When you begin selling online, managing your inventory can be a relatively easy and straightforward task. As your business grows, however, product types increase, orders become more complex, and you start adding more channels to your marketing strategy. Without the right PIM system, you could end up wasting hours of your precious time trying to organize and update information about your products when there’s a far more efficient solution.

What is a PIM?

A Product Information Management (PIM) solution is a type of software that manages all of your product information in one central location. With a PIM system, you’ll be able to access comprehensive data about every one of your products, update information across all your channels, create a product catalog, and manage images in a breeze. Instead of having to individually update product information on every single sales channel, you can simply change it in the PIM system to ensure accurate data for customers on all online platforms. 

Features and Benefits

Along with saving you from the frustration and hassle of managing conflicting product descriptions on different platforms, a great PIM solution can:

• Ensure accuracy. Easily stay in compliance with legal requirements and regulations about data compliance with a PIM’s built-in data detection functionalities. Whether a product image is missing or product information is different from channel to channel, a PIM solution can find these errors quickly to create an accurate representation of your brand.
• Enhance customer experience. Customers expect rich product descriptions, high-quality photos, and personalized recommendations. Using a PIM system can be a major advantage for your marketing efforts because it will unify your brand presence and create seamless shopping journeys for buyers. 
• Improve search functionality. Content is still king, especially when it comes to SEO. PIM systems can help you enrich your product descriptions to boost SEO and improve the search function on your own website.
• Expand your business. If you want to expand to an international market, a PIM system makes this process seamless. It can translate content to other languages, deliver localized content to different regions around the world, and even submit content to translators to review.  
• Gain detailed insights. A great PIM system will collect and aggregate data from several areas of your store, creating helpful reports to help you identify problem areas within your marketing strategy. Using a PIM solution can help you make smart business decisions without spending weeks of manually studying and analyzing data.
• Boost efficiency. One of the immediate benefits of a PIM solution is that it will free up time for you and your team to work on more exciting projects. It will reduce frustrating bottlenecks in your product management strategy, streamline workflows, and automate essential, repetitive tasks. 

Signs You Need a PIM

Growing businesses often reach a tipping point where they can no longer reasonably continue to manage their products using Excel or spreadsheets alone. When there are multiple channels and product types to keep track of, it’s all too easy for information to be misplaced or lost. 

If the description above sounds like your current business operations and you’re wondering if you really need a PIM solution, here are 4 additional signs that you need to upgrade your product strategy soon: 

• Data governance is a time-consuming chore. Keeping all of your products updated, accurate, and easy for customers to find is anything but easy. If you sell items from other vendors or have partnered with other agencies to sell your products, it can be a major headache to make sure that every platform remains consistent.
• Your team lacks agility. Product inventory management is a repetitive and often headache-inducing task that is much better completed with sophisticated software than your employees. When your workers aren’t bogged down by the minute product details, they’ll be free to work on more creative assignments to help grow your business. 
• You’re overwhelmed with spreadsheets. If you feel like you spend everyday typing information into Excel sheets, do yourself a huge favor by upgrading to a PIM solution. You’ll be amazed at how much time you’ll save and how many little mistakes can be avoided when processes are automated.
• Products bought online are frequently returned. Inaccurate product descriptions equate to disappointed customers. If people love buying your items in-store but feel misled when they try to purchase online, the issue lies in your product information.

Solution Providers

If you think a PIM solution could benefit your business, Akeneo PIM offers an excellent system that excels at streamlining your product needs and delivering incredible, personalized customer experiences. Akeneo is an industry leader in PIM solutions, and it has recently partnered with Wagento to offer a unique Product Experience Management (PXM) assessment for brands to easily assess their key strengths and weaknesses.