Jun 29, 2020
More companies than ever, across all industries, are racing to embrace digital transformation. For many, that means starting to sell online in t...
More companies than ever, across all industries, are racing to embrace digital transformation. For many, that means starting to sell online in their own webshop and in marketplaces or moving from a B2B scenario to also support selling direct to customers (DTC).
PIM has proven to be an important piece of technology that should be considered as a way to actually accelerate the pace of getting your eCommerce site up and running. Without it, organizations are left to manually acquire and prepare product information and transform it for use in the new eCommerce site and to external marketplaces.
With PIM, however, this process can be made to go much faster and delivers the added benefit of making managing product information as your catalogs adapt and evolve simpler and easier as time goes on. PIM can ultimately help you reduce return rates by up to 40%, reduce product enrichment costs by as much as 5x, and increase conversion rates by 400%.
A common concern we hear raised is “Our digital transformation project is moving fast and we’re worried about making the project longer if we include PIM.” So how long does it take to implement and deploy your PIM and start seeing some of these benefits and realizing a return on your investment? No two PIM projects are alike, but by using the right approach, it can lead to go-lives in less time than you think — in fact, you can be up and running in a matter of weeks!
The key to getting value rapidly is to take a “minimum viable product” implementation approach. Fortunately, Akeneo PIM supports this approach so you can deliver an initial, working solution rapidly, and still be able to evolve and grow the PIM to a “perfect” state over the longer term.
Another common concern we hear is about integrating PIM with your existing stack. How much extra effort is this going to add to my project?
Akeneo’s highly connected PIM is ready to fit perfectly into your existing tech arsenal. We offer fully documented APIs, and with our marketplace you can easily integrate Akeneo PIM by working with one of our more than 100 extensions and connectors to leading eCommerce platforms, print solutions, syndication tools, translation services, and more, all designed to simplify and speed integration. This saves you the costs and person-hours that are typically spent enriching product information without PIM and manually feeding complete product data to your sales channels.
Even the longest journeys start with a first step, so think big and start small, then iterate and evolve over time. You can have a vision for what you want the perfect PIM to be able to do, but you don’t need to design and build the ultimate PIM solution before you go-live. Adopt a good/better/best approach to help you design the simplest PIM possible, then add additional functionality as your business grows and your needs evolve.
That way, you can get your PIM project started quickly, provide accurate, consistent, and compelling product information and better product experiences for your customers, and scale sustainably with a fast and easy go-live process with minimal investment.
Maybe you think PIM is a nice-to-have tool in your arsenal, but not your must-have or go-to weapon in the omnichannel commerce war? Or perhaps you’re convinced that PIM is too complex to implement and adopt quickly?
Instead, you can adopt and implement PIM into your teams’ product information processes easily and efficiently, without wasting valuable energy, money, or time. By leveraging Akeneo PIM’s flexibility, and adaptability, you can allow your solution to grow and evolve alongside your business. The key is to select a solution that doesn’t force you to define the distant future up-front — as well have all seen, things can change rapidly.
Now more than ever, it’s important that your product enrichment team be able to efficiently and productively update product information in order to get your products to customers quickly.
But if your teams are relying on outdated or poorly suited solutions to manage product information they won’t be able to work efficiently to meet your current needs or change catalogs in the future. This is especially true for smaller, thinly spread, or fully remote teams, who are often also suffering from a lack of resources or support. Fortunately, there is an answer — use PIM to help your team react to changing demarket demands with ease and efficiency.
Look at the example of Midland Scientific. The company was able to train college students to successfully use the PIM to enrich products in a matter of weeks, and leverage Akeneo’s easy-to-understand user interface and short learning curve to help its team rapidly adopt the solution.
Check out the podcast below to hear a brief conversation about the MVP approach and some tips and advice on how to leverage this agile implementation methodology.
Ready to add an MVP to your team? Contact us and we’ll help ensure your PIM project gets off on the right foot!
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