information Management (PIM) Implementation [Before & Through]

1. Consolidate all product information

This is the first step in establishing an infrastructure to manage product information across your company from a single location. PIM is the system that manages all your product data in a centralized platform.

With a PIM solution, your team can manage, access, and publish product data to one or multiple locations. Along with consolidating all data in a single location, it is important to create consistency by sharing product data in a predefined structure.

Consolidation of all the product data enables you with several benefits such as

• Reduced errors and fewer redundancies in the product information
• Greater scalability in terms of adding new sales channels quickly and easily
• Improved traceability
• Better control over how products are managed

2. Understand your business objective for implementing a Product Information Management (PIM)

Don’t decide to implement a PIM just because your competitors are doing it or someone suggested it. If you do so, there are full chances that you might end up making the wrong decision.

Before considering PIM, you need to analyze your business objectives and conduct a detailed study about how the PIM system helps you to accomplish your business goals. It helps you define the parameters that determine success and set expectations.

Keep your objectives in mind and develop your PIM that supports your eCommerce strategy. Check out the below-listed objectives. If you have any, many, or all of them, then PIM will definitely help you achieve them.

Accelerate time-to-market

Improve new product onboarding time and deliver the updated content faster across multiple channels, including online marketplaces, eCommerce stores, mobile platforms, websites, print, catalog, and more.

Improve customer experience

Drive tremendous customer engagement by enabling them with complete product information, including detailed product descriptions and images that establish an emotional consistency across different sales channels.

Deliver high-quality product data

Leverage the bulk editing tools and streamlined workflow of PIM to manage the product information in a complete, comprehensive, and error-free way across all the output channels.

Expand to new channels

PIM lets you sell and market your wide range of products on new sales channels. The solution provides several advanced capabilities that automatically populate product data across these new channels with rich product information.

Enhance team collaboration

Increase functional team participation to improve product data quality.

Boost marketers’ productivity

When data is scattered across different spreadsheets, marketers face a challenging job collecting and syndicating product data to get a unified view of all product information. Moreover, PIM enables an efficient process and guided interface that saves effort and time in product catalog management across different output channels.

Faster vendor data onboarding

Do you want to streamline product data collection for your internal team and suppliers? PIM lets suppliers update their data directly in the system. With flexible supplier onboarding, you can improve vendor collaboration by letting them provide the product data you need in your preferred format.

Market your products across new regions

Advanced translation and workflow management make localization more efficient and faster than ever.

Do you want to achieve any of the above-listed objectives by implementing a Product Information Management system?

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3. Set up your Product Information Management (PIM) requirement and implementation plan

Based on your collected product information and business objectives, define your PIM implementation plan. You need to determine

• Do you want to build your product data from scratch?
• Do you want to model your entire catalog?
• Do you want to consider the “land and expand” approach to begin with, starting with a subset of your products, brands, channels, and locales?

You need to make the right decision by analyzing your business objectives for PIM implementation and your company’s maturity and complexity. To ensure expected success with PIM, it is crucial to design your PIM project to meet all existing and upcoming requirements, regardless of project size.

Small approach

A small approach is the best option for large-scale organizations. It becomes easier to implement and test PIM connections and processes with your existing business applications, ensuring everything works as expected.

By starting small, organizations can launch a single product line in a single region to test market response. Instead of risking an entire range of products in a new region, this approach lets you analyze single-product performance in the new location first.

Based on the target market’s response, you can roll out other product lines one by one and/or expand to other areas within the region one after another.

Full-blown approach

Organizations can also choose a large approach where they roll out all products at once. With this approach, you can realize the benefit of the PIM solution and experience its centralized data management capabilities.

Whatever approach you choose, make sure the PIM implementation fits your business objectives. To do that, ask yourself these questions before making a concrete decision.

• Should we tackle the entire catalog?
• Can we start with a subset of products?
• How crucial is time-to-market for our PIM implementation initiative?
• Which channels are most essential for our business?
• Which regions/locals are more important for us than others to focus on in the initial phase?

4. Identify the right Product Information Management (PIM) platform

Once you determine your business objectives and PIM requirements, the next step is to select the right PIM platform. Before you decide, you need to understand your business’s current state and identify all PIM-related needs.

You need to make a choice of a PIM platform that fills the expected gaps in your product ecosystem and helps you achieve your business goals. Investing in the right PIM platform is the best Product Information Management strategy, allowing you to set the right expectations, measure PIM’s effectiveness, and develop advanced eCommerce capabilities.

A lot of options available to you when it comes to the PIM platform. All you need to do is analyze the options in detail and then make the right choice for your organization.

