But increasingly, it takes more than just an attractive product that keeps up with the latest movements in the marketplace to find fashion fame and fortune. More so than any in other industry, fashion brands and retailers must provide customers with compelling experiences if they want to make the grade. In an increasingly complex and competitive industry, that means your company is dealing with large volumes of product information. Dozens of dresses, a ton of trousers, an assortment of accessories, and oh so many shoes add up to hundreds of thousands of SKUs, each with hundreds of attributes and variants, from images to colors to sizes. It’s enough to make your head spin — that’s where product information management (PIM) comes in.

PIM is always in style because it helps brands and retailers organize product information, develop perfect catalogs and deliver fashionable experiences.

How can a PIM solution like Akeneo help you successfully manage ever-changing fashion catalogs and product assortments? Akeneo PIM can help you cost-effectively grow by providing your marketing team with an easy-to-use solution to collect, standardize, enrich, contextualize, and distribute product information.

Create a central catalog for all your channels

Fashion brands and retailers have huge volumes of product information and data at their disposal. Akeneo PIM was born to handle this situation. Our first customer was a luxury fashion brand that needed help providing customers with consistent product information across a range of channels while reducing time-to-market. PIM helps fashion companies by providing all of the teams inside your organization with a single source of product information truth that can be put into context for all channels and all locales. This ensures that your customers will constantly be given consistent product information across a wide range of shopping channels. In addition to being consistent, product information must also be compelling and create an emotional connection with your buyers. This emotional connection helps encourage sales, helps you build a relationship with the customer, and fosters impulsive and repeat purchases. Why is this important? If consumers don’t connect emotionally with your products, they’ll quickly abandon the purchase. This is especially true when it comes to high-priced fashion items — brands and retailers need to present compelling, consistent, and accurate content to convince customers to make a purchase.

Use PIM to efficiently create a single source of truth for all your product data and information to boost your omnichannel marketing efforts.

Pick up the pace

In the fashion industry, speed is everything. Consumer tastes are constantly changing — the “in” and “out” styles seem to change as often as the weather, and trends rarely last for more than a single season. Of course, fashion companies must also change stock frequently as new seasonal collections hit their shelves, — making time-to-market a key factor for success. As a result, fashion brands and retailers require product information solutions that allow them to change product data or add new SKUs at the drop of a hat. But if product information is trapped inside spreadsheets or stuck in silos, adding new SKUs can be a laborious, time-consuming process. Akeneo PIM speeds the product information management and new product introduction process so you can get your products to market faster — across all channels and regions. Plus, with Akeneo’s PIM Accelerator for Fashion, you can get a head start on your PIM project, reducing time to market even further and pushing up your go-live date.

Lengthy product creation processes and slow time-to-market can be cut up to 300% using Akeneo PIM.

Use variants to become victorious

Winter and summer collections, changing trends and styles, and a host of other factors mean that your fashion brand or retailer is dealing with a huge number of products. But those aren’t the only factors pushing the total SKU count skyward. Your team also must deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of products that vary just slightly — the same cardigan in a different color with several sizing options. Because these products are all based on the same base product model, much of the information they require — like product names, styles, care instructions, and price — does not change. But even with all of these similarities, variant products can be a nightmare for those in charge of product information. The best way to efficiently manage these products is with a capable PIM that handles products and their variants. Akeneo PIM allows you to define a product model and variants that inherit common attributes but allow you to handle different sizes, colors, etc. at the SKU level. Akeneo PIM gives you control over how products are grouped and linked, allowing users to copy shared information from SKU to SKU, eliminating errors and saving hours of tedious busywork for product managers.

Variants can cause major headaches for product managers if your solution doesn’t allow them to group and link common information.

Localize and contextualize

Once you’ve created a single source of truth, it’s time to raise the bar on product information. The world is constantly getting smaller, and today’s consumers expect to be able to do business in their native tongue. If they reach your website and are unable to view product information in a language they can read and understand fluently, or greeted with images that aren’t relevant to their experience, they’ll go somewhere else to make the purchase. Sizes must also be updated to correspond with those of a given region or country. Even the products your company sells often vary from country to country based on differences in climate or culture. As a result, your product information needs to be localized to match the intricacies of different regions and markets, from languages to currencies and from photos to product selection. Your product information also must be presented in the proper context for the channel a shopper is using. After all, a website designed for desktop users won’t do much to motivate mobile shoppers to hand over their hard-earned money. Akeneo PIM offers over 200 pre-defined locales (you can make more if you need to) and allows users to combine regional and language data to provide customers with an experience that’s personalized for their location. What’s more, the PIM helps ensure all that information is presented in the proper context for the channel shoppers are browsing on.

Properly contextualizing and localizing product content can increase sales conversion rates as much as 400%.

