After a year that surprised everyone, we here at Akeneo want to take a chance to say “thank you” to our community for sticking with us this year. For the work you did to adjust and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. For your continued effort to create exciting product experiences across a wide range of channels. And, more than anything, thank you for your trust and support through the up and downs of this wild year. So, with that in mind, the Akeneo Family says goodbye to 2020 and hello to 2021 with our new video. Check it out, share with your own family, friends, and colleagues, and enjoy the holiday season! We can’t wait to continue our journey together into the new year!

So, you’ve decided it’s time for your organization to adopt a product information management (PIM) platform. Now, it’s time to make another, perhaps even more important decision — to build or buy. Will you call on your team of developers to build your own PIM, or will you buy a subscription to a PIM platform from one of the many solution providers on the market? While both building and buying a PIM have pros and cons, we believe that for most organizations, there is a definitive answer to this question — namely, buying a purpose-built PIM solution from a software vendor. Why are we so confident in that? Allow us to explain!

Cost

Let’s start with the most obvious perceived advantage that home-grown systems have over their licensed counterparts — the initial cost. If your company already employs software developers or designers, you may be thinking, why not use those resources to create a PIM rather than pay a large upfront cost or an ongoing licensing fee? You may avoid the upfront operational expense of a packaged PIM subscription when you develop your own solution, but you won’t avoid the ongoing maintenance and upkeep that your custom application will require. When running as an on-premises application, you’ll need to factor in the capital cost of hardware acquisition and upkeep, as well as integration, connectivity, and remote access, especially now.  With a purchased, cloud-based PIM, however, the software provider deals with all of the costs associated with maintaining the solution, including, but not limited to enhancements, fixes, upgrades, and more, allowing you to avoid spending money on depreciating assets like hardware, and the expense to support a technology that is on the critical path to getting your products ready for sale.

Resources

Hardware and software costs are not the only resources you need to consider. To build your own PIM will require significant resources. Consider what a software vendor requires to develop a solution: dozens of dedicated software engineers, product and project managers, and technical support resources who work 100% on PIM, and nothing else. These dedicated individuals spend thousands of person-hours and hundreds of thousands of lines of code, or more, to make a PIM solution that can support all your channels, products, and markets. In order for your organization to even begin to realize the benefit from a PIM solution, you’ll have to make a major investment, not just with your money, but with your people, your processes, and your priorities. Or, if you want to run your business in the most efficient manner possible, you could work with a PIM vendor that has already invested all of this, and more, into their solution.

Control

When it comes to building your own solution, one of the biggest benefits is control. When you’re the owner, creator, and manager of a PIM platform, you have complete control over how the software works. You and your team get to decide what features are the most important to include, what UI is best for your team, and how to prioritize updates, fixes, and other decisions that need to be made. But with great power comes great responsibility. Building your own PIM system means that you are responsible for updating that solution, which in turn means making all of the decisions when it comes to adding new features or making changes to the solution. But when you buy, your software vendor will constantly be updating the SaaS PIM solution with an ongoing stream of upgrades and enhancements, doing so at a rate that your IT team simply won’t be able to keep up with. By working with a solution provider, you don’t have to worry about enhancing or maintaining your solution, and instead be able to focus more on using that solution to provide the best product experiences possible.

Features

Most likely, if you’re reading this blog, you’re not a software developer yourself. You’re an artisan working to design beautiful and comfortable furniture, a manufacturer shipping products to retailers around the world, a retailer yourself, or a distributor. If you want your PIM solution to have the latest and greatest capabilities, including tools like embedded workflows, user management features, support for product variants, an integrated way to manage digital assets, data quality insights, and more, you shouldn’t be opting for a homegrown solution. Buying a PIM is the fastest and easiest way to keep pace with advances in the solution needed to keep your business growing. That way, you can focus on selling your products and not worrying about maintaining the tools you use to get them ready to sell. So, rather than spending valuable resources outside of your core competency, leave designing a PIM solution to the experts who concentrate on doing this on a daily basis. That way, you can focus on running your business while your solution provider takes care of running your PIM instance smoothly and securely on a cloud infrastructure.

Speed

We’ll wrap up with one of the biggest benefits of any PIM, bought, built, or otherwise, is the enhanced product creation and enrichment speeds, leading to accelerated time-to-market. This gives your team more selling days while reducing enrichment costs, helping drive revenue skyward. But developing, designing, and perfecting a PIM is a complex, time-consuming endeavor. If you’re wasting time building your own home-brewed solution, your team may never realize these benefits! Buying a packaged solution allows you to get your new PIM up and running almost instantly, allowing you to start experiencing the benefits and tracking the ROI of your investment in PIM.