Here’s the list of the most popular PIM platforms:

• Pimcore
• Akeneo
• EnterWorks
• Agility Multichannel
• PIMworks
• Salsify
• inRiver
• Informatica
• Plytix
• Stibo Systems
• Syndigo

Do you want to get detailed insight into the key features and core benefits of each platform listed above? Read Top 11 Product Information Management (PIM) Platforms to Consider in 2020 & Beyond.

5. Select the right Product Information Management (PIM) Team

Before defining a process, select a team to develop and implement the PIM solution to meet your business-specific needs. Make sure they have all the required data about your products, eCommerce channel requirements, and desired catalog format.

Choose an experienced PIM solution development company like Credencys Solutions Inc., with a team of skilled professionals who have successfully developed and implemented PIM solutions for clients like Kenmare and IronLists across different industry domains. The core purpose of PIM implementation is to help your marketing, sales, and eCommerce teams by simplifying, automating, and centralizing the management of multiple products and their attributes.

Identify the key team members who will use the PIM solution to manage product data and save time and effort.

6. Define the process

Now that you have chosen your team, focus on establishing a process that helps you realize the most product information management benefits. Identify the best information management enrichment practices and analyze how your teams fit into the process. Make sure all team members are domain experts with deep knowledge of how the workflow should function.

Furthermore, as your professionals suggest, you need to improve the process moving forward. To leverage the successful PIM implementation, ask your team to focus on high-value tasks and leave mundane product information management activities to others.

For example, your team can sidestep repetitive tasks like entering complex datasets into computers. Instead, they can focus on establishing an emotional connection with the customers by writing compelling product descriptions.

Do you have a well-defined process in place and you want to bring it to the PIM system?

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7. Determine roles and responsibilities

Product content strongly influences customers’ buying decisions. Let your teams collaborate directly within the PIM solution to eliminate content errors and speed up the workflow significantly.

To provide customers with the right, up-to-date information, include your eCommerce managers, marketing executives, and external collaborators like wholesalers, vendors, distributors, etc. in the product content creation process. Selecting a PIM system that lets you create different roles with varying access levels at minimal risk is critical.

PIM platforms like Pimcore let you add as many access levels as you need, including admin, product management, publishers, read-only, and more. Each user has a set of default permissions based on their roles and responsibilities.

With Pimcore, you can be more granular to allow your users to perform only certain actions.

Internal users

With granular permissions, your respective users can

• Create product attributes
• Update product attributes
• Read product attributes
• Delete product attributes

There are many other permissions too that you can define in the PIM solution based on roles and responsibilities, such as

• Update products
• Sync products
• Request approval for product
• Publish products and more…

External users

Invite your wholesalers, suppliers, vendors, distributors, and other external users to collaborate on the product content. Ensure external users provide the right data in the desired format.

You have full liberty to define how much access you want to provide to your internal or external users. The PIM system also lets you keep a history of every action performed within it and revoke access permissions if required.

8. Provide training to your team for Product Information Management (PIM) adoption

To get the most from PIM, train your team and help them understand how the system works and how it streamlines day-to-day operations. The success of PIM implementation depends on how smoothly and effectively your team adopts it.

Your employees are very familiar with the existing system, so they might resist this new change. Moreover, adopting new platforms requires establishing new habits and understanding new processes.

Thus, it’s likely they won’t be ready to work with the new system. You can address this issue by providing thorough technical and functional training to boost your team’s confidence in working with a new system.

Technical training

Provide technical training to your technical team where you can explain the technical implementation, system integration, and performance tuning.

Functional training

Enable your marketing and catalog management teams with functional training that covers day-to-day operations and PIM use. You can help them understand how they can organize products, manage media assets and attributes, and create a catalog using the PIM.

Every new change seems tough to adopt at first glance. So, support your team in adopting the new product data management ecosystem seamlessly and ensure a successful PIM implementation that maximizes operational and financial benefits.

9. Avoid managing product data in multiple systems

According to research, more than 50% of firms manage product data in more than 5 systems. With data so scattered, it becomes difficult to consolidate, syndicate, and enrich product information when needed.

Also, to get a unified view of your product information, you need to invest a lot of time and effort to collect the data and organize it well. Without a centralized system, you won’t be able to manage the massive product information effectively.

If you are thinking of managing all your product data in a database, you are making a big mistake: you can store and manage the data, but you won’t be able to view or access it without a user interface.

Thus, you need to build a front-end UI. Eventually, you end up spending on a solution that connects the database and provides output through a UI, which costs more than a PIM system.

10. Data integration with different systems and platforms becomes easier

Data integration with existing enterprise systems

If you already manage product data across multiple enterprise systems, you might hesitate to implement a PIM solution because you think integrating your massive product data will be problematic. Moreover, you may want to keep product data on different platforms for certain business purposes.