Distribute data anywhere, anytime

Once disparate sources of product information have been combined to create a single source of truth, your team needs to send that data across their channels. Akeneo PIM allows you to spread enriched, complete product information to all channels and all users with the snap of a finger. The solution provides connectors capable of hooking into virtually any platform, including eCommerce, web, mobile, POS, and print, allowing users to efficiently store product information across a wide range of channels. This allows Akeneo to serve as product information central for your organization, giving control over the management and enrichment of data only to those who need it, making those teams more productive and efficient. That way, customers are presented with consistent, compelling information, no matter what product they’re viewing or what channel they’re shopping on.

Making data collection and distribution a simpler, easier process for your employees can pay real dividends, marketers 50% more productive.

Upgrade your PIM for style success! Contact Akeneo to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or find out how to beat the competition by reading our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands.

According to research recently published by Accenture, more than 900 million consumers — or 45 percent of all online shoppers — will purchase products internationally on the web by 2020.  But selling your products to buyers outside your country is a major undertaking — it requires careful planning and a well-thought-out strategy to deliver a product experience in context for each of these new markets. How do you prepare your product catalog for cross-border commerce? Of course, you’ll need high-quality translation and localization services to ensure your products are customized to each regional market. You’ll also need images that are appropriate for what buyers expect in their country, ensuring that assets conform to local norms and customs while providing an emotional connection with buyers in those markets, too. The most important piece, however, is ensuring that your team can manage your product information and put it into the context necessary to be successful in those locales.

Cross-border commerce is a massive opportunity for growth in B2C and B2B.

Akeneo PIM is an enabling technology that can help your marketing teams put product information into context to reach more markets through cross-border commerce. Akeneo PIM centralizes all technical, usage, and emotional information for your product listings and catalogs while also improving workflows and scalability, acting as the central product information hub suitable for use by both brands and retailers. A PIM acts as a single source of truth for all product data, allowing information to be efficiently translated, localized and put into context for each location and sales channel once complete. Here are four ways PIM can help your growing business reach new markets:

1. Take the pain out of translation

When it comes to expanding to new markets, acing the translation process is crucial to success. Cross-border customers expect to be able to do business in their native language, no matter where the company they’re buying from is based. To enable this, Akeneo integrates with popular translation agencies and tools like Translations.com and Textmaster to help brands and retailers manage 3rd party translations within the PIM. The PIM also automatically tracks items and fields that still need to be translated, ensuring no incomplete records are published. That way, you can be positive that your products will resonate with an international audience.

2. When in Rome…

Content must also be localized so that the information is not only presented in the proper language, but also the correct vernacular and context for a given area. Spelling “color” as “colour” in the United States, for example, could confuse customers. Images and other multimedia assets must be adapted to remain relevant and appropriate for buyers in these new locales. What’s more, brands and retailers must also convert product data, such as clothing sizes or product measurements, to units that buyers in these markets understand — displaying product information in a language or unit they don’t understand is a surefire way to lose a customer. Akeneo allows companies to more simply and efficiently localize product data for international markets. For example, marketers can perform bulk actions to set US shoe sizes in US channels and European sizes in European locales and channels. Putting your product data in proper context will make sure that product information will make sense for those customers.

3. Simplify processes

Before you can translate and localize product information, however, you need to know exactly what information needs to be localized. In the modern age, time-to-market is vital, and time spent localizing information that doesn’t need to be updated can lead to delays. To help simplify this process, Akeneo ensures that both internal and external translation and localization teams see and edit only the information that needs to be adapted. These automated and simplified processes are crucial for success, so workflows to support them should be in place to ensure your cross-border sales efforts reach their true potential. Akeneo helps your workflow go global by allowing teams to collaborate using customized workflows that serve each specific product category and region. Every team member can see their next task within the PIM, eliminating the need for additional task management overhead. The PIM also reports on the progress and completeness of each item to ensure high-quality product information is ready to be published.

4. Feed the right information to the right locale

Once you’ve adapted and updated product information, it’s time for the task of feeding all localized product information to each locale your business sells in. With Akeneo’s export profiles, the final, localized product information can be easily distributed to the appropriate eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, print catalogs, and other channels and storefronts via a variety of connectors available on the Akeneo marketplace. With the ability to export the right information for the right locale and right channel, your localized product information streamlines the product information management process to more efficiently meet the needs of cross-border commerce. This will give your business better time-to-market and opportunities to pursue sales growth to customers around the world. Ready to grow? Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or read our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands.

Once you have set up your PIM, onboarded, and enriched your data, it’s time to push your product catalog to market. It may sound simple, but these last few steps are arguably the most important part of your PIM journey. Having complete and accurate product information is crucial to making the sale — but achieving this is often easier said than done. And even so, it’s not quite enough.  Verifying the accuracy and completeness of product information before spreading it to all channels is a requirement for providing the right information to the right channel and deliver the omnichannel product experiences customers crave. Modern PIM solutions make this happen. Here are the PIM best practices that will help you get your products to market faster and ensure they look good across every channel.

