For many companies, digital transformation can feel like a colossal (maybe even downright impossible) undertaking. Where do you begin? How do you know what technologies will drive the highest return on investment? And why are those commerce tech landscape infographics so terrifying?! For those of you left scratching your heads, a product information management (PIM) solution is a great place to start.

A PIM solution can help you build a strong foundation for the rest of your digital commerce strategy. In this article, we’ll help you navigate all things PIM - what it is, why you need it, and how it can help you set yourself up for digital commerce success.

What is PIM?

According to our partner and preferred PIM solution provider inRiver, “Product Information Management (PIM) provides a centralized hub to consolidate, manage, and enhance all of the information about your products, providing an accurate and up-to-date repository of everything everyone needs to know.”

Think of all of the data that supports a single product across its lifecycle. From SKUs to product descriptions, pricing to customer reviews, categories, assembly instructions, measurements, keywords, images, videos, translations, and more, a PIM manages all of your product data in one central location.

How does PIM work?

When properly integrated with your other customer-facing systems, your PIM acts as a single source of truth for all of your product content and information. Consider a new product launch. What does it entail? A lot, right? Ensuring the new product data makes its way into every channel you engage customers can be tricky. But if you have a PIM, you can input product information once and ensure all of your marketing and e-commerce channels are updated with the new offering automatically. Wouldn’t it feel good to know your customers are always seeing accurate, up-to-date product content?

What are the benefits of PIM?

There is no shortage of benefits when it comes to product information management. Companies that leverage a PIM solution are better able to provide accurate, up-to-date product information to their sales teams. E-commerce managers can use PIM to improve the user experience on their websites and increase conversion rates. Marketers can easily create and update campaigns across multiple channels while customers can make confident purchase decisions with accurate, quality product information at their fingertips.

The use of a PIM solution can help you increase organizational efficiency by eliminating manual data entry, simplify the creation of seamless customer experiences, accelerate time to market for new products or offerings, and reduce errors and redundancies in your product information resulting in fewer costly returns.

How can a PIM solution help me build the foundation for my digital commerce strategy?

The goal of digital transformation is to enhance the customer experience, and data is a cornerstone of that. So the first step of any digital transformation initiative is to determine what foundational solutions you need to deploy to collect, organize, and update customer and product data. PIM software is a great foundational system because it automates the collection and distribution of accurate product information. When integrated properly, it can actually accelerate your digital transformation by freeing up staff, eliminating duplicate entry and management, and ensuring your buyers see the most accurate, up-to-date product information across the entire buyer journey.

All of these things play a key role in elevating your customer experience. We dive deeper into this in our article Product Information Management: 5 Best Practices here.

How do I determine if I need a PIM solution?

If you’re on the fence about incorporating a PIM solution into your company’s digital transformation strategy, here’s a quick checklist to help you determine if your company can benefit from a PIM solution:

• Does your product suite include a high volume of SKUs?
• Do you sell products through multiple channels?
• Do you manage complex product content and relationships?
• Do you need to disburse accurate product information to multiple teams?
• Do you suffer from too many manual processes in your e-commerce workflow?
• Do you expand or transition your product offering multiple times a year?

If you checked any of the boxes above, it’s likely time you incorporated a PIM solution into your existing or planned tech ecosystem. Contact us for help selecting the right PIM platform for your needs.

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