eCommerce domain is expanding exponentially in the last few years. These days, people prefer to shop online rather than visiting offline stores. The reason being is, they can see more options from different brands on a single platform.
Especially during this pandemic, when people cannot go out to buy the essentials, they use online platforms to fulfill their basic and luxurious needs.
Thus, it becomes essential for manufacturers and retailers to create their own eCommerce store and/or register with leading marketplaces to sell the products.
When you have to deal with thousands of products every day, effective management of all the product information becomes a challenge for you.
Conventional ways of product information management
Many startups and mid-sized businesses prefer to manage the product data in excel, ERP, PDF, and other formats manually.
If you need to manage the data of 10 to 50 products, then all these are good options for you to consider. But if you have advanced requirements still you are sticking to these traditional ways, then you will be inefficient for sure.
Using a robust product information management system, you can manage the product data effectively as well as help your sales, marketing, and production teams perform efficiently.
There are many signs that intimate your business needs a PIM. Here, I am going to talk about a few very important things.
8 signs that your business needs product information management
1. Management of a large number of SKUs
Managing a multitude of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) and the data associated with each SKU becomes a challenge. Manual management of a large number of SKUs can be error-prone as well as effort and time-consuming.
Using a robust PIM system, you can manage the massive information of SKUs seamlessly. An organization having a million SKUs chooses the PIM system exclusively over other options.
Although, a company with low SKUs can probably handle the product data without the help of any data management solution. But, if the SKUs have complexity in terms of customer geographical diversity and distribution channels.
2. Product data duplication
All the product-driven organizations face the issue of data duplication. In the absence of a centralized repository of product information management, your sales, marketing, production, and eCommerce teams generate the same product data repeatedly, in different formats.
If they manage the data spreadsheets, then imagine the complexity of the data. You need to identify and remove the duplicated data by analyzing all the spreadsheets closely. This process costs you considerable time, effort, and resources.
3. Information distribution across various sales channels
Distribution of a large number of product data across the multiple touchpoints either becomes unmanageable or requires more manpower to perform these activities. If the companies deal with multiple sales channels without a system like PIM, then probably they will end up delivering an awful customer experience by offering inconsistent or awkward product data.
Half of the retail companies struggle to maintain a single version of product information across multiple channels.
4. Requires product quality enrichment
Continuous data enhancement is the major goal of all product-based organizations. There are different ways to achieve it. To improve the product data quality, you need to standardize the data and provide adequate data governance. PIM ensures to provide accurate external and internal product information across the organization.
5. Challenges in penetrating the global market
Every business wants to grow from its geographical boundaries. Things go smoother until you expand your venture within your country. But, when you start targeting other countries, you have to adopt localization to leverage success in the new market.
PIM supports multi-currencies, multi-languages, and multi-measurements. So your target audience can easily connect with your products and brand. This directly impacts your customer engagement and conversion rate.
6. Required integrations of your existing systems
Every organization manages their product information in different enterprise systems such as ERP, order management system, eCommerce portal, vendor management system, and more.
PIM allows you to integrate all your business systems to enable you with a complete and consolidated view of your data.
Moreover, all the enterprise software receives updates on a regular basis. Once your software gets updated, PIM makes sure the integration of all these systems along with complete product information just one time. Thus, it helps you to allow your product data to flow freely as it is updated and changed.
7. Frequent launch of new products
If you launch a new product or a new product line on a frequent basis, then you need to merge the information about the new products in your operations. When you acquire a new company, at that time, you need to migrate all the product lines of that organization with yours.
By managing all this information into various software such as Excel, ERP, PDF, etc. in different formats, you will end up having scattered data that is not so handy while you need them. Most the products driven organizations face this issue as they need to merge massive product information.
With the disparate data, you won’t be able to perform data mapping, data matching, and data merging activities efficiently.
PIM not only manages a large number of product data in a centralized platform but also allows you to perform data merging activities in a hassle-free way.
8. Inconsistencies in product information management
Are you sure your product information is presented in such a way that your customers can easily consume it?
Most organizations fail to do so. When it comes to product information management, they have a lot of consumer-facing inconsistencies.
Make sure that your product data should be portrayed in a way that your customers do not need to look for a guide or tutorial to get a better understanding of all the differences in specification and nomenclature.
It is your responsibility to display the product information in a consistent way across the different sales channels that you are going to consider to market and sell products.
Verdict
Do you want to manage your product information in an accurate, complete, consistent, and automated fashion?
If yes, then you have to implement a Product Information Management solution that works as a centralized repository of all your product data, Moreover, it allows you to distribute the information on different sales channels by matching their respective publishing standards.
A reliable digital experience platform like Pimcore that enables you with its robust PIM framework that supports globalization, data quality enrichment, integration of third-party software, and more.
Partner with an experienced product information solution provider company that has proven expertise in the development and implementation of PIM for various brands of the versatile industry domain.