
PIM eCommerce: 8 signs you really need it

PIM eCommerce: 8 signs you really need it

PIM and eCommerce, a marriage that is often a valuable combination for achieving business goals while maintaining high levels of productivity. Here’s when!
PIM eCommerce: the role of product information management
We have talked about Product Information Management on several occasions in this blog, including comparing PIM, PXM and DAM software. In this article we will look at the main signs that indicate the need to adopt PIM software.
#1 Scattered product data
275. Although decreasing, the average number of software in companies’ digital ecosystems (Zylo) is very high and often generates high fragmentation of information.
From a PIM eCommerce perspective, this translates into a generalized entropy of spreadsheets, emails and notes of various types. Typical context in which – to populate product catalog, PDP and PLP – it takes a long time, you risk delays and you are never certain that the data is correct.
#2 Inconsistent product sheets
Another sign that a digital solution is needed to manage product data.
Especially in multi-channel contexts, manual management of information (via data-entry or import/export) can easily give rise to inconsistencies, resulting from the misalignment of content representing the same product in different touchpoints.
A phenomenon that as many as 3 out of 4 customers notice and that can fuel returns or penalize CX.
#3 Updating channels takes a lot of time
Another recurring bellyache solved by the PIM eCommerce pairing relates to updating product-related data, descriptions, and multimedia content, especially in contexts where items rotate often and are subject to seasonality, as in the case of Grünland.
#4 Incomplete product sheets
For 87% of online shoppers, the informative richness of a product sheet is crucial to making purchase decisions.
A requirement that often jarring in contexts where the assortment is large and time to generate, update, and publish descriptions and multimedia content is limited, pushing companies to a choice between launching late catalogs or partially populated PDPs.
#5 Managing translations is very costly
In cases where business is developed in multiple geographic markets, translating product information is also an issue that can prove to be perennial and crucial from a PIM eCommerce perspective.
Without centralized management of the process, translating data can be time-consuming and occur through hours of manual work on multiple worksheets, encouraging the proliferation of misalignments and requiring additional loading activities once the translation is complete.
#6 Scaling to new marketplaces is complex
An omnichannel approach, while essential for business, requires major operational adaptation efforts from companies’ marketing and e-commerce teams.
Each marketplace, for example, categorizes products differently, just as the specifications regarding media content (such as background color, size and proportions of images and videos) are different.
In the absence of a structured digital catalog management approach, landing on new touchpoints can become a very complex challenge.
#7 Absence of version and revision control
Another good reason to consider a PIM solution for eCommerce relates to the control. Indeed, in medium-sized companies, there are many people and teams enriching the product information base.
Without a tool to centralize and enrich products, tracking who did what and, if needed, accessing the previous version of a piece of content is at best … very difficult.
#8 Absence of version and revision control
For the same text content, web pages that contain multimedia content such as a video are 80 percent more likely to convert.
In these cases, without proper digital solutions (on all, PXM software, even more so than PIMs) approval and sharing of content is likely to slow down due to continuous unstructured exchanges via file sharing tools (WeTransfer, Dropbox, and so on).
PIM eCommerce or PXM software?
Did you find your company in these lines? We’re glad, because what you read are some of the challenges we at WARDA have helped our clients overcome.
How. With SeeCommerce, our PXM software that evolves the traditional PIM approach, shifting the focus from managing individual data to managing brand catalogs.
Want to schedule a no-obligation demo to find out live how it works? Click here!
Articles like this one. Via e-mail. Once a month.
If you have read this far, you have probably found this article helpful. We appreciate it.
Sign up for our newsletter-you’ll receive it spam-free once a month.
You only need to enter your name and business e-mail address. Easy, right?
Recent Comments