Build or Buy — what’s right for you?

When you consider all of the factors that go into making the decision to build or buy software — from the time and cost of implementing a new solution to the speed you can implement it in and even the features it offers — it’s clear that buying a PIM system is the right answer for most organizations. Buying a PIM system allows you to focus on creating great experiences for your customers and growing your business without wasting time, money, effort, or any other resources outside of your core competency. But which solution on the market is right for you and your team? If you need help answering that question, check out our guide to the issues to consider when (s)electing a PIM candidate!

B2B business is going digital. According to McKinsey, 90% of B2B organizations have moved to a digitized sales process in 2020 and more than half of them find it as effective or more effective than previous models. The enforced changes to business-as-usual have revealed huge benefits to companies. However, salespeople still see the value of face-to-face interactions, and many customers still prefer the feel of a handshake deal. As we all adapt to the reality that our habits must change for the foreseeable future, salespeople are looking for tools that encourage clients to move online but still retain the feel of the personal relationships they have always valued. The answer lies in digitized sales processes fueled by conversational commerce.

What is a digitized sales process, and why invest in it?

If you are looking for a loose synonym for a digitized sales process outside of the B2B domain, then conversational commerce fits the bill. This term was only coined in 2015 but has already become a fundamental strategy for increasing sales and customer loyalty in eCommerce. It refers to the system of direct communication between a brand or business and its customers. Conversational commerce uses instant digital messages shared on platforms, and incorporates the ability to make purchases online. It is a response to the 2.5 billion people who communicate using messaging apps on mobile phones for general communication and are coming to expect the same kind of easy and quick communication with their favorite brands. In recent years, companies have started to use chatbots to open new sales channels and save significant amounts of money. This trend is growing fast —about 80% of businesses plan to use chatbots for their online businesses by 2020. Around half of shoppers say that they willingly interact with eCommerce chatbots; the next step is then to go beyond chatbots that answer questions and move to a more digitized sales process. In spite of this rapid development, bots will probably never replace human-to-human interactions between the consumer and the brand. They are improving all the time but will likely never be able to build relationships, understand emotions, and answer complex questions about products.

How using a digitized sales process boosts your online sales

New sales channels

It’s not just end-customer relationships that can benefit from conversational commerce. A digitized sales process becomes a whole new revenue stream. McKinsey estimates that it brings 5 times faster revenue growth, 30% higher acquisition efficiency, and a 40-60% reduction in sales costs.

Building relations and trust

Digitizing your sales processes helps you build better relationships with your partners and clients. It also gives clients a better chance to keep connected and stay informed.

Greater conversion, shorter time

A digitized sales process will also increase conversion rates and shortens transaction times. Sales reps can propose and suggest new products and upgrades more subtly as they talk freely with your customers.

Kickstart a digitized sales process in just 24 hours

There is no shortage of benefits to implementing a digitized sales process—but doing so is often easier said than done. The typical obstacles to success include long implementation times, a high cost of eCommerce development, and a common lack of experience with online sales strategies and tools. There is an urgent market demand for a tool that can easily connect customers with consultants in a virtual sales meeting. One that helps increase sales without disrupting existing processes. This demand has become more urgent due to the necessity of remote work; moreover, in a time of restrictive budgets, the solution should also be affordable, user friendly, and implementable in a short period of time so that Sales Representatives can start their online sales immediately. That’s where Meetsales comes in. It’s a cloud-based solution that puts the shopping cart right inside the call, letting sales reps present and compare products, discuss prices, generate offers and orders, and close deals directly in the video interface. It integrates with different PIM systems, including Akeneo PIM, to bring the product catalog to life and facilitate digitized sales processes. Meetsales integrates with the PIM system and draws all product information such as types, numbers, sizes, and colors of products. It also imports data from the CRM and exports data to ERP. The sales rep then receives this data in an application in the sales dashboard. During a meeting, a salesperson can add, edit, or remove specific items from the basket. With Meetsales, there are no document scans, no emails with offer summaries, and no frustrating price negotiations. After the call, the customer gets an overview of the accepted order, and the sales rep receives the same information in a pdf. It is a simple, mostly-automated process that saves time and eliminates the risk of mistakes. The web app is aimed at medium and small businesses that have not yet taken the step to integrate with eCommerce platforms but are already aware of the need for digitization. Meetsales is a perfect fit in such cases because it can be implemented and integrated within 48 hours. As a SaaS solution, the full functionalities are all in the price of the license and there is no need to install software beyond a simple integration with a widget that will help your new leads to get in touch with Sales. This new approach to the B2B sales process will help encourage customers and partners to explore the value of online meetings and have a substantial impact on their choices. It also allows salespeople to take a more active part in a remote buyer’s purchase decision, suggesting alternative options or complementary products to add to the cart. When sales consultants can add value to the online buying process, customer confidence and satisfaction automatically skyrockets. Learn more about digitized sales processes, Divante, and Meetsales at Divante.com

