How to Improve Sales Using PIM: 2018 Holiday Season and Beyond

This holiday season, your eCommerce store will have visits from both loyal and new customers – providing a huge opportunity to significantly improve sales revenue. There are several aspects to consider as you prepare your online shop for the holiday season. In particular, you must consider one important yet often overlooked aspect: streamlining product data across multiple channels using product information management (PIM).

Omnichannel Optimization

Product descriptions are the key source of information for online buyers. Incomplete or outdated information can cause sales conversions to decrease. A PIM solution, like Akeneo, can help organizations maintain all of their product information in a centralized repository. This data can be utilized by the entire team and a variety of systems including warehouse point-of-sale solutions and a wide array of digital sales channels like web and mobile.

Using a centralized system for this critical information provides organizations with numerous benefits. Let’s dive deeper into each one.

Quickly Launch New Product

The holiday season is a prime time to launch new products and roll out exclusive bundle offers for customers. To quickly spread the news about new product launches, associated content must be updated instantly across all sales channels. PIM solutions can help streamline this process and ensure that any update made within the system gets distributed to all of the appropriate channels. PIM can also further help improve sales as it supports the multi-channel marketing of seasonal campaigns and bundled offers.

Ensure Seamless Synchronization and No Duplication

PIM centralizes all product information into a single-window interface, which prevents multiple entries of the same product information. This ensures that all information is maintained with the latest, up-to-date details and shared across all systems including online and offline channels.

Reduce Returns by Standardizing Content

Product returns are higher for eCommerce retailers than in brick-and-mortar stores. According to research firm Optoro, return rates range between 18-35% and up to 60% of those returns end up as non-liquidated inventory, costing retailers 20-30% of the sale price of the product. Returns occur due to products having incorrect sizing information, items not matching descriptions, or just general unfamiliarity with the product. All of this boils down to one main problem – having incomplete or inaccurate product information. PIM can help reduce returns by standardizing product page details with ‘how-to’ videos and previous customer reviews/ratings to help purchasers make well-informed purchase decisions.

Enhance The Customer Experience

A PIM system allows customer-centric product categories and structures to be created independently of the ERP system. This setup makes site navigation significantly more customer-friendly. When customers carry out specific searches using parameters like size, technical specification, or category, all the relevant products show up.

This shortens the customers’ search process, helps them locate specific products quickly, and helps them buy products faster. PIM provides relevant product information, easy navigation, and effective search results to help build confidence and enhance the customers’ buying experience.

PIM: The Critical Tools to Enhance Sales

Customers have high expectations when it comes to shopping for products online. In order to increase sales and decrease returns, you must ensure that product information is complete and consistent across channels. Today, product details no longer only include the standard parameters like weight, dimensions, and price, they must also include QR codes, ‘how-to’ videos, vendors, retail stock, reviews/ratings, and more. This is what customers expect. In the future, customer expectations will continue to increase so the complexity of product details in online stores will also increase significantly. All of these external elements make having a PIM system critical to not only managing all of your product data for internal purposes but to also increase your online sales.

Interested in seeing how PIM can help you improve sales? Sign up for a demo of the Akeneo PIM solution.

 

About Aravindhan Anbalagan

Aravindhan is a senior content writer at Ziffity with more than 8 years of experience. He enjoys writing about technology and the latest digital trends.

About Ziffity

Ziffity is a new age Digital agency focused on serving the connected world through design, technology and e-Marketing services. Our solutions include experience design for web and mobile, B2B/B2C eCommerce, PIM, AEM, AI chatbots, machine learning, and digital marketing.

To learn more about what Ziffity does, check out their website.