By 2024, every online entrepreneur should have heard of PIM — or Product Information Management. A PIM is a software that enables you to streamline your product catalog processes and improve your operations, saving you time, money, and effort. Have you ever wondered how companies like Skullcandy work with platforms like BigCommerce or Shopify? Implementing PIM is the underlying element behind such success. If you want to save time and money, reach out to your desired customer base, and gain a competitive edge over the others, a PIM can help. Not only does your product creation better suit your online strategy, but your customers experience higher levels of satisfaction, as the shopping experience is smoother when a PIM is set up. Let’s find out what PIM is and what are the benefits for you and your company.
6 Quick Facts About PIM
A PIM acts as a single repository inside your organization and manages all your product data. As a single source of truth for all information around your products, a PIM centralizes, updates, and synchronizes all relevant product prices, catalogs, images, and inventory to a single place. Here are some quick facts that will make it easy for you to understand what PIM is:
- Responsive, updated catalogs: a PIM can synchronize all your product data instantly, across your back-end and front-end — all your storefronts are updated accordingly, saving you time, money, and a huge workload dealing with spreadsheets.
- Digital assets management: imagery, videography, product prices, inventory, and more are all saved into one single source. It’s easy for your team (supply chain and marketing) to figure out where new product information is stored.
- Integration with third-party websites: a PIM enables you to add powerful eCommerce integrations on your websites, such as a cart or animated promotional videos, to help you become more engaging in the eCommerce sphere.
- High levels of customization: with PIM, you can highly customize your product information and data and add the necessary elements tailored to your needs, budget, and website. For instance, you can choose how many storefronts you need and also which languages to add.
- Cutting-edge marketing campaigns: thanks to intuitive integration of marketing tools (such as browser history or tracking of past purchases), a PIM can help your marketing team implement innovative campaigns, for instance, with product recommendations.
- Latest technology for a website, online merchant platform: that’s one of the most impressive features of a PIM! As the latest innovative technology, a PIM enables you to create powerful, fast, and elegant websites that are responsive and will delight your customers, driving you to more sales!
How Does PIM Work in Real Life?
Your company sells fashion items online to two countries, one in the USA and one in France, and wants to make sure all your product data is relevant and updated in both countries, without doing the work twice! With a PIM, you can track all product data — knowing exactly how many are left in inventory — but also manage currencies, prices, languages, PDFs, images, and online videos at the same time, without losing time and energy: all data will be consistent and updated. All you have to do is install the PIM that most serves your needs: customer markets, storefronts, budget, and size of your company.
6 Advantages of PIM
When you implement PIM into your company, you may expect higher sales and a decrease in costs, lowering your overhead by saving your organization from high-manpower administrative tasks. In specific, a PIM has the following advantages:
- Cost-effective: this is one of the most important aspects of PIM. As the processes are streamlined, your company saves money on fixing bad product data. Cost-efficiency allows any online marketplace to invest in some new areas such as marketing or product development.
- Time-efficiency: a PIM provides instant upload and updates of product data across all channels, meaning you don’t need to do these tasks manually anymore or with multiple parties involved. As the data are clean and ready to go, you improve your organization’s time to market and reach more customers.
- Customer satisfaction: a happy customer is more likely to recommend you to his network. A PIM truly boosts customer satisfaction since the online experience is enhanced and smooth with relevant, enticing product data that give them the envy to purchase from you over and over again.
- Smooth eCommerce experience: that’s one of the best aspects of PIM software! With all data streamlined and updated accordingly on multiple storefronts with the right language, and with a great online shopping experience, you can be sure that your customers will rejoice but also your marketing and customer support teams.
- Product data management: with PIM software, your product data is well managed, stored, and updated. You know where to find all the product information without getting lost. It’s easy to create new products and launch new catalogs online without getting rid of your old data while integrating the new ones.
- Beat the competition: a PIM will give a new edge to your product data, resulting in more sales and an intuitive website that attracts prospects — beating the competition very quickly. If you are after some new technology to take a further leap in eCommerce, a PIM is what you need.
- Better management: as your product information flows, your company can not only beat the competition but also improve its management, services, and operations. As you save time, money, and better handle all product data, all teams — from supply chain to marketing, from operations to customer support — can work more easily.
The world of eCommerce is fierce: it’s hard to succeed if you don’t implement the latest technology to your website. A PIM streamlines all information around your product data, making you more competitive and enticing to existing and potential customers.