What is a Composable Commerce Architecture?

What is a Monolithic Commerce Architecture? 

Business Benefits of Composable Commerce

• Increased flexibility & scalability: Successful businesses aren’t static businesses. To thrive in the eCommerce world, brands have no choice but to adapt their tech stacks to customer expectations, market trends, and of course, the challenges that come with growth. A composable commerce architecture makes this flexibility and scalability possible. It allows brands to easily add, remove, or replace components as needed, so that their platform stays agile and responsive to change. This flexibility also allows businesses to scale their eCommerce operations seamlessly, without the constraints often imposed by monolithic systems. Simply put, it helps your brand become future-proof. 
• Streamlined workflows & increased internal efficiency: Because composable commerce is so flexible, businesses can create an eCommerce platform that meets the unique operational requirements of their teams. For example, with composable commerce, the customer support team can leverage their preferred helpdesk system that seamlessly integrates with the eCommerce platform, allowing them to access customer data and order history in real-time, leading to faster and more accurate support. This personalization of the tech stack means more streamlined workflows, reduced complexity, and increased efficiency, allowing teams to focus on delivering value to their customers.
• Communicate the entire product story across all channels: In today’s landscape, businesses must tell a compelling – and consistent – product story that resonates with their target audience. A composable commerce makes this possible by allowing the integration of important eCommerce components, like product information management (PIM) tools, content management systems (CMS), and digital asset management (DAM), to ensure that product data, content, and assets are synchronized and up-to-date across owned and unowned channels. 
• Faster time-to-market: With a composable commerce architecture, businesses can bring new products, features, or services to market much faster than with a monolithic one. The modular nature of composable commerce makes it easier to integrate new eCommerce components, update existing ones, or launch new sales channels, effectively reducing the time it takes to deliver innovations to your customers.

Impact of a Composable Commerce Model on the Customer Experience

• Access to more reliable product information: Customers crave a straight-forward, trustworthy purchase experience. When the product’s information varies based on whether they’re shopping on your website or a third-party marketplace, that creates frustration, confusion, and distrust. Not great for your brand. Composable commerce makes it possible to integrate PIM, DAM, CMS and other systems that keep product data consistent and reliable for consumers, no matter where they’re shopping. This not only helps build trust but also simplifies the decision-making process for consumers, leading to better overall product experiences. 
• More product options and innovative experiences: Above, we mentioned that composable commerce can help improve time-to-market. This helps keep you ahead of your competition and puts more products on the shelves, but it also frees up time and resources to invest in innovation . . . and to launch those innovations for your customers to enjoy. With the modular nature of composable commerce, businesses can experiment with and adopt emerging technologies like AR or voice commerce, creating cutting-edge shopping experiences without disrupting the existing infrastructure. 

• Improved customer support: A composable commerce architecture allows for easy integration of order management systems (OMS) and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) into your current eCommerce tech stack. But more importantly, it allows you to choose the right OMS, CRM, and helpdesk systems for your business and customer needs. With tools customized to your unique requirements, you can seriously improve the overall customer support experience with real-time updates on order status, inventory levels, and estimated delivery times. And, of course, faster, more personalized support leads to higher customer satisfaction. 
• Customized shopping experiences: Composable commerce supports the integration of more advanced personalization tools, meaning businesses can deliver a unique shopping experience for each customer based on their interests, browsing history, and purchase patterns. This level of personalization not only improves customer satisfaction but also fosters long-term loyalty and repeat business. (Who doesn’t want the most relevant and tailored product recommendations, promotions, and content?)

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Now imagine you click the “Furniture” menu on a site and the options are “Lounge,” “Relax,” and “Recharge.” No longer clear where you’ll find the bed frames, right? 

That’s the power of product taxonomy. The way you organize and display your products directly impacts your brand’s reputation, customer experience, and ultimately, conversion rates. 

At first glance, product taxonomy may seem as simple as putting the right products in the right category, but that can be easier said than done… especially when you’re working with tens of thousands of products. Let’s take a deeper dive into what product taxonomy means, why it matters, and the best practices to follow to see the biggest impact. 

What is Product Taxonomy?

Product taxonomy is a set structure used to organize and categorize a vast amount of product information in a logical, easy-to-understand way. The main goal of any taxonomy system is to present both structured and unstructured product data in a way that is quickly digestible for both internal teams and consumers.

Think of product taxonomy like a tree. You sort products into categories, and then those categories branch out into smaller groups, organized with tags. These metadata tags play a huge part in helping your consumers find your site. Search engines, browsers, and web crawlers use them to understand the structure, content, and context of your web pages, which in turn improves your website’s discoverability and search engine rankings.

Let’s take a quick look at an example. Luxury fashion brand Fendi has their products initially sorted into large buckets in their menu; namely, “Women”, “Men”, and “Kids”. Then, clicking into just one of this categories gives you a range of items to choose from within that category. So, you click under “Women”, and you see all the types products targeted for women that Fendi offers, such as bags, shoes, and accessories. Then, taking it a step further, Fendi allows its shoppers to click into one of these sub-categories and personalize even further; by selecting “Accessories”, you can see a list of the different types of accessories offered such as scarves, socks, sunglasses or belts. How Fendi decides to organize and list their products is their product taxonomy, and has a direct effect on the shopping experience.

What are the Benefits of Taxonomy Management?

When your product taxonomy management game is on point, your business benefits. Here’s how: 

• Skyrocketing search engine rankings: A well-structured product taxonomy that uses relevant keywords and metadata tags helps search engines like Google more accurately index and rank your content. These tags include crucial information such as the title, description, and keywords related to your products.  What that means for you is better visibility in search results, increased organic traffic, and a higher likelihood that potential customers will find your products online.
• Boosted conversion rates: When your product taxonomy is easy to navigate and understand, consumers can quickly find the products they’re looking for, which in turn creates a better shopping experience. Since happy customers are more likely to make a purchase (and return for future purchases), this positive experience often translates into a higher conversion rate.
• Personalized customer experiences: Streamlined taxonomy management helps you create a more tailored shopping experience for each customer. By offering product categories and filters that resonate with your target audience, you can make it easier for them to find products that match their preferences and needs. A personalized experience not only leads to higher customer satisfaction, but also stronger customer loyalty.
• Simplified inventory management: An efficient product taxonomy structure allows for easier inventory tracking and organization. With a well-defined product hierarchy, your internal teams can more efficiently manage stock levels, monitor product performance, and make informed decisions regarding product assortment and merchandising.

How Does a PIM Solution Support Product Taxonomy Management?

Let’s revisit that last bullet point. Product taxonomy can simplify your product management processes… if you’re using the right tools. A product information management (PIM) solution is the secret weapon to take your product taxonomy management to the next level. 

Manually managing taxonomy can be inefficient and error-prone, especially at high inventory levels. With thousands of products, it’s easy to imagine accidentally applying the wrong tag or sorting a product into the wrong category. PIM solutions allow you to automate many of the mundane tasks associated with taxonomy management, such as data entry, updates, and validation. This not only saves time and resources so your team can focus on higher value tasks, but also reduces the risk of inconsistencies and errors in your product data.

PIM systems also help by centralizing all of your product information, including taxonomy structure, in one place. This creates a reliable and consistent record that can be accessed by marketing, sales, IT teams, and other stakeholders. By creating a single source of truth, you can ensure that everyone is working with the most up-to-date and accurate information, essential for maintaining a well-organized product taxonomy.

Whether you’re selling through your own D2C site or partnering with retailers, PIM tools make it easy to syndicate your product content and taxonomy across all your sales channels. This means your customers receive consistent and accurate product information, regardless of where they’re shopping. 

Product Taxonomy Best Practices

Of course, the better you structure your product taxonomy, the more impactful it will be to your bottom line. To optimize your product taxonomy, make sure to follow these best practices: 

Use logical organization and clear naming conventions

Your product taxonomy should be easy for both internal teams and customers to understand. Each category, subcategory, and tag should have clear, descriptive names that accurately represent the products within them. (Remember our bed frame example at the start?) For eCommerce, consider using terminology that aligns with common search terms to support SEO. Pro tip: Create a visual representation of your taxonomy hierarchy to further help users navigate where they want to go.

Prioritize the customer

Nobody wants to navigate through ten different categories and subcategories to find the one product they’re looking for. The golden rule is to enable customers to reach their product in three clicks or fewer by providing intuitive navigation options and filters. Consider what kind of information and product attributes are most valuable to your customers during their decision-making process (ex. are desk buyers more concerned about the color or the size?), and incorporate these details into your taxonomy.