An advanced PIM solution lets you integrate data from your enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM, Excel spreadsheets, and custom-built systems. This lets you easily import product data from any or all of your current enterprise systems.

Not only that, but you can also export the updated product data from PIM to other systems by establishing seamless data integration.

Data integration with external sales channels

With a PIM platform offered by Pimcore, you can also distribute the product data from the PIM system to external sales channels like eCommerce stores, websites, marketplaces, etc. You can distribute product data in the format and data structure required by your external channels.

Do you want to leverage a successful implementation of a Product Information Management system that drives incredible values and benefits to your business?

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5 Best Practices of Product Information Management (PIM) [After Implementation]

1. Product information enrichment

Product information is a key asset for engaging customers and helping retailers gain a competitive edge. Thus, it is very essential to keep enriching the product data as per the customer’s expectations.

Are you unsure how to enrich your product data with PIM? With PIM, you can write high-quality content for the product description, use high-quality images, add HD-quality videos, and more.

Brick-and-mortar stores often overlook these product elements as they shift from physical stores to digital platforms. Beyond these standards, it is also important to use tools and processes that make PIM more efficient.

It enables increased revenue, better conversions, improved customer loyalty and engagement, and stronger differentiation.

2. Product performance optimization

Product Information Management is more than managing product data. It is not only about managing data in a centralized platform, but also optimizing product performance across all sales channels.

The success of an eCommerce platform is judged based on two factors.

• Driving high-quality traffic
• Converting visitors into customers

Product information strongly affects product performance and the factors listed above. To improve product performance, focus on the four areas below.

• Strategize your product information and apply A/B testing to improve conversions.
• Create rich, SEO-friendly product information to attract highly qualified buyers and increase traffic.
• Create customized product information to better meet the needs of different market segments and sales channels, helping you increase conversion rates.
• Monitor product performance across all the output channels. Keep product information updated over time.

3. Product information standardization

By managing all product data in a centralized repository, PIM gives you a unified view of product data, so you can update, search, and publish product content across multiple sales and marketing channels. It also lets you set validation rules to enforce a common format for product categories and attributes.

Effective data validation is essential to ensure a consistent product catalog and protect it. This helps you to generate a completely error-free product catalog.

Beyond product data format, product information standardization helps retailers establish eCommerce relationships between different products. With a feature-rich PIM platform like Pimcore, you can enable cross-selling and upselling by ensuring faster time-to-market.

4. Design catalog structure

Your product catalog appears across sales and marketing channels and locations, and it should reflect the product’s unique characteristics. Especially when you offer a wide range of products, catalog structuring matters most.

When I say catalog structure, do not confuse it with product profiling. PIM is far beyond just a database interface.

You can do much more than that. In fact, you can utilize the PIM potential as much as you can.

Product catalog creation is not everyone’s cup of tea. You need experienced marketing or eCommerce executives who have thorough knowledge of the profiled product to do this job.

Each product belongs to a product category, so there is a product family, product attributes, and product variants. Your team should be able to analyze products based on their properties to design a robust catalog.

While creating a product catalog with PIM, you should consider varied factors like:

• Product families, attributes, variants, categories, and families
• Defined associations and relationships between different products
• Manage channel-specific attributes such as more images for marketplaces and eCommerce sites or shorter
• product descriptions for mobile apps seamlessly
• Product enrichment requirements to be considered “Fulfilled”
• Locale-specific attributes such as metrics, currencies, and more

5. Product Information Management (PIM) improves customer experiences

According to a survey, 96% of respondents said customer experience would affect whether they purchase again, and 83% referred your brand to others after a positive experience. These statistics make it clear that customer experience is the key to growing your business.

And PIM implementation ensures you improve the customer experience consistently. Also, it adds significant value to your B2C and B2B efforts.

PIM lets you create and manage a complete set of content for each product, with different versions that provide customers with the right information at each stage of their journey. It simplifies multichannel sales by letting you present your products across every channel where customers are likely to buy.

Last but not least, PIM helps you create error-free product content and lets your team focus on relevant product stories that drive strong customer engagement. All this proves that PIM is a critical component of your customer experience strategy that helps you boost your brand presence and sell products.

In nutshell

I hope you’re now clear on how you can leverage PIM to get the most benefits. By following these practices, you can not only manage your product information in a structured, meaningful, and unified way, but also market and sell it with greater impact than ever before.

Are you ready to skyrocket your online business by implementing a robust PIM? Book 30 minutes free consultation with our PIM experts, who help you design, develop, and implement a custom Product Information Management solution that helps you meet your specific business needs.