We’d like to invite you to leave a review on G2, and let us know how you feel about Akeneo PIM. In return, you’ll have our (and Ziggy’s) undying gratitude, of course. But that’s not all! For every review made between November 16th and December 31st, Akeneo will make a donation to the Red Cross’s Gift of Giving program. So, if you’re ready to help us spread the gospel off PIM, and make the world a little better at the same time, then follow the link below to leave Akeneo PIM a review on G2.

Leave a review now

You know there’s a problem in your company, one that’s slowing your team down, causing them to make mistakes, and, most importantly, costing your organization revenue. It’s your product information management tools and processes. Fortunately, you also know of the perfect solution — a PIM, or product information management solution. So how do you convince the people in charge to adopt a new tool and new approach? Getting buy-in from company executives is key to making your PXM strategy a success. So, if you’re wondering how to approach each position, read on to discover our tips for on how to sell PIM to your boss.

CMOs and Heads of eCommerce

Marketing and eCommerce executives are typically bastions of brand identity and guardians of growth, asked to push their teams forward to new channels and locales in search of new customers. They know that their success hinges on the quality of the product experience customers are presented with when they shop on any channel and are constantly looking to connect with customers in new and innovative ways. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure they understand just how powerful PIM can be when it comes to crafting a compelling product experience. Explain that your company will be able to enhance its brand identity and growth objectives with an exceptional product experience. This will lead to reduced returns and higher conversion rates.

Product marketers and catalog managers

Speed and accuracy — those are the two biggest priorities for product marketing and catalog managers. These professionals are obsessed with productivity gains and reducing errors. Their goal? To make every process faster, more efficient, and more accurate. So, to convince these managers to invest in a PIM solution, you’ll need to work fast to convince them that your new tool will help you pick up the pace without falling victim to errors or inconsistencies. The good news? PIM may be the perfect combination of speed and precision when it comes to product enrichment. A good PIM solution will simplify the lives of product marketers and catalog managers by automating and accelerating their current processes. Eliminating manual tasks helps cut enrichment time, and accelerates time-to-market — and reduces the incidence of typos, missing data, incomplete data, and other errors commonly found when manually managing product information. What’s more, with all of this manual work taken care of, they’ll be able to focus on more value-added tasks, like creating compelling product experiences. Talk about an easy sell!

IT decision-makers

When it comes to IT managers, they don’t just care whether a job is done — they want it done right. They’re interested in getting the right tools to help marketers do their jobs the right way and ensuring those tools work well in their existing technology infrastructure. What’s more, IT teams typically are dealing with a litany of issues and requests from around your organization, so they want to empower data experts, facilitate data governance, and eliminate gaps from legacy systems in order to ensure your product information processes run as smoothly as possible. So, explain that a PXM solution is specifically designed to play nicely with your existing tech stack. You can also tell them that PIM is a purpose-built tool designed to help control who does what with the product information and sync with other enterprise applications, so they won’t have to worry about who has access to the data. Finally, remind them that a good PIM solution will offer flexible SaaS deployment options and a robust ecosystem of technology and solution partners to help implement, support, and extend the solution.

C-level decision-makers

When it comes to the C-suite, it’s all about the money. Sure, they want to find a solution that can help their teams work more efficiently and reduce manual tasks. But what they really care about is the bottom line — the cost of a solution, whether it will help cut costs, and the impact on revenue the investment in a new solution will deliver. This emphasis on revenue and return on investment may seem daunting, but the bottom line is that PIM truly does help your bottom line. It’s a solution that helps you cut enrichment costs by accelerating time-to-market and reducing your team’s workload while helping you grow revenue by making it easier to expand to new channels and new markets. In fact, Akeneo clients have seen their enrichment costs fall by as much as 80%, conversion rates climb by 400%, and even shopping cart sizes grow by as much as 500%. So, show your executive team how to calculate your PIM ROI and use our helpful list of KPIs to track the performance of your new PIM once you’ve sold your team on its effectiveness.

Sell PIM to your boss

Whether it’s your head of IT, product marketing manager, head of eCommerce, or even your CEO, PIM has something for everybody. The key is to know your audience and make sure you’re telling a story that speaks to what matters most to them. Do they still need further convincing? Tell them they can learn more about the benefits of PXM  achieved by other organizations by checking out some Akeneo customer stories or help them discover more about the sweet science of product experience management with our eBook, PXM for Dummies. 

Don’t worry — we’re not talking about the election. Instead, we’re talking about the process of selecting the right PIM (product information management) solution. But picking a political candidate and picking a PIM solution have more in common than may first meet the eye. In both situations, to choose the candidate that’s right for you, you need to know where they stand on the issues you care about — your use cases. So, how do you find out which PIM candidate is right for you? We’ve polled the team of product experience experts here at Akeneo to find the nine issues you should consider as you evaluate PIM candidates. Take a look at their suggestions, and use this guide to help you make a smart PIM choice!

Issue No. 1: Architecture

Let’s start with the core of any PIM solution — its architecture. A good PIM candidate will be a cloud-first offering that’s built with a modern SaaS architecture. This architecture should be designed to give your team access to the power of PIM without forcing your organization to implement and manage costly on-premises IT infrastructure. That way, you can focus on running your business while your solution provider takes care of running your PIM instance smoothly and securely on a cloud infrastructure. It should also offer a robust, well-documented API. This allows for the quick and easy development of integrations, connectors, and extensions that can simplify connecting to your sales channels and advance the PIM capabilities.

Issue No. 2: Data Collection

A good PIM candidate should make it much easier for your team to manage and enrich product information — a process that starts with collecting and centralizing your data in one place. But this data exists in a wide variety of systems, including internal sources like your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, marketing database, other systems, and external sources such as suppliers, which can make data collection a challenge. That’s why a good PIM candidate will offer a deep roster of capabilities designed to make it easy for you to collect and centralize product information. This includes tools such as connectors, APIs, and import features to collect data from various applications. The best candidates will even provide product content directly from trusted sources, so look for a solution that offers an integrated capability to onboard product data directly from your suppliers.

Issue No. 3: Standardization

Once you’ve centralized your product information in one place, you’ll need to clean and standardize that data to make it easier to consolidate and configure for use in your product catalog. Standardizing product data is necessary because the raw source product data comes from systems with varying file formats, naming schemes, attribute values, and more. The PIM should help your team to accurately map and consolidate your raw data from these different sources. A good PIM candidate should also make it much easier to categorize products, including supporting product variants (i.e., products that vary by color, size, etc.), and organize your product data for the requirements for different channels and languages.  Look for a solution that saves labor and increases efficiency in this area via automation and business rules.

Issue No. 4: Enrichment

Once data is collected and standardized, you need to use that product data to create accurate, compelling product information to deliver exciting, emotionally resonant product experiences. This includes enriching the products’ technical data with usage information and emotional information – content that makes customers feel connected to your brand and confident in making a purchase. What does it take to forge this personal connection with your buyers? Compelling, in-depth product descriptions, digital assets like photos, videos, and documents, related information to help communicate your brand values, and more. A good PIM candidate will shorten your time-to-market, making the enrichment process easier and faster by providing features such as an easy-to-use interface, bulk actions, and mass editing capabilities, validation workflows, and collaboration tools to help streamline your team’s day-to-day work. It will also help you reduce manual enrichment effort via features like automation and business rules, and provide a mechanism to measure product data quality and ensure a high-quality product experience.

Issue No. 5: Localization and Contextualization

If you are selling in multiple regions and on multiple channels, you need to localize and contextualize your product experiences for the requirements of each region and the rules of each channel. Localization is all about adapting product data for specific markets, translating it for different locales, and providing images that are relevant and appropriate — even altering your product assortment to meet the needs of your new customers. Contextualization, meanwhile, means ensuring that the appropriate product data is used for each channel. This includes managing and meeting different product listing requirements for each marketplace, customizing product descriptions or digital assets for various channels, and providing a product experience that’s tailored to the touchpoint your customers are using. A good PIM candidate won’t merely be a container for your product data and assets. Instead, it will help you improve your data quality and product experience by crafting localized and contextualized product descriptions, images, and other data for each channel you sell on and every locale you sell in. It will also measure and improve the data quality that identifies low-quality product information and offers suggestions to enhance your product experience in the process.

