Many retailers have told researchers that they have experienced a notable increase in the number of product returns, particularly among digital shoppers, with returns costing sellers more than $600 billion around the world each year. What’s more, in a report released late last year, more than half of surveyed merchants described returns as a problem that “has a negative impact on the day-to-day running of their business.” Some of this ever-increasing return volume can simply be chalked up to buyer behavior, including customers who buy expensive items to use them once before returning them, those that buy several products at once so they can see what color or size works best for them, returning the rest. But according to many analysts, the vast majority of returns — nearly two-thirds, in fact — are the result of mistakes made by retailers. These mistakes can often be as simple as delivering the wrong product, or a product being damaged during the manufacturing or shipping process, and can be fixed by simply replacing the product with the proper version. But in many cases, these returns are the result of bad and inaccurate product descriptions or assets, which leave shoppers with the wrong impression or idea of what they purchased.

So how can your business avoid falling victim to product returns caused by bad product depiction?

The answer lies in Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions. These solutions help you optimize your product data and assets, including descriptions, images, and technical details, ensuring that the content consumers find is consistent, compelling, and most important of all, accurate, thereby reducing the amount of customers who return products to bad product depiction. Enriching product information and assets with PIM and PXM can help your business see real reductions in return rates. PIM users have reported a 40% decrease in product returns, thanks to features such as automated enrichment rules, product completeness monitoring, and validation, which each work to ensure that shoppers are more informed prior to purchase.

Let’s take a closer look at the ways these features can lead to a reduction in product returns.

Automated enrichment rules

Accurately and compellingly completing and enriching product information can be a daunting task, especially for distributors, big-box retailers, fashion companies, and others with a large, varied, or constantly changing product assortment. Whether you have 1,000 products or 1,000,000 PIM and PXM can help you reduce confusion among customers using automated features. These tools can help your team more accurately and consistently enrich product information while also reducing and even removing tedious and repetitive work from marketers’ to-do lists, leaving them free to focus on crafting accurate and compelling content. By using automated business rules to standardize and enrich data, for example, you can improve the quality and accuracy of your product information by removing human error, as well as expediting the enrichment process. Automated features can also help you manage product data in bulk, which can help your team more easily create product collections and ensure that matching products will be grouped together.

By adding automation to your enrichment workflow, you can reduce errors in product descriptions and data while giving your team more time to craft compelling descriptions

Product Completeness

Inaccurate product data or descriptions are a major reason for product returns — but so is incomplete information. If you don’t allow customers to easily find all the images, video, measurements, and other product details and data, they are more likely to return the product after receiving it. PIM and PXM, however, can prevent incomplete product information from reaching your customers using product completeness features. These tools provide information about product enrichment quality and help ensure that all of your product attributes have been enriched before a product can be added to your online store or other channels. Product completeness features can also help your team with their workflow across channels and locales and is the basis of productivity tools like Projects and Views. What’s more, they can be particularly powerful tools in building data governance policies that ensure that future product imports and enrichments are accurate and use high-quality product descriptions and data.

Use completeness features to make sure the product information you provide to customers is complete and consistent, putting an end to customer confusion.

Validation

Even after your products have been enriched using automated features and descriptions and data have been completed, there remains a small chance that product information could be inaccurate in one way or another. After all, no one is perfect — not even your marketing team. Errors are part of human nature, and some big and small mistakes are bound to crop up along the enrichment process. Even if these mistakes are miniscule, however, their effects can be massive. If they lead a customer to purchase a product they otherwise would not have, eventually necessitating a return, it can cost companies more than just the cost of the purchase — it could also drive the customer away for good. To prevent these mistakes in product data and descriptions to slip through the cracks, a good PIM or PXM solution will offer validation features. These features allow managers or other members of your team to easily verify both the accuracy of individual contributions to product data and the overall completeness of that data.

Errors are unavoidable — what matters is catching them before you publish. Use validation features to ensure product information is complete and correct.

Reduce returns by 40% with PIM and PXM Product returns are a disaster for brands and retailers — but most are preventable. By using PIM and PXM features like automated enrichment rules, validation, and product completeness, your team can improve the quality, accuracy, and consistency of your product information. This can help your business reduce returns by as much as 40% and increase customer trust in the process. Get rid of returns with PIM and PXM! Contact us to learn how Product Information Management and Product Experience Management can help you make sure that customers keep the products they’ve purchased, or download our eBook, Product Information Management 101.

This trend is not expected to reverse in the foreseeable future, either — the Census Bureau projects that the Millennial population will continue to rise in the coming years, and Pew expects the amount of these workers to rise in step. These young employees are making their presence felt, and changing the way many companies, and even whole industries, do business. While these generational shifts affect a range of industries, they have been particularly pronounced in the B2B sector. According to a report issued by Avionos earlier this year, more B2B buyers (33%) said they started their purchasing journey via a search engine like Google and Amazon Business even before visiting a supplier’s own website or portal (32%). Many millennial buyers use these sites in hopes of finding the same user-friendly experience they’ve grown accustomed to when buying products online as a consumer. But while the inspiration for this shift may have been convenience and familiarity, those factors aren’t the deciding factors when millennial B2B buyers make a purchase. The most important factors motivating young B2B buyers are the foundations underlying a convenient and familiar customer experience, namely your product information and product experience.   According to Avionos researchers, high-quality, accurate, and compelling product information can lead to increased purchases, while inaccurate, inconsistent, or otherwise, low-quality product descriptions can send B2B buyers running for a competitor’s site — 84% of businesses said product content has stopped them from completing a purchase with a supplier. Fortunately, there is a solution — Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) can help you optimize your product assets, data, and description, and connect with customers. Let’s take a look at the biggest issues leading to this purchase abandonment, and how your business can use PIM and PXM to keep B2B buyers from searching elsewhere.

1. No product information

Whether they’re buying for their own needs or for their company’s, customers want to understand exactly what they’re paying for. That may be why a lack of product information is so disastrous for B2B sellers. In this age of information, consumers and B2B buyers alike want, and expect, to be able to conduct extensive research into a product, it’s price, uses, and other options before finally completing a transaction. If your company doesn’t offer customers comprehensive product information and make it easy to find (more on this later), it likely won’t matter how well-designed or produced those products are, or what features and capabilities differentiate it from the competition. Buyers will simply move on to another seller that allows them to easily access the information and data they feel they need to know before making a purchase. Use PIM and PXM to enrich your eCommerce store with accurate, consistent, and emotionally compelling information about whatever it is you’re selling. Research shows that this content is typically a major motivating factor for B2B buyers.

2. Bad product information

It’s important to have your product information online — but it’s even more crucial to ensure that the information you’re presenting to customers is both accurate and consistent. Nearly one-third (32%) of consumers said they had abandoned a planned purchase due to incorrect or inconsistent product data or descriptions. If a customer does not feel confident regarding the price they’re paying, the product they’re purchasing, when their order will arrive, or any other part of the purchase process, they’re likely to abandon that purchase and complete the sale via a merchant who makes them feel safe and secure regarding their purchase. A good PIM or PXM solution, however, can help you and your company avoid losing potential customers due to bad product information, with product completeness, validation, and automated enrichment rule features. These capabilities can make sure incomplete, incorrect or inconsistent information is never published on your website, preventing confusion among customers.

3. Hidden product information

If incorrect product information is bad, however, hidden product information may be even worse. An even higher percentage (35% to be exact) of millennial B2B buyers said that difficulty finding information about certain products led them to abandon a purchase. Pre-purchase research is typically done via consumer-friendly search engines like Google, and as a result, B2B and B2C companies alike need to ensure that their product descriptions and data can be easily found by a search engine. After all, if the search engines buyers use to find products can’t find yours, customers won’t find it either. PIM and PXM can help you make sure that buyers will be able to easily find information regarding the products they’re hoping to purchase. A good solution can also make sure that the content you show to customers is presented in the proper manner and context for the channel they’re using.

Beat B2B challenges and make sales boom

B2B commerce has seen major changes in recent years — an influx of younger, digitally-native millennials have infiltrated the workforce and are pushing the industry to become more cutting edge. As a result, eCommerce has become a major revenue stream even for B2B sellers, but one that is difficult to master. But by using PIM and PXM to enrich and optimize your product experience and information, your business can take advantage of these shifts in the industry. Ready to beat B2B challenges and make sales boom? Contact us to learn more about how Product Information Management and Product Experience Management can help you boost B2B sales, or download our eBook, Product Information Management 101.

It’s not hard to see why. Just as big box stores like Target and Walmart gave customers the ability to find items from a wide range of vendors in one convenient location, modern online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and TMall each provide shoppers with a one-stop-shop for all their wants and needs. According to recently released research, more than half of online purchases were made via marketplaces last year, with consumers spending more than $1.86 trillion in 2018. But succeeding on these marketplaces is often a tall order, and presents a different challenge compared to more traditional eCommerce offerings. Brands and retailers must be able to ensure that customers can find their products simply and easily, even if they aren’t searching directly for a brand or product name. What’s more, each marketplace has its own set of product information standards and requirements, making the process of adding a marketplace channel even more challenging and complex.

That’s why it’s crucial to have accurate, compelling product information, provided in the proper context for marketplace customers — and why your company needs Akeneo PIM.

Why is product information management (PIM) a key driver for a successful marketplace expansion? Akeneo PIM is a gateway technology that can help your business cost-effectively expand to marketplaces by providing the infrastructure your company needs. It does this by centralizing and harmonizing all the technical, usage, and emotional information for your product listings and catalogs, ensuring that you provide shoppers with data that is accurate, consistent and contextual.

Hit the product information bullseye

When consumers are shopping online, they crave product information. They want to know everything there is to know about a product, from the colors and sizes it comes in, to what each product looks and feels like and even how it should be cared for. That means that providing them with incorrect or misleading product information can be an absolute disaster for companies hoping to find success on marketplaces like Amazon and TMall. If marketplace shoppers don’t feel as if though they can trust that product information is accurate, they’ll likely find a different seller to buy from. What’s more, if a customer does purchase a product, only to find out once it’s delivered that it doesn’t match their expectations, they’re likely to return the item, sending it right back to the seller and hurting your bottom line in the process. Akeneo PIM avoids all this by making sure that your product information is accurate and complies with the unique requirement of each marketplace. That way, customers will find your products easily and be pleased with their purchase when it arrives.

Keep things consistent

Accurate product data may be important, but it isn’t enough — at least not on its own. Customers often research products across a wide range of information sources, from marketplaces like Amazon to a company’s own eCommerce store, on the hunt for a wide range of information, and the best possible price. If the information they find via one source doesn’t match the corresponding info on another site, they’re likely to lose faith in the product, if not the brand as a whole, and abandon a potential purchase in favor of a merchant they feel they can trust. But using a PIM, your company can make sure that all product information isn’t just accurate, but consistent across a wide range of commerce channels, making sure you earn customers’ trust and make the sale.

Provide the right info for the right channel

Ensuring that product information is consistent across is crucial — but offering consistency without regard to context is a surefire recipe for disaster. While keeping product information consistent is key, each channel is different. Amazon has different requirements than TMall, for example, which displays product information and assets in different ways than other marketplaces. Failing to pay attention to these sometimes subtle differences will lead to failure overall. