Top 5 New Year’s PIM Resolutions to Support eCommerce and Retail Growth

It’s All About Products

As an eCommerce organization your focus is always on the products you sell:

• How to sell more
• How to deliver a great product experience
• How to expand your catalog with new products
• How to take advantage of the latest technologies

A top priority for all eCommerce organizations is to ensure that product information is accurate, complete, and compelling to make an emotional connection with buyers. This sounds good in theory, but collecting, managing, and enriching product information is an ongoing challenge for many organizations. Ensuring completeness for your entire product line is difficult, and if you’re still managing this data in spreadsheets it’s nearly impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Product information management (PIM) is the solution you need to improve the management of your product data and achieve your other business goals.

We’ll let you in on a little secret – if you make implementing and efficiently using a PIM solution your top resolution for the year you’ll more easily accomplish many of your other commerce goals.

Resolution #1: Take Product Information to the Next Level

Always Deliver Accurate and Complete Product Data

Improving the quality of product data may not be a new goal for your brand, but it’s always an ongoing effort. By implementing a PIM solution your team can have more high-quality and comprehensive data included in product descriptions across every channel. With better information, customers will be more likely to buy your products, and less likely to return them since they know what they are receiving. Besides basic data, PIM can also help you provide contextual data based on specific channels.

According to a study by Shotfarm:
78% of consumers said the quality of product information is very important when making purchasing decisions.
87% said they would be unlikely to make purchases again if they receive incorrect product information.

Resolution #2: Provide Customers with the Omnichannel Experience They Deserve

Contextualize Product Information

To stay competitive, you must be where your customers are with relevant product information. As product data goes, there is no one size fits all. This is a challenge for many brands as every new channel and platform has unique product data requirements. Use a PIM to provide contextual product data across all customer touchpoints. PIM gives your team the tools you need to enrich and export the required data and optimized product information for every channel and every platform to succeed in your omnichannel initiatives.

Ensure your product information is delivered in context on every platform and every channel – no matter where your customers are.

Resolution #3: Expand Product Lines and Target Markets

Grow Your Product Catalog

With a PIM, your team can be more efficient in onboarding new products and spend less time managing current ones. Easy-to-use tools quickly organize products into families and automatically populates shared attributes and descriptions. Bulk editing allows marketers and catalog managers to mass enrich or edit products and utilize business rule-driven automation to assign values to products, groups, and categories.

Expand into New Markets

With all other aspects of product enrichment optimized, you can spend more time growing and expanding your business. PIM smooths out the complicated and manual aspect of translating and localizing product information for new regions. Automated workflows help move remote teams seamlessly through the entire enrichment process. Teams can even connect the translation tools of their choice and easily review and approve localized information without ever having to leave the platform.

Resolution #4: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Remove Tedious Work and Automate Processes

Your product marketing team’s mission is to create compelling and exciting product descriptions to entice buyers. However, too often, product and marketing teams spend most of their time copying and pasting information between spreadsheets and various applications.

A PIM can remove this tedious, manual, error-prone, and repetitive work, by automating many of the repetitive tasks that take up so much of your team’s time. Let your PIM streamline your product data management and enrichment with bulk edit actions, completeness checks, automated import of data, and workflows that guide team members through their assigned tasks.

PIM helps you speed up the time to market by 3X to 4X.

Resolution #5: Innovate More

Take Advantage of the Latest Technologies

Comprehensive product data doesn’t just impact the point-of-sale. With new digital technologies becoming mainstream, you need to organize your product information in a way that can support the latest shopping methods such as chatbots and vocal assistants. You also need to be able to prepare and create the customized experiences that consumers now expect. These strategies and solutions require structured data. PIM centralizes and organizes data, so it is both available for these new technologies and vastly simplifies the process of deploying new sales tools and marketing initiatives.

Support Your New Year’s Resolutions with PIM

PIM is your most valuable asset to support your omnichannel commerce goals and deliver a 21^st-century customer experience. With the right solution in place, you can improve your existing operations, easily expand your activities, and prepare for the technologies of the future.

Ready to start 2019 off on the right foot? Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or read our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands.