How to Know Your Company Needs a PIM System
Behind each smoothly running and effective E-commerce platform there is a bound system of business management applications – CMS, CRM, PIM, and many others. Each of them has its own purpose – to ensure uninterrupted platform performance, consistent customer service, fast procurement, error-free accounting, and much more.
There is a great variety of business management applications to choose from. Therefore, companies carefully select management software to build unique digital ecosystems that effectively meet their business needs.
Those companies that have thousands and thousands of products and services to offer and a continuously growing customer base often add PIM applications to their digital environments. With PIM software, they manage to support a consistent database of their products and services throughout various selling channels, easily modify product data, and much more.
In this article, we’ll outline the main PIM benefits, have a look at the PIM trends, and explain how they help E-commerce businesses grow and keep their customer service to a high standard.
When to Use PIM?
Product Information Management software or PIM is more than just a specific marketing tool used only by big companies with large budgets. In reality, PIM is also widely implemented by medium and often small businesses whose product and service base reaches the amount of 15,000 items.
Other cases when to use PIM include:
- Large amounts of customer-related information – these can be product ingredients, materials, allergens, product origin, child safety data, and more.
- Omnichannel sales – when companies sell their products through multiple channels and need to keep product data up-to-date and consistent in all of them.
- Product relationships data – when companies advise on similar products, divide products by categories, cross-sell (offer complimentary products), or up-sell (offer more expensive items or add-ons).
- Dynamic range of goods – this involves selling seasonal products, short-term offers, selling products under temporary partnering with other companies.
- Complex supply chains – when companies work with a wide range of goods suppliers.
- Diverse sources of product data – if companies update their product data from various online sources to ensure that they are relevant and due.
- High level of product returns – PIM applications allow simple processing of goods returns.
If some of the above mentioned points are relevant to your business then you should seriously consider using PIM.
Which Companies Might Need Product Information Management?
Which companies could benefit from using Product Information Management systems? Here are some use cases when companies can increase ROI by using PIM solutions.
- When they have complex products with many options – by using PIM, companies can simply store all the data related to various features or add-ons used in one type of product. Moreover, if there are any changes in product versions, they only need to add specific data that differs from the general product description. Basically, companies can make their data as detailed on each model as they want.
- When a company sells on several marketplaces in different countries – PIM systems help to maintain consistent product data across various selling channels. Moreover, companies can localize their products depending on the market, providing the data in the required language and considering customers’ social and cultural backgrounds.
- Actively expanding business – it’s much easier for companies to pursue new business targets with PIM – entering into new markets, increase in marketing activities, optimization of product flows by maintaining several catalogs, price lists, and websites timely updated, increase in the number of suppliers, and many others.
Five Key Benefits of PIM
The use of PIM systems can bring companies many advantages in strategic, tactical, and operational business areas. They help create the conditions for effective business development and sustainable market leadership. Let’s have a look at the benefits of a PIM system and what companies can gain from using PIM solutions.
Support Buying and Launching to Market Process
With PIM systems, businesses can provide consistent customer experience throughout numerous selling channels. Customers are able to access proper and timely updated product information whether they do it on a website, in a mobile app, or else. This ensures that customers know well what product they want to buy, its price, delivery method, delivery time, and more.
Moreover, PIM systems are easily customizable. Companies can determine on their own which product information they want to include in their catalogs and which one to show on various selling channels. For example, manufacturing companies can use exportable XML files completed with their product data to share with third-party platforms and marketplaces such as Google and Amazon.
Increased Sales and Faster Time to Market
Most PIM systems include a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) feature for effective ranking in various search engines. With SEO, companies can better optimize their websites and web applications to appear on the upper lines of Google search, minimize inconsistent data, improve customer traffic, and, as a result, get higher conversion.
Apart from increasing product data and SEO quality, PIM ensures products’ faster time to market. This becomes possible due to carefully built data hierarchies and structures, quick data validation, and updating across various selling channels, resulting in better operational efficiency. This way, products get to the markets much quicker whereas new products can be launched with fewer difficulties.
Better Customer Satisfaction
Customers are extremely demanding for the services they receive, especially when it comes to purchasing goods online. PIM systems allow customers to investigate the products they want to buy in every detail, compare several products by their characteristics, get additional product data, and, after all, make an informed decision on the purchase.
Providing customers with detailed information also helps companies to minimize the number of questions about products and their delivery. This relieves the tension in the customer support department and reduces the number of returns due to better met buyers’ expectations.
Improved Digital Asset Management
For most PIM systems, having a robust Digital Asset Management (DAM) feature is a must. DAM helps companies to effectively manage their content – images, animations, videos, graphics, and more related to both product and marketing activities.
DAM supports various formats of data and allows managing it effortlessly. This way, companies can show the right media content to the right target audiences using the right channels. All this results in high brand