Utilize PIM tools for automation and efficiency

Remember how we said a PIM solution can help? The best taxonomy structures are managed by a PIM tool which can automate and easily maintain your categories and tags. Not only does this cut down on time and errors, it allows you to easily review and update your product taxonomy periodically to make sure it remains both relevant and effective.

Product taxonomy affects search engine rankings, customer experience, conversion rates, and more, making it an absolutely critical aspect of your business’s success. By adhering to best practices and tapping into PIM tools, you can make your taxonomy management more efficient for both your consumers and your internal team. Always a good sign for your bottom line. 

Want to see how Akeneo’s PIM solution can help support your product taxonomy management? Let’s talk. 

Why does it matter? With an effective product management strategy, you’ll be better positioned to attract and retain customers, increase sales, and stay ahead of the competition in the fast-paced world of eCommerce. Plus, by staying on top of emerging product trends and evolving customer needs, you can ensure that your products remain relevant and in-demand. Not to mention, effective product management can help you streamline your operations and improve your time-to-market.

In this article, we’ll explore the ins and outs of eCommerce product management, including what it is, what an eCommerce Product Manager does, and how a Product Information Management (PIM) solution can help streamline your product management process.

What is Product Management in eCommerce?

Product management involves overseeing the product roadmap, or the entire lifecycle of a product from its initial creation to its end, with the goal of creating products that meet customer needs and generate revenue for the business. It involves working cross-functionally with teams such as marketing, design, and engineering to develop, launch, optimize, and promote products. 

While eCommerce product management involves the same basic principles, it specifically optimizes the entire online shopping experience, from product discovery to checkout and post-purchase support. Today’s consumers have high expectations when it comes to the online shopping experience, demanding seamless navigation, personalized product recommendations, and fast customer support. Investing in effective eCommerce product management helps brands meet these expectations, leading to a more loyal customer base. 

Because things are ever-changing in the world of eCommerce, the most effective product management also incorporates monitoring the competitive landscape, following the latest eCommerce trends, and keeping up with consumer demands to stay ahead of the competition.

What Does an eCommerce Product Manager Do?

eCommerce Product Managers act as trusty guides along the product journey, focusing on the online retail environment. An eCommerce product manager sets and oversees the product strategy, creates a product roadmap, defines the features, and works with teams across the organization to position the product for success, creating the best possible online experience for consumers. 

Though the exact responsibilities can differ based on the organization and product need, a breakdown could include: 

• • Market research: Identifying customer needs, market trends, and competitive landscapes.
  • Product roadmap: Creating an outline that maps the strategy vision and direction of the product and tracks progress.
  • Product feature definition: Defining product features and working with cross-functional teams to develop and launch the product.
  • Product launch: Leading the launch of the product and ensuring that it is promoted effectively to the target audience.
  • Product discovery: Enhancing search, navigation, and recommendation features to improve product discovery.
  • Online product experience: Ensuring product information is accurate, up-to-date, and well-organized.
  • Product performance monitoring: Monitoring success and making necessary adjustments to ensure that the product continues to meet customer needs and drives revenue.

Why is eCommerce Product Management Important?

The cost of launching a new product can vary wildly depending on the industry or brand, but most often, it falls within the $20,000 – $500,000 range. That’s a big investment for a company of any size… and one you don’t want to lose with a failed launch. 

That’s where product management comes in handy. Instead of assuming a new product will meet consumer needs or resonate in the market, eCommerce product management develops a strategy to set new products up for online success from square one and reduces the risk of a product flop. This strategy is created through digital market analysis conducted to uncover the unique differentiators and needs of online shoppers.

Plus, as eCommerce competition grows and customer needs evolve, product management can help businesses stand out from the crowd and attract and retain customers.

At its most effective, product management helps businesses streamline their operations by optimizing their product offerings, reducing time-to-market, and improving inventory management.

How can a PIM Solution Help eCommerce Product Management?

