PIM do’s and don’ts – the biggest DO when it comes to selecting a product information management (PIM) solution is also the biggest DON’T:
You DO need to choose the PIM that solves all your problems, so DON’T buy one if you don’t need one.
But how do you know if you need one or not?
To help you with this important decision, we’ve created a simple, step-by-step guide. With it, you can determine whether or not your operations would benefit from PIM integration.
How does it work?
If you answer any of the seven questions below with a large amount or don’t know the answers, it might be time to start thinking about a PIM.
But first, let’s talk about value.
What value does PIM bring?
One key feature of PIM is its greatly simplified functionality for inputting, updating, and managing product content across channels, manufacturers, products, and variants. If you repeatedly have trouble finding specific product content, how can you enrich your product pages?
What is product content?
Product content can be divided into the following two categories.
- Product information
- Descriptions
- Specifications
- Feature benefits
- Digital assets
- Images
- Videos
- CAD drawings
*These lists are not exhaustive.
As the number of these increases, so must the complexity of your organization.
1. How Often Do You Update Your Product Pages or Catalogs?
Complex operations necessarily require ever higher degrees of organization.
In 2010, research into 1,150 senior executives at companies of at least 1,000 employees resulted in 2 major revelations:
“Companies reporting low levels of complexity … had the highest returns on capital employed and the highest returns on invested capital.”
(McKinsey & Company)
Further, 80% of companies that minimized complexity also saved money, with some having slashed nearly 20 percent of personnel costs by prioritizing the value of activity over its complexity.
eCommerce today is overburdened with automatable busy work.
PIM makes keeping product content up to date and accurate far easier than with traditional spreadsheet management. These benefits minimize complexity, but are best understood at scale. So if your products don’t change from month to month or year to year, updating your product pages and catalogs often is probably unnecessary.
For example, companies that sell seasonal products likely have an annual updating schedule, giving them a year to foresee and avoid product page and catalog updating problems. Companies that provide a set of products proven to sell year after year may not need to update their catalogs and product pages at all, except to change their overall aesthetic.
If you consistently ensure your product information is accurate and up to date and your company falls into one of the categories described above, you may not need a PIM.
Unless you want to increase sales by selling on more channels…
2. How Many Channels Do You Sell Across?
And how complex are their processes?
Do your sales channels provide standard templates to create new products in their systems? Are those templates ready to accept attribute information for new products immediately? If not, and you must send a general description, how long do you wait for them to reply?
Multi-channel campaigns that produce limited or no results might suffer from a lack of PIM’s enrichment capability.
One channel might be fine with several file types and sizes, while another might want your images to correspond to particular parameters. One channel requires a small number of specific pieces of information, while another requires dozens per product page.
PIM makes this and many other jobs easier.
Another key function of PIM is automatic translation and conversion. Do you sell products in other countries? Only 20% of the world speaks English, so if you don’t have a way to convert your product pages into your customers’ preferred languages, you’re not going to sell to them.
Likewise, suppose your spec sheets discuss your products in Imperial terms, with inches and gallons instead of centimeters and liters. In that case, you’re likely confusing the 7.3 billion potential customers who use the Metric system worldwide. Ultimately, PIM ensures product content coherence across channels.
Just how many markets do you want to sell in anyway?
Selling across multiple channels is complicated at best. Still, it’s relatively easy to maintain high-quality product content on one channel if you don’t update your product pages or catalogs often. In that case, you may not need the functionality a PIM provides.
Unless you sell products made by several manufacturers…
3. How Many Manufacturers Do You Work With?
If you only work with one manufacturer, you probably don’t need the organization PIM provides.
Again, the simpler your operation, the easier it is to manage. However, several possibilities become increasingly likely as product information is available from more manufacturers.
- Standardizing information entered with different systems requires more and more work to coordinate
- Formatting that information for your sales channels adds a second level to standardization.n
- Some manufacturers will inevitably be worse at supplying you with error-free information. You can mitigate some of these difficulties in Excel to a certain degree. But if you don’t know how to build, maintain, and feed standardized information into macros, managing more manufacturers will only require more time and effort.
So, if you only work with a single manufacturer to sell on one platform and your product pages or catalogs don’t need much updating, you probably don’t need a PIM.
Unless you sell a large number of products…
4. How Many Products Do You Sell?
Is a hard number a valid measure?
Consider this question regarding people, the amount of work, or time. Regardless of the number of products you sell, if one person can get all the job done in 40 hours a week, do you need to buy a PIM?
But is the work of Retting done?
Ultimately, you know your operation well enough to confidently say all the product content management work is getting done. Think about how well-organized your products appear, and whether any associated information is ever missing from your product pages. PIM is a way of getting even more done in an equal amount of time, which means an organization that leads to robust product pages that convert.
Do you provide a personal experience?
Personalization driven by tailored content is the engine of modern eCommerce, something consumers have come to expect from shopping experiences. PIM functionality makes personalizing your brand message easier, so you can keep your promises to your customers, increasing sales and decreasing returns.
What about new products?
How long does it take your company to bring new products to market? E-commerce success is typically measured in dollars and cents, not hours and days. However, PIM can reduce the amount of time it takes.
If you dread bringing new products to market because meeting deadlines and quality standards is so tricky, PIM can help. With PIM, product pages aren’t just complete, they’re dripping with the most accurate information possible and set off with rich, detailed pictures, descriptions, and feature explanations.
