10 Things to Know About Spring Release 2023 for Akeneo’s 10th Anniversary

1.Akeneo Activation for Retail

Akeneo Activation for Retail is a new solution intended for brands using or interested in using Akeneo PIM to manage their product catalog and activate it across their key retail channels, making it easier than ever before to sell your products on retail channels with the product experience that your customers expect. 

When utilized with Akeneo PIM, the powerful and user-friendly Akeneo Activation for Retail is proven to fuel exceptional product experiences, increase time-to-market, and reduce operational inefficiencies of being a first-party vendor selling to multiple retailers. With error reporting that enables a user to read and diagnose missing product information, Akeneo Activation for retail makes it easy for your team to map PIM source data to any and all retailer requirements.

2. Custom Apps

One size does not fit all when it comes to your Product Experience Management (PXM). Custom Apps provide a flexible solution to easily create an app to address almost any unique customer need, enabling organizations to innovate faster than ever before. A Custom App is an app created from the Akeneo Product Cloud to package in a SaaS-compliant way your specific needs that are not covered by our existing native features or existing Apps available on the Akeneo App Store. These SaaS native apps allow developers and integrators to alleviate the expense and time necessary to build and maintain custom integrations by leveraging tools provided through the Akeneo App Store.

3. Time-to-Market Insights

What’s the best way to beat out your competition? Get on the shelf earlier with a faster time-to-market and increased sales. Just announced as part of our Spring 2023 Release, Time-to-Market Insights brings new operational analytics to the Akeneo Product Cloud that identify opportunities to streamline the product data enrichment process in Akeneo PIM, providing your team with the data and insights you need to innovate and improve.

4. Akeneo for Shopify

Today, eCommerce teams have to pull from multiple scattered data sources to build their product catalog in Shopify.  The Akeneo App for Shopify enables customers to connect Akeneo PIM directly to their Shopify stores through Akeneo technology and Shopify APIs.  Customers can easily publish their optimized product content from Akeneo PIM directly into their Shopify stores, making it easier than ever to map and import Akeneo products into Shopify.

With this newly released app, customers can easily publish their optimized product content from Akeneo PIM directly into their Shopify stores, resulting in a faster time-to-market, more accurate and up-to-date product content, and more impactful product experiences that include images and technical or emotional information to your customers.

5. 10 additional new apps on the Akeneo App Store

That’s right, we released so much stuff that we had to combine a whole other 10 new announcements into one! We launched many more apps other than Shopify, including:

• Digital Asset Management (DAM) apps, such as the new TESSA Akeneo App by EIKONA Media, Filerobot Akeneo App by Scaleflex and Akeneo Image CDN by TwicPics, which will allow Akeneo customers to seamlessly access digital assets within Akeneo PIM and foster cross-platform collaboration between teams working in an external DAM and teams working in Akeneo PIM.
• Translation apps, such as Powerling x Akeneo App, and DeepL App by Induxx that will streamline workflows to make it easier for businesses to deliver localized content. 
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) based apps, such as ChatGPT Bee App by Dataggo and RoughDraftPro AI that leverage ChatGPT to speed content enrichment. Contentwise Catalog Builder App also leverages AI capabilities to generate product attributes and text.
• A new catalog classification app, Calago ETIM App, that creates a catalog structure in Akeneo PIM based on ETIM classifications, the international standard for technical products.

And that’s not even all. You can head to the Akeneo App Store to get a full account of all the new apps released.

6. Identifier Generator

Enable product managers to efficiently prepare products for market with the Identifier Generator, a new way to automate the generation of your identifiers during the creation process of your products. Create product identifiers, a critical piece of product information, directly in Akeneo PIM and ensure that your product identifiers are created and structured to match your specific needs. This new feature allows your organization to create the structure of your identifiers with product attributes, select your targeted products by specific families, and manage custom abbreviations for each property.

7. Enriched Categories

Create a better customer experience, powered by a stronger product experience. With Enriched Categories, your organization will be able to create more impactful experiences for your customers on your D2C site by providing them with access to more information about specific product lines, categories, or sub-categories. Enriched Categories enables your team to leverage e-merchandising information such as images, descriptions, and SEO content, all of which provide better information to your buyers.

8. AI-capabilities now available in Akeneo PIM

Thanks to Spring Release 2023, you can now leverage Artifical Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning directly inside of Akeneo PIM.  Automate the cleansing, deduplication, and categorization of product data as it is imported into Akeneo PIM, and support a faster time-to-market through AI-driven data cleansing.

9. Developer Tools and Sample Apps 

Akeneo’s platform makes it easier than ever before for you to interact with our ecosystem, ensuring that both our customers and integrators have access to everything they need. On the customer side, Business Users can feel confident that the applications that they need are easily accessible in the Akeneo app store off-the-shelf, are easily integratable. And for our integrators, partners and developers can integrate with Akeneo, reducing their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with confidence and ease.

10. Akeneo PIM Flexibility v 7.0 

The forever-free, open-source Akeneo PIM Community Edition (CE) now boasts some of the latest and greatest Akeneo features. CE customers and managed services version customers can now more easily export and import product information with the product UUID option, as well as mark the SKU input as optional, and more. See the full list of what’s included in Akeneo PIM Flexibility v7.0 here.

With a decade of dedication to product experiences in  our rearview mirror, we’ve released a ton of really exciting and innovative product updates, but Spring Release 2023 has truly been one to remember. We had a wonderful time celebrating with our PX community of customers, partners, and PX experts at Unlock Paris last week, and we look forward to seeing what we can create and build together in the future.