Issue No. 6: Distribution

After you have a complete catalog tailored for different markets and channels, this catalog will need to be distributed across your owned channels such as your webshop, print materials, and mobile app, and syndicated to your unowned channels such as marketplaces. So, make sure your preferred PIM candidate can quickly and efficiently deploy your catalog to the desired channels. A good solution will track when your products are complete and ready to sell and offer connectors and export capabilities designed to publish catalogs that work for each channel. It will also offer features designed to ensure your team only exports the right data to each channel by allowing them to filter export data based on selected product attributes, families, categories, and other identifiers. Finally, a good PIM candidate will enable your marketing team to save these export profiles for future usage.

Issue 7: Manageability

When managing information for hundreds, or even thousands, of products, human error will inevitably introduce product data inconsistencies. That’s why it’s crucial that a good PIM candidate helps you catch these errors before you publish with features designed to verify the accuracy of individual contributions to product data, as well as its overall completeness. Your PIM should also help define the minimum level of quality and completeness required for a product to be published to a given channel and locale. A good PIM will also help you manage not only your product data, but also your team’s workload, with capabilities that allow you to more easily identify your team and define your product information management processes. This includes tools that ensure your employees only have access to the product and field values they need, along with features that use validation workflows to improve productivity.

Issue No. 8: Maturity

Implementing a PIM solution and building a top-notch PXM practice is not a one-and-done effort. The needs and goals of your organization, market conditions, customer behaviors, and other factors are continually changing and shifting, meaning that the work of building a top-notch product experience is never truly over. Teams should work collaboratively to track progress over time, so you can adapt and evolve to support your business needs. Your PIM candidate should offer a path to help you with this progress along your product experience journey. This path should light the way to becoming a more mature organization when it comes to managing product information and continuing to create better product experiences. Make sure you find a solution that has a maturity path and plan in place. That way, you and your team can ensure that they’re following that plan closely as they continue to progress along their journey.

Issue 9: Community & Ecosystem

Our final issue focuses not on the PIM solution itself, but on the support system surrounding it. A good PIM candidate will have a strong ecosystem of solution partners to help you implement your PIM easily and efficiently, along with a thriving community of technology partners that are there to ensure you get the most out of your PIM instance, and that it suits the needs of your company. The sign of a healthy ecosystem isn’t just a high quantity of integrators or extensions. Perhaps more importantly, your PIM candidate should also offer a range of high-quality partners and vendors. These partners shouldn’t just be there to sell an additional solution. Instead, they should support you, work transparently to help you achieve your goals, and offer resources such as thought leadership and best practices, a roadmap to success, and a vision for the future.

Choose the right PIM candidate for your needs

Choosing the right PIM candidate isn’t easy, and there are lots of issues to consider when it comes time to make your decision. Each PIM use case and project is unique, so make sure you find a well-suited solution to your organization’s individual needs and objectives. If you have any questions as you travel along your PIM journey, feel free to reach out to our team of product information and product experience experts. They’re here to answer and product information query and conquer any challenge that stands in your way.

Here at Akeneo, we’re obsessed with helping distributors, manufacturers, merchants, and brands create compelling product experiences using top-notch product information management (PIM) solutions. That’s why we employ an elite entourage of product experience experts in the form of our team of functional and technical consultants. These dedicated professionals spend their days helping Akeneo customers on nearly every continent implement their PIM solution and build best-in-class PXM practices. Now, in our effort to help spread the gospel of Product Experience Management (or PXM), we’re bringing insights from this team of experts to the public. We’ve tapped into their years of experience building great experiences and have come out with four of their most crucial keys to PXM success. So what do the experts have to say?

Understand where you’re starting from

According to our team of experts, the biggest thing to get right when it comes to getting your PXM practice off the ground is understanding the current state of your product data. That includes the existing problems with your product data and your product information management processes, along with the goals for the project. As you begin to think about your PIM solution and your new PXM practice, make sure you have a clear understanding of the leading business objectives you need to accomplish and the KPIs you’ll use to measure the impact of your new solution.  You should also consider your project’s scope, including what processes will be affected by PIM. This is an essential step to set expectations and define how you’ll measure success. With your objectives and scope clearly understood, you can structure your PXM practice to support your commerce strategy.

Get everyone on board

A critical component to understanding the scope of your new PXM practice is understanding the human resources you will need to make the project a success. Constructing a top-notch team is a vital part of building a good PXM practice. So, be sure you spend time considering the key players on your PIM team early in the process of setting up your PXM practice. These individuals should have a comprehensive knowledge of your products, data governance processes, desired catalog structure, current channels, and locales, along with the goals and objectives we discussed above. Your PIM team should also include those responsible for impacted systems, such as your ERP, eCommerce store, or DAM. Remember that PIM is a business application designed to serve your teams, not the other way around, so be sure to spend time identifying the parts of your organization that could benefit the most from it.

Stay agnostic

That last point is an important one. Your PXM practice should fit snugly into your organization and serve to make your team’s lives easier and help them unlock new levels of growth — and that is also true of the technology that PIM works with and supports. That’s why it’s crucial to analyze your functional needs and structure your product catalog and make sure the PIM solution you choose is well suited to those needs. That’s not to say that a good PXM practice isn’t always looking for ways to make your existing product enrichment ecosystem and processes better, of course. Ultimately, however, your PIM should be agnostic and able to work with a wide range of different data management solutions, including your ERP, PLM, and more. It’s important to remember that the PIM is designed to fill a gap that your other systems cannot fulfill; it must stand on its own two feet without being constricted by other applications.

Your PIM is only as good as your data 

Last but not least, remember that it’s all about the data. A new tool may dazzle your customers with how it presents your products. But without putting an effective data governance policy in place, your customers will still see the same inaccurate or missing information that could impact their purchase decision. What does that mean for you and your team? It means that they must set your project up for success before you implement a new solution by ensuring that data is cleaned, standardized, and ready for public consumption. This can be time-consuming, but it’s ultimately the entire purpose of a PIM and is what drives ROI for the system. Then, once your PIM is live, they’ll need to work toward instituting straightforward and easy to follow data governance policies, a vital part of data standardization. They’ll also need to progressively work toward improving product data by assigning your product team small side projects around certain attributes or parts of your product catalog. Ready to learn more about the sweet science of PXM? Download our eBook, PXM for Dummies, or discover the six ways Akeneo PIM delivers unbeatable ROI.

PXM Maturity Assessment

How mature is your organization? How can you take it to the next level?

Take the assessment! Take the assessment! Take the assessment!

But these are no ordinary tales of ghosts, ghouls, or things that go bump in the night. No, Ziggy’s haunted Halloween tales are much more frightening than that. Her scary stories feature perhaps the most horrifying villains of them all — bad product information and the terrifying (and terrible) product experiences they create! So if you’re brave enough, get ready to be terrified by these three true tales of scary product experiences from Ziggy the Hydra.

The Curse of Incomplete Product Information

Once upon a time, at a company quite like yours, there was a marketer named Julia with a bright idea. “I know what we can do to find new customers and sell more products,” she said during a meeting one dark and stormy Friday afternoon. “Let’s try out some new sales channels — how about Amazon?” The idea was a hit, so the small but eager team of product marketers got to work preparing to syndicate product data to their new sales channel. But this was no ordinary Friday afternoon — it was Friday the 13th! And so, unbeknownst to the poor product team, a curse took hold, one that foredoomed the employees, forcing them to toil for hours upon hours without a solution to help them manage and enrich product information. The result? These poor souls were eventually forced to use spreadsheets and other outdated or ill-suited solutions to manage product information, solutions that did not help contextualize product information, and left details out of product descriptions and data. At first, it seemed to be a minor setback — after all, what’s a little incomplete product information? Surely some information is better than none. But soon, the impact of the curse was clear. Conversions on their new channel failed to appear as confusion about the company’s products caused customers to abandon carts and flee to the safe haven of another merchant. The expansion project was doomed — and all because of the curse of incomplete product information.