PIM Best Practice #8: Implement Validation Processes

When managing information for hundreds, or even thousands, of products, it’s inevitable that human error will introduce inconsistencies into product descriptions. When listing the dimensions of a picture frame, for example, a user can easily transpose two numbers. When localizing for the United Kingdom, it’s possible to leave the letter “u” out of “color.” Even a simple typo can create a disaster: just a single character separates “Ugg Boots” from “Ugh Boots.” Errors are unavoidable; what matters is catching them before you publish. Benchmark research conducted by Ventana Research found that only 16% of organizations trusted their product information processes, while better data quality was the top issue motivating improvement in product information for 66% of organizations. A study by Shotfarm, meanwhile, found that  87% of consumers said they’d be unlikely to consider a retailer again if they received incorrect product information. Product information errors decrease customer confidence in the brand while also decreasing sales and increasing returns. A PIM solution offers easy-to-use features for verifying the accuracy of individual contributions to product data, as well as the overall completeness of that data. You can define the minimum level of quality and completeness required for a product to be published to a given channel and locale. The PIM can also track workflow and processes to ensure smooth operation in managing and creating better product data quality. This simplifies the answers to common questions like:

• How do you know when the product information is complete?
• Who decides if it is correct?
• What’s the next step and who should take it?

PIM Best Practice #9: Customize Product Information and Distribute it to your Sales Channels

Different sales channels have different requirements for product information. To list a product on Amazon, for example, you need to provide a different set of data than when you’re listing on Wayfair. There are many contextual variables across channels, from the character count of the product description to mandatory details about the size and materials of the product and even the dimensions and format of the media files.  It’s a headache to keep track of, but essential if you want your products to look as enticing as possible when customers click.

When posting products on different sales channels, the number of variables can seem endless.

Export profiles

A key objective for merchandising is ensuring that your products look great across every channel. For example, in Akeneo PIM you can create an export profile within the PIM. This export profile lets marketers export only the data they need, and route it to the desired channel and locale. Marketers can filter export data based on several products and select attributes, families, categories, and identifiers. Export profiles can be saved for later use, or modified and saved for a different use, so you can export more products as time goes on. These PIM tools work together to save time, reduce errors, and save your team from a ton of aggravating and boring work.

PIM Best Practice #10: Collaborate, Track Progress and Evolve

The goal of PIM is to help organizations better manage and distribute product information and create a product experience that ultimately results in increased sales. While these tasks may seem somewhat exclusive to the product or marketing teams, the reality is that using PIM should be an organization-wide collaborative process. Ideally, you have configured your PIM to reflect your organization and how it works. To ensure it evolves with your company and is delivering business value, make sure you track the implementation and success of your PIM project across our organization. What’s more, your product catalog and sales channels are likely to change over time, andyour PIM processes need to support your business growth should change with them. Here are the typical PIM benefits that you should see in your organization over time:

• Increase in product information quality and completeness
• More efficient product onboarding and ongoing management
• Create more product collections or assortments more quickly for promotional events and seasonal sales
• Reduce your time to market
• More easily launch new locales with market-appropriate product information
• Increase your team productivity with task automation and streamlined workflows

Get Your Products to Market and Increase Sales with PIM

PIM is the solution to help centralize product information, streamline enrichment and spread contextualized data to your various channels to improve sales within your organization. It helps brands and retailers create the customized omnichannel experiences that customers now expect. Stop using outdated tools to manage product data and revolutionize how you handle product information with PIM. Ready to see what PIM could do for you? Sign up for a demo. Want to learn more about the basics of PIM? Download our eBook Product Information Management 101. Need to start at the beginning? Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our Best Practices series, or download our eBook Product Information Management 101.

Once you’ve determined your PIM project objectives and scope, identified and trained your PIM team and stakeholders, and defined your catalog structure, your next mission is to collect, standardize, and enrich your product information. Then, you must put your product information in context to deliver a compelling product experience that will be distributed to all channels. These next best practices will ensure you’re as efficient as possible in these steps. Akeneo PIM’s array of automated features allows your team to skip the tedious busy work of copying and pasting information and performing manual product data validation. That way, they can focus on the creative work of writing compelling product descriptions — this, after all, is the heart of marketing, and why you hired your team in the first place.

PIM Best Practice #5: Identify Sources and Collect Product Data

In order to make your PIM work best for your organization, you will need your management workflow to onboard product information from the right sources. Selecting the right sources will remove many of the tedious copying and pasting tasks required when working within spreadsheets. To effectively determine your best sources, consider the following:

• What are your most trusted sources?
• What is going to be the source of each part of your product data?
• What sources have the best data for certain attributes?
• What are the different formats?
• Can I allow suppliers to provide product data?

PIM Best Practice #6: Automate Catalog Management With Business Rules and Bulk Actions

One of the main benefits of PIM is the variety of automation features your team can utilize to remove tedious and repetitive work, allowing them to focus on creating compelling descriptions.

Standardize and enrich data through business rules

One example of PIM automation is the use of a business rules engine to automatically populate attribute values that apply across many products and product models. This can lead to much higher quality data by removing human error, as well as expediting the enrichment process. Using business rules can automate actions such as:

• automatically categorizing new products based on family
• copying the value from one attribute to another
• setting a default value to an empty field
• setting a text attribute to another text attribute
• assigning families to new products

Managing product data in bulk

Another example of PIM automation is the use of bulk actions to perform actions on many products at once. Bulk actions make it easy to complete a variety of tasks, such as editing and adding attribute values, changing families, adding products and product models to groups, adding categories and moving products to different categories, changing the parent of a product, and adding associations to a selection of products. The ability to mass add associations to a selection of products makes it easy to create product collections by allowing you to group together all products that match your selected criteria. Rather than handpicking items from your Excel tabs and risk forgetting an item or introducing errors when publishing, brands and retailers should automate the process of creating collections with a PIM. Let’s say your research shows that German men are favoring brown bomber jackets this season. Simply create a custom collection with the words “brown”, “bomber jacket”, and “men”, and all matching products will be grouped together. What’s more, as team members import new products, they’ll automatically be added to the list if they meet existing criteria. Similarly, you can create associations of other related products to create cross-sell opportunities – for example, associating matching brown leather gloves to bomber jackets.

PIM Best Practice #7: Put Product Data in Context

The core of your marketing team’s time should be spent creating rich and emotionally compelling product descriptions and media. These details and images serve to create emotion, give your brand a distinctive voice, and encourage sales, so it’s crucial to make sure your team’s focus and incentives are aligned with this goal. Enrichment is a core component of the PIM process. It’s important to keep the enrichment process focused on creating emotion in customers and ensure you deliver a compelling product experience.

Enrich and localize by region and for each channel

PIM can help support your organization’s expansion efforts with features designed to improve the translation and localization processes. This ensures that your product descriptions are translated correctly and have each of the proper elements that put product information in context for specific locales and the channels customers use to buy. In addition to translation, you may need to localize size charts (US vs. the UK vs. European sizes), media imagery (just the product, or showing the product in use), spelling (color versus colour), and display specific attributes in catalogs for local compliance, among other tasks.

PIM includes features that allow teams to specify which product fields need to be localized or translated, while all other product attributes are automatically carried over.

Using a PIM to ensure your catalog presents your product information in context allows your team to:

• Simplify and focus: Use automation and rules so your merchandising teams can spend time on the value-added activity of creating emotion in buyers about your products.
• Organize your workflow: PIM can help distributed teams work together to increase the speed of translation and localization and get your products to market faster.
• Help increase sales and decrease returns: By ensuring that all product information is market-appropriate, regardless of location, you can easily increase sales and decrease returns.

Improve Data Management with Streamlined Processes Using PIM

A PIM solution is critical to increasing sales and reducing returns – but it’s only as good as the information put into it. By setting up your PIM correctly, you can streamline enrichment processes and get your products to market faster. The days of managing product information in spreadsheets are over — brands and retailers should take advantage of modern features to help take their eCommerce organization to the next level. Ready to see what PIM could do for you? Sign up for a demo. Or want to get started with PIM? Check out Part 1 and Part 3 of our Best Practices series, or download our eBook Product Information Management 101.

Brands and retailers must deliver a compelling story across all digital touchpoints during the purchasing journey.

That all sounds well and good – but how do you actually do that? How can brands and retailers manage product experiences and provide compelling content in the proper context? And where does product information management (PIM) fit into this picture?

What is Product Experience Management (PXM)?

Product Experience Management is a new profession. It’s the subtle science of delivering product information in context, adapted and scoped by channel and locale to match the buying experience at every touchpoint. Having the right data and insight into the type of product experience buyers expect is the foundation for any great customer experience.

According to Forrester, 85% of customers rate product information as the top feature they want from a website.

What Happened to PIM?

PIM is here to stay. It provides the foundation needed to control your product information and is a cornerstone of eCommerce and omnichannel operations. PIM remains a critical component and enabler of the practice of PXM, focusing on the content portion of the product experience.

Why is Product Experience Management So Important?

Product experience management is how you make an emotional connection with your buyers. It’s the next stage beyond goods and services in the progression of economic value. PIM is the “what” you use to describe your commodities, goods, and services, while PXM is “how” you stage an experience. Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy, does a fantastic job of describing this progression:

It’s All About Products

As an eCommerce organization your focus is always on the products you sell:

• How to sell more
• How to deliver a great product experience
• How to expand your catalog with new products
• How to take advantage of the latest technologies

A top priority for all eCommerce organizations is to ensure that product information is accurate, complete, and compelling to make an emotional connection with buyers. This sounds good in theory, but collecting, managing, and enriching product information is an ongoing challenge for many organizations. Ensuring completeness for your entire product line is difficult, and if you’re still managing this data in spreadsheets it’s nearly impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Product information management (PIM) is the solution you need to improve the management of your product data and achieve your other business goals.