Speaking of inventory management, a PIM system should be an eCommerce product manager’s best friend. Product managers are often juggling a lot of information, and spend quite a bit of time chasing down product details and assets from departments across the organization. A PIM system makes it easier to manage eCommerce product information in several ways:

• Effectively store and manage product information that can be syndicated to eCommerce channels: A PIM software centralizes product information, making it easier for product managers to oversee and distribute these details to a wide variety of eCommerce channels. This can save time and reduce errors associated with manual data entry.
• Optimize product information for eCommerce channels: A PIM can help optimize product information for eCommerce channels, such as Amazon or a first-party site, by ensuring that the data is complete, accurate, and formatted correctly. This can improve the customer experience and increase sales – a product manager’s dream. 
• Simplify & improve time-to-market: The longer it takes you to gather, enrich, and verify product data, the longer it takes your product to hit the virtual shelves. A PIM can help streamline product launches by providing a single source of truth for product information, assets, and more. This can reduce the time and resources required to launch new products.

Remember, “composability” should be on your list of PIM feature requirements. A composable PIM will offer more flexibility than a monolithic architecture. This allows you to tailor your PIM solution to your specific needs and integrate with other systems in your tech ecosystem, such as eCommerce platforms, such as BigCommerce or Salesforce CC.

Effective eCommerce product management is a non-negotiable for businesses looking to succeed in the digital economy (which is basically all businesses). A PIM system can help manage eCommerce product information, improve the customer experience, and drive sales. By investing in eCommerce product management and leveraging the power of a PIM system, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and succeed in the rapidly-evolving eCommerce landscape.

Want a better idea of how PIM and eCommerce product management can work together to hit your product goals? Get a firsthand look here. 

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What are Product Variants? 

Product Variant Examples 

• Potato chips that come in different flavors, such as salted or BBQ
• Couches available in different fabric materials and/or sizes
• Screwdrivers with long or short handles 
• Shampoo that comes in regular or travel-sized containers

Benefits of Product Variants for eCommerce Sales

• Improved conversion rate: Product variants keep consumers browsing on your eCommerce site longer – and reduce the chances they’ll check out your competitors. The easier it is for them to find the exact size, color, or style they need quickly, the more likely they are to convert.

• Increased sales: Not only do product variants impact conversion rate, they also can affect the total number of sales. Variations can allow you to reach new audiences that may have unique product needs.

• Improved customer experience: Product variants are key to providing a customized and personalized shopping experience, something that over 71% of consumers now expect from retailers. 
• More efficient internal operations: Instead of creating product variants for a t-shirt, some brands create a new product listing for every size and color combination. Not only does this confuse your customers, it definitely does not endear you to the internal team tasked with updating the listings. Product variants = a streamlined process. They allow teams to upload one “master” product and incorporate/adjust variants quickly as they go.

How PIM Can Support Product Variants

While there are too many notable moments to count, we wanted to share some of our favorite sessions from the global event, just for you. Check out the full recordings of our top five Unlock sessions below.

1. 2023 Product Announcement, featuring Akeneo Activation for Retail

During one of the highest-attended sessions of Unlock Paris 2023, we unveiled some of the most exciting features included in the latest Akeneo Spring Release on stage alongside Havaiana’s International CTO, Francois Silvain. Dive into everything you need to know about Akeneo Activation for Retail, our new Shopify app, AI capabilities, and more.

“We implemented Akeneo to enable our marketing team, our product team and merchandising teams to have one source of truth for all of our channels and languages to improve our product experiences through all channels.“ – Francois Sillvain, CTO Haviana’s International

2. Are You Ready for the Next Disruption? Lessons on Resilience in an Unpredictable World

The past three years have brought a global pandemic, inflation, war, and new challenges for companies trying to engage their employees and customers. In this session, Solutions Architect Matt Caffrey discusses the trials and tribulations Akeneo customer Assa Abloy faced as they navigated these disruptions and learned how to position themselves to weather and thrive during the next one.

“We’re giving customers the tools they need to do the job and we’re empowering our product managers and our marketing teams to future proof and get ahead of the curve. We feel we’re one step ahead every time.” – Matt Caffery, Solutions Architect Assa Abloy

3. Fireside Chat: Demystifying Omnichannel Product Experience Strategy, Unlearn Multi-Channel

Your customers’ journeys are changing, and becoming increasingly more complex. Their buying habits are multi-touch and omnichannel. If you really want to succeed in offering the experience that your customers expect, both on your owned and unowned channels, you need to make sure that you have a cohesive omnichannel product experience strategy. We sat down with folks from the WÜSTHOF team during Unlock Paris to break down the process of bringing a product all the way from browsing to buying and even post-purchase. 

