Case Study: Lancaster

Lancaster has always focused on innovation, both for its products and its digital strategy. Naturally, when optimizing its online catalog became a challenge, implementing a PIM solution emerged as an obvious choice, more so as it became part of redesigning the website under Magento.

Lancaster has multiple e-shops – one in Europe and one in the USA – each with different product catalogs and objectives. With this comes a multi-source challenge. Product information emanate from various sources such as ERP, photo services, or CSV files. In addition to its own online shops, Lancaster also relies on other platforms such as Google Shopping and Criteo. Each channel requires specific information to be exported each time.

Before the PIM was introduced, creating product references was done manually – a tedious and time consuming task. Products were published one by one on the e-commerce website, which was an obvious drawback against the competition, or even with resellers as they could offer products before their availability on the website. Choosing a PIM had to address two main objectives:

• Optimizing the creation and enrichment of product datasheets on the website, in terms of speed to remain competitive and information reliability to reduce human actions required to transfer information. The goal was to eliminate the risk of errors, inconsistencies and omissions that cause numerous and repetitive manipulations.
• Simultaneously updating all channels used by the e-commerce website and web marketing activities while maintaining the characteristics and complying with the requirements of each channel.

Faced with these requirements, Lancaster was looking for a flexible, modern and easy to integrate solution. With its open source and intuitive solution, natively connected to Magento, Akeneo became the natural preferred choice.