We’ll let you in on a little secret – if you make implementing and efficiently using a PIM solution your top resolution for the year you’ll more easily accomplish many of your other commerce goals.

Resolution #1: Take Product Information to the Next Level

Always Deliver Accurate and Complete Product Data

Improving the quality of product data may not be a new goal for your brand, but it’s always an ongoing effort. By implementing a PIM solution your team can have more high-quality and comprehensive data included in product descriptions across every channel. With better information, customers will be more likely to buy your products, and less likely to return them since they know what they are receiving. Besides basic data, PIM can also help you provide contextual data based on specific channels.

According to a study by Shotfarm: 78% of consumers said the quality of product information is very important when making purchasing decisions. 87% said they would be unlikely to make purchases again if they receive incorrect product information.

Resolution #2: Provide Customers with the Omnichannel Experience They Deserve

Contextualize Product Information

To stay competitive, you must be where your customers are with relevant product information. As product data goes, there is no one size fits all. This is a challenge for many brands as every new channel and platform has unique product data requirements. Use a PIM to provide contextual product data across all customer touchpoints. PIM gives your team the tools you need to enrich and export the required data and optimized product information for every channel and every platform to succeed in your omnichannel initiatives.

Ensure your product information is delivered in context on every platform and every channel – no matter where your customers are.

Resolution #3: Expand Product Lines and Target Markets

Grow Your Product Catalog

With a PIM, your team can be more efficient in onboarding new products and spend less time managing current ones. Easy-to-use tools quickly organize products into families and automatically populates shared attributes and descriptions. Bulk editing allows marketers and catalog managers to mass enrich or edit products and utilize business rule-driven automation to assign values to products, groups, and categories.

Expand into New Markets

With all other aspects of product enrichment optimized, you can spend more time growing and expanding your business. PIM smooths out the complicated and manual aspect of translating and localizing product information for new regions. Automated workflows help move remote teams seamlessly through the entire enrichment process. Teams can even connect the translation tools of their choice and easily review and approve localized information without ever having to leave the platform.

Resolution #4: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Remove Tedious Work and Automate Processes

Your product marketing team’s mission is to create compelling and exciting product descriptions to entice buyers. However, too often, product and marketing teams spend most of their time copying and pasting information between spreadsheets and various applications. A PIM can remove this tedious, manual, error-prone, and repetitive work, by automating many of the repetitive tasks that take up so much of your team’s time. Let your PIM streamline your product data management and enrichment with bulk edit actions, completeness checks, automated import of data, and workflows that guide team members through their assigned tasks.

PIM helps you speed up the time to market by 3X to 4X.

Resolution #5: Innovate More

Take Advantage of the Latest Technologies

Comprehensive product data doesn’t just impact the point-of-sale. With new digital technologies becoming mainstream, you need to organize your product information in a way that can support the latest shopping methods such as chatbots and vocal assistants. You also need to be able to prepare and create the customized experiences that consumers now expect. These strategies and solutions require structured data. PIM centralizes and organizes data, so it is both available for these new technologies and vastly simplifies the process of deploying new sales tools and marketing initiatives.

Support Your New Year’s Resolutions with PIM

PIM is your most valuable asset to support your omnichannel commerce goals and deliver a 21^st-century customer experience. With the right solution in place, you can improve your existing operations, easily expand your activities, and prepare for the technologies of the future. Ready to start 2019 off on the right foot? Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or read our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands.

Efficiently managing product information is crucial for any organization that sells products. For years, spreadsheets have been the default data management tool, but as companies grow their product catalog and expand into more channels and markets, the limitations of spreadsheets have become frustratingly apparent. As a result, more and more enterprises are adopting a PIM solution to manage their product information. PIM solutions help improve product experience, streamline product data management, processes and workflows, and increase productivity. As a central repository for all product information, it is critical that organizations take the time to properly define and understand how they are going to utilize their PIM, so it can be optimized for their specific needs. This first set of best practices outlines the first 4 best practices to get started on your PIM journey.

A robust PIM solution can increase catalog management productivity by 50%.

PIM Best Practice #1: Define Your PIM Project Objectives and Scope

Before you implement a PIM, determine the main business objectives you need to accomplish. This is an essential step to set expectations and define how you’ll measure success. With your objectives in mind, you can structure your PIM to support your commerce strategy. Here are some examples of objectives that PIM can help you accomplish:

• Enhance the customer experience: Entice customers with product descriptions and images that create emotion consistently across channels.
• Increase marketer productivity: instead of wrestling with hundreds of spreadsheets, PIM tools offer process efficiencies and a guided user interface to help save time and effort in catalog management across multiple channels.
• Deliver higher quality product data: Streamlined workflows and bulk editing tools help ensure that product information is comprehensive, complete, and error-free across all channels.
• Improve team collaboration: Increase participation across functional teams to raise the quality of product information.
• Accelerate time-to-market: Deliver new products and content faster across channels including eCommerce, print, catalog, online marketplaces, mobile platforms, and more.
• Expand to new channels: Simplify the process of opening new sales channels by leveraging your PIM’s capabilities to automatically populate these new channels with rich product information.
• Scale across new regions: Advanced workflow and translation management make localization much faster and more efficient.
• Onboard vendor data: Simplify the process of gathering product information from suppliers by allowing them to easily upload the data. Flexible supplier information onboarding improves collaboration by allowing vendors to provide the data you need in the format you require.

In a nutshell, building a robust PIM platform will support your brand’s growth.

Formalizing your business objectives upfront will pave the way to your PIM project success.

Understanding and Determining Scope

Next, you can start thinking about the scope of your project. Should you model your entire catalog and start managing all your products from the beginning? Or should you take a “land and expand” approach to begin, starting with a subset of your brands, products, channels, or locales? The decision will depend on your business goals for implementing PIM as well as the complexity and maturity of your organization. Whether you decide to start small or big, it’s critical to design your PIM project for all your current and future needs. The argument for starting small is that you can test and implement processes and connections to your other business applications to ensure everything works as expected, and then roll it out more broadly in subsequent phases. This approach can work well for larger enterprises who want to start with a product line or a particular region before rolling out across the entire organization. On the other hand, some enterprises may benefit from an all-at-once roll out that will give the full benefit of product data and process centralization. Regardless of approach, make sure it is right for your business objectives and ask yourself these questions:

• Can we start with a subset of products or should we tackle the entire catalog?
• Which channels are most important to our business?
• Is a particular locale/region more important than another?
• How critical is time-to-market for our PIM initiative?

Thinking big but starting small offers the opportunity to iterate, optimize, and then expand in a controlled and coordinated manner.

PIM Best Practice #2: Identify Team and Define Processes

With overall business goals and scope well-defined, you must next identify the team that will be working on your PIM project, determine and assign their roles, and define your optimal product information management process.

Select Your PIM Team

Determine who will be working with your PIM early in the process. Ideally, these individuals will have comprehensive knowledge of your products, your desired catalog structure, and your commerce channel needs. PIM is a business application designed to serve your teams, not the other way around, so you want to make sure to identify the people who are responsible for managing product information and who will benefit from the time-saving functionality of the PIM solution.

Define Processes and Roles

Once you have selected your team, it’s important to figure out what your product information management and enrichment processes will be and how your team will fit into the workflow. Remember, these individuals are your experts in this domain, so they likely have an idea of how they want things to flow as well as suggestions to make things even better. Identify each individual’s contribution to the process and make a list of all the roles and the permissions they will need to complete their job duties. The golden rule of PIM is to have your team focus on high-value tasks instead of repetitive ones. Computers are really good at dealing with repetitive tasks and organizing complex sets of information—they’re not so good at creating emotional product descriptions that communicate your brand value. With this golden rule in mind, you can easily keep your roles and permissions smart and effective.

The golden rule of PIM: Use PIM to automate and simplify repetitive tasks so your team can focus on creating emotionally compelling content that sells your products.

PIM Best Practice #3: Ensure Team Training and Adoption

In order to get the most out of your PIM project, you need to ensure your team is fully trained on how it works and what it will do to make their day-to-day work easier. Don’t underestimate the change that you are going to impose on your team. Using a new tool requires understanding a new process and establishing new habits. Make sure your team has the proper functional and technical training they need to fully understand how to use the PIM and to understand the benefit that comes with fully adopting it for catalog management. Functional training will cover day-to-day use and operation of the PIM by your marketing and catalog management team including how to create a catalog, organize products, and manage attributes and images. Technical training for your PIM technical team will cover the technical implementation, performance tuning, and system integration. Getting internal adoption of the PIM is critical. Make sure you support your team throughout the change to ensure a successful adoption and implementation to realize the full benefit of your PIM project.

New tool = new habits, the success of your PIM project lies in the buy-in of your team.