“Being with the company for 23 years, I’ve seen the different stages of the company development. We are on the right path to be future-proof. With collecting the data in the digital single point of truth, we are on the right step to be future-proof in the omnichannel.” – Björn Kirsten, Brand & Creative PIM/MDM WÜSTHOF

4. Think Bigger: How to Realize the Full Potential of Your Product Experiences

Does your organization struggle to view Product Experience Management (PXM) as more than just an operational challenge? In this session, you’ll hear from Akeneo customer, XPIM GmbH who’s thinking bigger by putting PX at the center of an initiative to modernize their entire industry. You’ll also learn more about a new Akeneo asset to help your organization assess and optimize its PX strategy to unlock the full potential of Akeneo as an important driver of growth.

“At the very beginning PX was just a buzzword to us. We’d heard about it but we hadn’t wrapped our hearts or our minds around it. That came later once we started to think bigger. Today, [Product Experience] is more than just a strategy, it has to be part of your DNA.” – Marvin Urban, Founder & CEO XPIM GmbH

5. Take Control and Make Product Experenices Your Differentiator

Designing a product onboarding process can be overwhelming. To optimize the suppliers’ and brands’ onboarding experience, you also have to analyze product data to understand which features are most likely to lead to positive customer outcomes. Learn why PIM is more than a tool for data collection and how to use it to create compelling product experiences that will differentiate your business.

“Our first success is employee satisfaction and gain of productivity. With the PIM they can do magic, they have automation and new processes. They don’t lose time anymore on doing the same tasks as they were doing on an excel file or losing date. The satisfaction of the employee is really nice to have.” – Manon Lemaire, Digital Project Manager Bongenie Grieder

We had many more wonderful sessions and discussions throughout the two-day event than we were able to share here, but we hope you enjoy at least this little sneak peek into Unlock Paris. As one of our favorite times of the year, Unlock provides an opportunity for leaders and experts in the world of commerce to come together and honor the art and science of creating omnichannel product experiences, forging alliances and meaningful connections along the way.

We’d love to take a moment to say a big thank you to the wonderful Akeneo employees, partners, and customers who made this event possible. We couldn’t have done it without you, and we’ll see you back in Paris next year!

If you don’t want to wait a whole year for the next Unlock event, Unlock Boston will be taking place this fall. Stay tuned for more details to come on how to register!

Akeneo is the ideal engine to support this omnichannel product experience strategy as it acts as a single source of truth for product information that can be quickly and efficiently contextualized and activated on every sales channel a company sells on. This benefit can be clearly quantified in Forrester’s recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) report on Akeneo, that found the incremental benefit provided by Akeneo’s data quality and management capabilities in new channels was responsible for 4.2% revenue growth over 3 years. 

Are you thinking about incorporating a new sales channel into your Akeneo solution? Let’s explore what a channel is and how you can prepare your Akeneo solution to unlock growth across all customer touchpoints, whether they’re owned by you or not.

What is a Channel in Akeneo?

Channels in Akeneo are used to adapt product information, product assortment, and mandatory fields to meet the requirements of each customer touchpoint within a product catalog. A company with an omnichannel strategy may sell the same product across many, or even dozens, of different customer touchpoints. 

A company selling in a print catalog, in an eCommerce platform, and through a marketplace may have three separate Akeneo Channels to support each version of the catalog. However, it’s important to think of each Akeneo Channel as an adaptation of product information, and not just a new destination of information. 

For example, a customer with four separate eCommerce storefronts with identical product information may need just 1 Akeneo Channel. Likewise, a mobile app and an eCommerce platform could also require just one Akeneo Channel if the product information, assortment, and mandatory fields (completeness) are identical. 

Adapt your Product Catalog

The first step in adding a new channel in Akeneo is to consider how your product content, assortment, and mandatory fields (completeness) will differ across channels. 

Product content

Different customer touchpoints often require different versions of the same product information. When adding a channel, it’s critical to first identify which information needs to be adapted and which information can remain the same across channels. 