To sum up, if you don’t have trouble bringing new products to market, sell a few products from one manufacturer on a single channel, and your product pages or catalogs don’t require regular updating, a PIM likely isn’t for you.
Unless your products have a lot of variants…
5. How Complex are Your Products?
Product complexity increases with the number of attributes.
How did you estimate the number of product variants when you completed the tool at the beginning of this post? If you have a large operation, this is likely the most challenging question because some products are simple, and some are impossibly complex.
In any case, most products vary to some degree.
Another key organizational feature of PIM is variant organization, known as the parent/child relationship. A parent is like a master product template, including a comprehensive list of all possible attributes a given product has. The children are the variant products sharing an identical set of attributes, but with varying values for them.
For example, if a parent product is a t-shirt, one child would be an extra-large, blue t-shirt. This is a straightforward example, as complex products can have virtually any number of attributes, and those attributes can have a vast variety of possible values.
Product content enrichment, accuracy, and completeness drive sales conversions, so the more variants you have, the more digital assets you will need. A PIM with digital asset management (DAM) capability simplifies this by giving you the option of tying a single image to each child product. One benefit is that your product pages will be tidy, making more sense to your customers and the search engines they use to find your products.
Consider the example above, if you’re selling 10 sizes of blue shirts, do you need 10 different pictures?
If your operation is simple, you have a small number of business partnerships, and you sell a narrow variety of simple products, you probably don’t need to invest in a PIM.
Unless your prices change often…
6. How Often Do You Update Your Prices?
Adjust your prices often if you sell many different, highly complex products.
Selling in highly competitive markets tends to require adjusting prices more frequently. Under certain circumstances, you may need to display discounted prices next to original prices to entice potential customers to take advantage of savings.
If you frequently run sales, promotions, or special offers, you’ll probably need to set and reset prices often. If those offers occur randomly or you have to calculate prices precisely manually, adjusting your prices may take up a significant amount of your time.
PIM can be set to do all of these automatically.
So, if everything above leads you to believe you don’t need a PIM and your products have stable prices, then a PIM probably won’t help you do business.
Unless your product content comes from multiple internal sources…
7. How Many Employees Do You Have?
Getting this far through the list means you’re probably running a big company.
PIM collects product content from multiple sources to maintain product information consistency across internal teams and external sales channels. If yours is a small operation, you’re less likely to need that kind of management control.
However, large operations require a significant investment in inter-team organization. PIMs often include workflow capability to increase efficiency and productivity. Workflow allows you to assign tasks in a specific order, with messaging and reminders set to trigger automatically. This makes it easier to ensure operations move forward smoothly and that employees get what they need to complete their work right when needed.
To Recap:
If any of the following are true or you plan on expanding to the following capacities, a PIM might need to be in your future.
- Your product pages or catalogs require regular updating
- Your company sells on two or more channels
- Multiple manufacturers provide you with products
- You sell a wide variety of products
- The products you sell come in a variety of configurations
- Your prices are volatile
- You have a few employees who directly control some of your product information.
How to Select the Right PIM: Tips You Need to Know Before You Buy
Choosing a Product Information Management (PIM) system is essential for any developing company. Knowing how to select the proper PIM can make or break your operations. Here’s what should you consider in addition to the regular steps?
Understand What You Need It For:
Before choosing from available PIM solutions, assess your team’s daily pains. Do you have product updates that are hindering your catalog rollout? Do you think manual errors might be impacting customer experience? These are telling signs you need a PIM when such is the case.
Investing in a scalable product information management system (PIM) is essential when your product list is likely to increase. However, many businesses do not consider PIM functionality until it is too late.
Avoid The PIM Tools That Promise Too Much:
Not every system is a proper system. What platform is effective in one business may not be effective in another. Choosing your PIM system requires you to determine catalog size, how many vendors you have, and what integration requirements you need.
Make Sure It Supports Sales Channels:
When your brand is present on numerous platforms, such as Shopify or Amazon, a PIM can make a difference regarding Shopify or other integrations. PIM for Shopify makes handling business simple. Businesses focusing on PIM sales growth should invest in a system that automates and centralizes product data across channels.
Research First
It is essential to do your research and PIM homework. You can look up into the review platforms and maybe reach out to the customers already using it to gauge your options.
What Will the Best PIM Do for You?
Owning the digital shelf means delivering rich, accurate product pages that will most likely convert visitors to your site into paying customers. Remember, accurate product information is one lever you have significant control over on the engine driving eCommerce sales success.
While human fickleness means you can’t keep people from changing their minds and returning products, you can help them make up in the first place.
Do this with rich, compelling product pages full of accurate information.
Bonus Pointers
We promised a list of PIM dos and don’ts at the outset, so here it is:
Do choose a PIM that…
- Solves all our concerns, but don’t choose one that’s overly complex or provides functionality you know you won’t use.
- Includes DAM integration, but don’t opt for a DAM built to mimic the functionality of a PIM.
- Offers responsive customer service, but don’t simply take their word for it (see final thought below).
Final Thoughts!
To understand how to choose the right PIM, it is necessary to realize that it is not about the features: it is about the business fit. The appropriate product information management software simplifies the processes, increases the accuracy, and enhances scalability.
How to choose the right product information management system? To verify that the PIM you’re considering offers all of these, you should research and read reviews on sites like G2Crowd.
Now that you have everything you need to know to decide whether or not you need a PIM, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