PIM Best Practice #4: Determine Your Catalog Structure

Building out your catalog might seem like a simple task at the start if you know your product offering well. But in reality, building an efficient catalog structure requires an in-depth understanding of your product categories, families, variants, and attributes, and how the catalog may be used differently in different sales channels and locales. A common mistake for organizations is to start utilizing PIM as just a “nice database interface” rather than taking advantage of all of its tools and features. A PIM is more than just an interface to create, read, update, or delete items. PIM allows you to efficiently model your catalog for all your channels and locales, and define only what your business requires. Your catalog structure should take into account and support:

• Product categories, families, product variants, and product attributes
• Channel-specific attributes like shorter descriptions for mobile applications or more images for eCommerce sites and marketplaces
• Locale-specific attributes like currencies and metrics
• Product enrichment requirements to be considered “complete”
• Defined relationships and associations between products

PIM is much more than a nice database interface, it is a business application.

Kiss Spreadsheets Goodbye and Simplify with PIM

The days of managing product information in spreadsheets are over. PIM revolutionizes data management by acting as a central repository for all product information with functionality that streamlines processes and workflows. The initial setup of your PIM project is critical to implementation success as well as long-term utilization. By following best practices from the start and involving your PIM stakeholders, you’ll be positioned to realize the maximum business value from your PIM investment. Ready to see what PIM could do for you? Sign up for a demo. Or, want to see how to get started with PIM? Check out Part 2 and Part 3 of our Best Practices series, or download our eBook Product Information Management 101.

Can you please tell us about Creatuity, and what is your experience and history with eCommerce projects and solutions?

I started Creatuity back in 2008, so we just celebrated ten years in the Magento space. Prior to that, I was a developer working on several different platforms and solutions. In the end, I opted to run a Magento-only agency because I felt the platform was poised to be dominant… and I was correct!  Creatuity’s successes have allowed us to be an innovator in the ecosystem, contributing instant purchase functionality, award-winning websites, and specializing in providing true omnichannel commerce technologies.

B2B eCommerce is growing 7 times faster than the B2C eCommerce. What do you see as the main obstacles B2B vendors need to overcome to fully leverage an eCommerce strategy?

The most important obstacle for B2B companies to conquer is providing a true omnichannel customer experience. Just as with B2C companies, B2B merchants want their customers to be able to buy online and pick up in-store, ship from store, and manage multiple vendors as well as distributors. Next, it is imperative to place product and service management at the center of your eCommerce strategy. If your catalog or buying experience is tedious or hard to navigate, a buyer will move on to the next option. You will also want to master inventory visibility and control for real-time buyer/supplier relationships that enable superior customer self-service. Next, B2B companies are in desperate need of better business intelligence models that allow them to fully leverage a data-driven view of their business. Platforms like Magento, the dominant leader on the IR300 B2B list of ranked sites, utilize innovative technologies to capitalize on untapped and growing B2B sales.

B2B companies are in desperate need of better business intelligence models that allow them to fully leverage a data-driven view of their business.

What main characteristics and challenges do you see in B2B eCommerce projects?

B2B companies often find their data is all over the place. Older business practices that are built upon traditional B2B operational styles are often overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information they need to compile and streamline. They typically have a need for advanced B2B capabilities like segmentation, invoices, multiple catalogs, different pricing agreements, etc. The scope of B2B projects is usually larger than B2C, as B2B companies often have more SKUs/attributes/bundles. In order to maintain a competitive edge in such an evolutionary vertical, B2B merchants must stay one step ahead of the aggressively moving benchmark.

B2B projects are usually more complex and require advanced capabilities, what must-have solutions do you recommend in B2B eCommerce projects?

In many cases, the nature of the product data, SKUs, dimensions, weights, diagrams, and photos often necessitate a PIM, plus the need to distribute content and to publish it on multiple sites beyond their own, which broadens their reach and visibility. B2B businesses must spread their product content with the goal of increasing brand awareness and driving traffic from a relevant audience.

The B2B market is evolving very quickly, as well as the behavior of its customers. What new buying trends have you noticed?

The way B2B shoppers buy is evolving. They shop on Amazon and on eBay. They want to order online, have prices right away and not ask for a quote. Essentially, they want an experience that is more reminiscent of a B2C experience rather than a traditional, “Call us NOW for a quote or more information” hassle. Their primary focus is having that speed to market, being able to buy quickly and be reactive. B2B customers need to be as pampered as B2C customers, if not more. These are long-term relationships with typically large average prices per transaction.

The way B2B shoppers buy is evolving. They shop on Amazon and on eBay. They want to order online, have prices right away and not ask for a quote.

B2B customers are requesting more and more personalized offers. Do you think merchants are ready for this?

Every customer wants to feel like they are the most important relationship you have. Making them feel like you know them, their needs, preferences and offering them unique buying, shipping, payment, and discounted inventory opportunities that make their buying experience more pleasurable only enhances and strengthens your long-term relationship potential.  Are buyers ready for this?  Absolutely. Are merchants ready for this? Not at all. It is such a paradigm shift, and the early adopters are destined to reap the benefits of their slower-moving rivals.

B2B customers want a smooth buying experience, how do you think a PIM solution can help?