Information that will remain the same can be left alone, while information that needs to be adapted to have a different value per channel needs to be configured in Akeneo. In the image below, you can see an example of how a Description attribute that’s been configured to have a different value per channel can support two separate descriptions. 

Note: We want to avoid doing redundant work, so be deliberate in identifying which information should actually change from channel to channel and what information can be shared. Need to modify some of your existing attributes to support separate values per channel? Check out this guide.

Don’t forget about your rich content! It’s often necessary to adapt your media across sales channels too. An eCommerce platform may require multiple high resolution images, while a print catalog may have just a handful of lower resolution or even black and white images. All of these different channel specific requirements can be supported with Akeneo’s Asset Manager. 

Assortment

It’s common for product assortment to change across channels. Category Trees in Akeneo manage product assortment and can be used to organize products within Akeneo. Each Channel in Akeneo can have a unique Category Tree. It’s quite common for products to be organized differently across channels. 

For example, print Category Trees are often much flatter while eCommerce Category Trees have multiple levels. Enriched Categories can also allow you to build channel specific category level content to build even more impactful experiences for customers. 

Completeness

Different channels may require more or less information. For example, a mobile or print channel may just need a few basic fields to meet customer expectations, while an eCommerce platform may need significantly more. Each channel in Akeneo can have different completeness settings to support this. This allows you to meet higher expectations for more detailed channels while launching rapidly on channels that require less information. 

Organize your Teams

Bringing a new channel to Akeneo often means incorporating a new team into your Akeneo environment. It’s important to understand early on who will be enriching products in Akeneo for your new channel and ensuring you have a clear definition of their roles and responsibilities. If an existing team will be enriching the new channel, it’s still important to ensure they are aware of their new responsibilities.

Training 

New teams being brought into Akeneo must be trained to work effectively in the tool. Akeneo offers a number of training options including free online courses and paid private training. It’s also possible to have a more experienced Akeneo user enable new teammates with some hands-on training. 

Permissions 

When adding new teammates to Akeneo, you want to ensure they’re working on the products and product information they’re supposed to with the help of Akeneo permissions. Consider which User groups and User Roles new teammates should have. Utilize Categories to control product access, Attribute Groups to control access to attributes, and Roles to control actions users can take in the PIM.

Process 

Map out the entire end-to-end product enrichment process for the new team. It’s important that every step is considered and that enrichment is done as effectively as possible. Utilize automation using Rules and Product Link Rules, and empower your teams on Teamwork assistant features to support rapid enrichment. It’s also critical to consider tasks or dependencies outside of Akeneo that new team members may need to contend with (like waiting for a photography team to take pictures, or a buyer to input a new product in an ERP system). 

Activate your Products

Now that you’ve adapted your product information for your new channel and enabled your new teammates, it’s time to get Products to your new Channel. In Akeneo, there are three primary ways to do this.

Akeneo Apps 

The Akeneo App Store gives you access to Akeneo Apps that provide a quick, high-quality integration to external systems with no developer intervention necessary. The App Store includes Apps for a number of platforms including Shopify, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, Channel Engine, ProductsUp, and more. In many cases, product mapping and scheduled exports can be handled directly in the Akeneo UI. Akeneo also allows you to build your own custom apps to meet your organization’s unique needs. 

Akeneo Activation for Retail 

Akeneo Activation for Retail allows you to send high quality product information and assets from Akeneo PIM to key retailers. By leveraging easy-to-use mapping, error reporting, and support for enhanced content, you can meet the requirements of your retailers at scale and deliver the customer experiences that increase discoverability and drive conversions.

Tailored Exports

Akeneo Tailored Exports allow you to build a custom export profile to map your Akeneo product information to the format of an external destination. Ideal for getting information to business partners, retailers, or internal teams, these exports can be scheduled to deposit a file into an external location (FTP server, AWS S3 etc.) and provide you with Akeneo native integration capabilities.

It’s critical that your organization manages every sales channel with Akeneo. Managing product information outside of Akeneo leaves you susceptible to inconsistent brand messaging, data inconsistencies, siloed workstreams, and excess content enrichment costs. 

Looking for other opportunities to improve your Akeneo solution? Take the Akeneo PX Strategy Assessment now.

Whether you’re a retailer with a host of suppliers helping to fill your product catalog, a manufacturer with a throng of retailers ready to sell your products to the masses, or the distribution company in the middle, you likely have a long list of business partners. These partners need the same thing you do to succeed in this omnichannel age — great product experiences built on a foundation of accurate, consistent, and compelling product information and assets.

But without a dedicated space for you to collaborate with external partners like suppliers, retailers, or distributors, and internal teams like sales reps and customer care workers, it’s easy for inaccurate, inconsistent, or outdated product data to reach your customers. Those mistakes can add up quickly, leaving you or your partners with low-quality product data filled with errors and inconsistencies and slow enrichment processes, which lead to bad product experiences, increased costs, and decreased revenue.

What’s needed is a dedicated space for sharing and exchanging product information and assets easily, efficiently, and securely. That’s where two of Akeneo’s products, Shared Catalogs and Supply Data Manager, come in. They’re designed to make it easier than ever to work together with your internal teams and partners and collaborate to create compelling product experiences, slash enrichment costs, and boost revenue.

Let’s take a closer look at how these two new innovations can help your team unlock growth.

Share Data Seamlessly

Managing product data is often a challenge for brands and manufacturers, particularly when it comes to sharing data with retail and distribution partners. Akeneo Shared Catalogs is designed to help your organization conquer those challenges with relative ease.

Shared Catalogs enables your teams to share specific product data and assets with selected partners via a dedicated, secure portal. This offers your retail and distribution partners a quick and easy way to access your product information, including digital assets, directly from you via an easy-to-use, flexible, and browser-based interface. It even comes complete with search capabilities to help them find what they need and export it on demand. Plus, Shared Catalogs gives your team increased control over who can access your product catalog, meaning that your retail and distribution partners can access the information they need — and only the information they need.

The results? Higher productivity and increased collaboration with external partners, on-demand access to your product information to pressure and workload from your teams, and improved product data quality and accuracy on partners’ sales channels. What does that mean? Better product experiences, higher conversion rates, and increased customer loyalty for your organization.

Provide Accurate, Consistent Data to Internal Teams

Shared Catalogs can also help organizations by providing them with a dedicated space to share accurate and up-to-date product catalog information.

With Shared Catalogs, your internal teams such as sales, marketing, and customer service departments can use a flexible and easy-to-use interface complete with search capabilities to ensure they have access to the latest product information. This gives your team a window into your Akeneo PIM instance, allowing employees to access information without forcing them to learn and use a new system on top of the many they already utilize. If they want, your internal teams can even consume it directly in the PIM user interface or share it with prospective customers, making collaboration even easier to manage and offering product managers increased control over access to a shared product catalog.

With Akeneo Shared Catalogs, organizations are able to collaborate with team members more easily and effectively, resulting in accelerated time-to-market, sinking enrichment costs, and improved product data accuracy. That translates to more selling days for your teams, better product experiences for your customers, and increasing revenue for your organization.

 

Onboard Suppliers with Ease 

Brands and retailers, of course, don’t just need to share product data among internal teams. They too need to communicate with external partners, namely the suppliers that help provide the products they sell. Enter Supply Data Manager.

Supply Data Manager is for anyone — retailers, distributors, multichannel brands, discrete manufacturers, and anyone else who is looking to improve workflows with suppliers. It provides a dedicated browser-based interface to help suppliers quickly and easily understand what information their team needs to provide for their sales partner. Sellers can then review and approve this new data. The data is then automatically fed directly into the seller’s Akeneo PIM instance, without forcing them to manually re-import or map attributes for each supplier.

Supply Data Manager also offers simplified supplier information acquisition processes by offering a familiar interface to manage suppliers, review, and accept the new products and information that they have provided.

Akeneo clients using Supply Data Manager have reported several business benefits, including better relationships with suppliers and accelerated time-to-market, improved product data accuracy, and consistency, and increased revenue.

 

Unlock Growth with Shared Catalogs and Supply Data Manager

Whether you’re a retailer, distributor, or manufacturer, you need to be able to send and receive information with your business partners easily and efficiently. That’s why Akeneo created Shared Catalogs and Supplier Data Manager.

Akeneo Product Cloud

Shared Catalogs and Supply Data Manager are just the start of what Akeneo has to offer. Start your journey towards better product experiences today.

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Casey Paxton, Content Marketing Manager

Akeneo

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.