The Werewolf of Wrong Product Data

Sometimes, things aren’t quite what they appear to be. That’s the case for the subject of our next scary story, Wally. On the surface, Wally appeared to be a pretty normal guy — by day, he managed product information for an appliance manufacturer. By night, he enjoyed a good book, classical music, and a glass of wine. But on certain nights, when the moon was full, and the conditions were just right, Wally would transform from a lovable, quiet man into a hairy, bloodthirsty werewolf. But Wally wasn’t the only thing that changed. When he mutated into a werewolf, the product information he managed would transform as well, breaking out of its spreadsheet prison, crawling all over his employer’s website, and filling it with incorrect product information. Now, when customers would search to find specific products — like top-loading washing machines — their search results would be filled with errors, including incorrect images and faulty product descriptions as the scourge of incorrect information wreaked havoc on the company’s product experience. Then, one full-moon-lit evening, something changed forever. When the moon finally fell, and the sun rose, Wally typically transformed from a werewolf back to his minor-mannered self. However, on this evening, Wally stayed frozen in his feral form —  and so did his product information. This forced customers to wander around looking for the products they need and sealed the fate of his company, as those customers walked away to another manufacturer that had a more organized (and less wolf-like) product information management process. The Missing Data Monster

While werewolves and curses are certainly chilling thoughts, there’s one product experience beast so truly terrifying that most merchants, manufacturers, and other businesses shudder at the mere thought. Who is this horrible beast? It’s the Missing Data Monster. The Missing Data Monster can pop up anywhere — anywhere that a product team lacks a dedicated solution for managing and enriching product information. He feeds on these overworked employees yet manages to leave their customers wanting more — more product information, that is. That’s because wherever the Missing Data Monster goes, he leaves a path of destruction in his wake, wiping out product information from sales channels and locales near and far. By the time he’s done, customers have lost faith in the businesses that have been attacked by the Missing Data Monster and find another option, lest they become the Monster’s latest victim.

Akeneo PIM — the bad product information slayer

By now, you’re probably shaking in your product information boots and wondering why Ziggy felt the need to scare you so much. But there is some good news. There’s an easy way to avoid falling victim to the Curse of Incomplete Product Information, The Werewolf of Wrong Product Data, or the Missing Data Monster — by implementing Akeneo PIM.  It’s got all the capabilities you need to stop these villains in their tracks, from features to help put your information in the proper format and context for marketplaces like Amazon and other channels to tools that can help you ensure only correct and consistent data reaches your customers, even governance and validation mechanisms to make sure you’ve got no missing product data haunting your product experience. So, if you’re ready to face these product information challenges and villains head-on, get in touch with our team of product experience experts. They’ll make sure you have all the weapons you need to avoid becoming the star in our next edition of scary product experiences.

We’ve been promoting the concept of PXM for more than two years now, and we see rapidly increasing interest in the subject. C-level marketing and commerce executives tell us that PXM sounds incredibly promising as an approach to unlocking growth through better product experiences. But they also come to us with a common question — where should we start? And how do we measure our success? As with any strategic decision or investment, it’s essential to know whether you are making progress. “What gets measured, gets managed,” as the old saying goes. In this article, we’ll discuss the PXM KPIs you should be tracking so you can evaluate your success and identify where to make adjustments along the journey.

Conversion rate

Because the objective is to unlock growth, the most obvious KPI is revenue. But this can be driven by many factors: raising prices, opening stores, adding sales channels, expanding catalogs and assortments, entering new markets, and more. With better quality product data, complete product listings, and other enhancements, the product experience should be significantly better. This improved experience should drive more conversions, so conversion rate is the right KPI to track — that way, you don’t muddy the waters by including revenue from new items, new markets, broader market reach, and other tactics. Of course, PIM and PXM ensure a great experience from the start and certainly make it easier to expand and adapt catalog catalogs, sell cross-border, and more. But to see the results of a PXM investment, you need to start from something you know, such as sales conversion rate on your eCommerce site, and measure the increase as time goes on. If you’re operating in a multichannel environment, it’s also important to consider each channel’s conversion rates and track how they improve. These might vary from channel to channel for a variety of reasons, so if you’re struggling with varying levels of quality product information on each channel, measure your progress on each one. That way, you can make decisions about where to invest for the best return.

Rate of product returns

By initiating a PXM practice, you get better product data, which means you convert more shoppers to customers. Increasing the number of customers buying from your site, however, can also cause your product return rate to rise. Some of this return volume can be chalked up to buyer behavior, but according to many analysts, nearly two-thirds of returns result from retailers’ mistakes. These mistakes include low-quality, incomplete, or inaccurate product information or assets, which leave shoppers with the wrong impression or idea of what they purchased. So, look at your current return rate overall, and if you track return reason, be sure to pay close attention to what percentage of purchases are returned because of bad product data. If your PXM practice is a success, you should see both the total number of returns and the number of returns made due to incorrect or incomplete product information plummet.