PIM optimizes a business and its catalog for an omnichannel experience that’s just as much in demand for B2B as it is for B2C. The technology allows a merchant to populate a compelling amount of product information, which only enhances the buying experience and reduces returns and poor reviews.

In conclusion, how do you see the evolution of PIM solutions in the market?

PIMs must become more mainstream. A great PIM should be fully embracing and laying the foundation for exceptional PxM (Product Experience Management). This technology will be invaluable in the enhancement of the way buyers interact with B2B brands.

About Joshua Warren:

Joshua has worked in eCommerce since 1999. He is the Founder & CEO of Creatuity, a Magento Enterprise Solutions Partner & eCommerce agency that since 2008 has helped retailers of all sizes achieve success with Magento. As a frequent conference speaker and author, he is constantly exploring the future of commerce and how technology will provide richer, more engaging shopping experiences. He is a Magento Certified Solution Specialist, a Magento Certified Developer Plus, and a 2016 Magento Master.  

Just like in B2C, every touchpoint in B2B eCommerce is part of that customer’s experience with the brand. Quality control across all channels is essential – and that’s where product information management (PIM) can help. PIM provides a one-stop shop for B2B merchants to manage the product data needed to market and sell their goods through all distribution channels, including websites, print catalogs, mobile apps, points of sale, and other channels.

Adopted first by retailers and B2C brands, PIM is now becoming more prevalent among B2B organizations looking to market and sell their products through multiple channels and locales.

Here are four ways that PIM can help B2B merchants and manufacturers create compelling product experiences in every customer touchpoint.

1.    Enabling Omnichannel Product Experiences

B2B customers increasingly have a variety of ways to interact with merchants, including shopping on a company’s B2B eCommerce website, purchasing through a distributor, a marketplace, or browsing third-party print catalogs. As Andy Hoar, the former principal analyst of B2B eCommerce at Forrester, said in a recent interview, “B2B companies stand to gain from migrating customers into an omnichannel environment, where customers can interact with sellers and receive consistent service across selling channels, including mobile commerce, desktop websites and sales reps.” To succeed in this omnichannel space, B2B sellers need to make their products and services accessible to customers wherever and whenever they are ready to buy. The most efficient, effective, and productive way to accomplish this is to use a PIM solution to organize and manage product information. A PIM makes it easy for marketers to customize catalogs by channel and locale, as well as to scope and optimize product information to fit the customer experience in each channel. The result is an easier way to create a consistent experience wherever and whenever a customer interacts with the brand.

Using PIM as a “single source of multiple truths” helps to improve the omnichannel customer experience – regardless of where customers may be viewing products.

2.    Supporting Cross-Border eCommerce Growth

Forrester predicts that cross-border purchases will account for 20 percent of worldwide eCommerce by 2022. B2B merchants need sophisticated PIM solutions to create and customize product data specific to individual international markets. PIM helps B2B merchants offer localized versions of their product information for local markets and for overseas buyers. A PIM system that can handle multilingual product descriptions is crucial. Selling products overseas means more than just translating websites into different languages, however. B2B merchants also need to take into account local vernaculars, sizing differences, cultural nuances, images, regulations and other regional elements that affect the customer experience. All of this can be managed in a PIM solution.

3.    Onboarding Product Data

According to Episerver, 98% of shoppers have been discouraged from completing a purchase because of incomplete or incorrect product information. How can you ensure you’ve got all the information you need? Ideally, suppliers and manufacturers have the definitive technical information about their products — but sometimes it isn’t readily available or it is delivered in an incompatible format which makes gathering this information from suppliers and manufacturers challenging. A PIM can streamline the product information onboarding process by offering an environment for suppliers to directly upload their product information, which your internal teams can quickly and easily enrich.

A robust PIM solution can provide the tools you need to onboard product information from a variety of sources, and help accelerate your time-to-market.

4.    Streamlining Catalog Management

Traditionally, product information has been scattered around different departments, saved in multiple digital and hard copy formats, and only accessed or modified by certain employees or by using certain systems. With PIM, companies can consolidate and maintain consistent data – about everything from product specs to model variations ­– and improve the productivity of their marketing and eCommerce teams. This resource becomes increasingly valuable as companies scale up and expand their operations. PIM helps streamline catalog management with capabilities that increase productivity and track that product information is complete and ready to be published. You PIM should have features such as mass editing and validation workflows that improve team productivity and aid in data governance. With automation in workflow and business rule processing, marketing and eCommerce teams will have more time to write compelling and emotional product descriptions to deliver a compelling product experience foundation for a great customer experience.

PIM: The B2B Product Information Hero

Maintaining complete and accurate product data across channels and locales and delivering compelling product experiences is critical to remaining competitive in an omnichannel world. PIM provides a robust set of tools and features that can help B2B organizations increase team productivity, speed time-to-market, and deliver the product experience needed to fuel a great customer experience.