Time-to-market

Constantly changing new trends and shifting customer demand means your product catalog and assortment are never finished. Instead, your catalog is always changing to accommodate unique and emerging needs and desires from your customers. That means you need to be able to pivot and update your catalog quickly, without allowing errors in product information to reach your customers. Time is money, and your PIM should be helping you make more money by accelerating your time-to-market and giving your products more selling days. Two crucial KPIs to track the efficiency and effectiveness of your PXM initiative are the time it takes your teams to add new products to your catalog and how often you can update or adapt product information.

Enrichment costs

A good PXM practice should also reduce the cost of getting products ready for sale. This is a time-consuming and expensive process, especially if you’re using an outdated or poorly-suited tool to collect, manage, enrich, govern, and distribute this data. With the right PIM solution in your PXM practice, it should become much easier and far less expensive to enrich and manage product information. Track your enrichment costs as a PIM KPI as you look to measure the impact PIM is having on your organization. Your enrichment costs should fall sharply as PIM helps you eliminate inefficiencies and decreases your team’s manual workload.

Using PXM KPIs to measure success

These are just a few of the critical KPIs you should use to measure the benefit of your PXM practice. You can choose to get even more granular in some of these areas depending on your business. But start with these, begin your PIM implementation, and use the results to calculate your ROI.

Managing product data and using it to build compelling product experiences is a must-have skill if you want to succeed in the modern era. But managing product information and creating these top-notch experiences is often easier said than done. That’s why Akeneo came together with our partner Vaimo to create a Product Data Crash Course designed to help your team to overcome product data challenges and unlock growth. The course is based on a survey of 100 companies conducted by Vaimo, which identified three main obstacles that inhibit growth, which can be addressed with Akeneo PIM. The secrets of this Product Data Crash Course were revealed in a three-part webinar series conducted by Akeneo and Vaimo. Miss the live webinars? No problem! We’ve compiled a few of the best tips and tricks in this blog, so read on to learn how to make your PIM project a success, and get the rest of our insights by watching the replays for yourself!

Boosting sales with perfect product data

The first in our three-part series focused on a goal that most merchants likely have on their own to-do list — boosting omnichannel conversion rates and sales revenue. So how can you use product data to help send your conversion rates sky-high? Simple, it’s all about the 4 C’s of product data and sales conversions:

• Consolidation: Back to basics on how consolidated data can increase sales when using several vendors
• Communication: Teaching your teams to focus on building a better product experience for the purpose of increasing sales
• Comparison: The good, the bad, and the ugly sites
• Competition: Can you compete with the products on your site?

Want more information on the 4C’s? No problem. Just watch Episode 1 on the Product Data Crash Course webinar series!

Solving supplier struggles

In the last year, enterprises have seen first-hand just how important supplier relations can be to their business. Despite its importance, however, Akeneo research reveals that many merchants struggle to collect and manage product data from their suppliers. Gathering supplier data and onboarding new suppliers can be a long and complicated process filled with risks of human error which in turn will lower your conversion rate. But with a little help from your friends Akeneo and Vaimo, you can easily navigate around any obstacle you face. All you need to do is use your PIM instance to efficiently onboard new suppliers or data, ensure quality control, and eliminate human error, allowing you to become more agile in response to recent trends or current events. If you need more help solving your supplier struggles, we have just the thing — check out Episode 2 on the Product Data Crash Course to spruce up your supplier smarts!

Inspiring customers with an enhanced product experience

Customers can be a tough nut to crack — mostly because their expectations are constantly increasing. Whether it’s a demand for personalisation, customised product recommendations or content in their native language, it is key to get the product experience just right. It’s no longer enough to deliver what’s expected but instead, you have to inspire and impress your consumers with features they didn’t even know they wanted. That’s where Akeneo PIM comes in — it’s designed to help you improve product data quality and give your customers an experience they can get excited about. Need an additional boost to help create an emotional connection with your customers? We’ve got you covered. Watch Episode 3 on the Product Data Crash Course webinar series on-demand, anytime, anywhere to discover the secret formula for calculating catalog volume! Learn from Akeneo success stories by checking out some customer stories, or learn more about the sweet science of Product Experience with our eBook, PXM for Dummies!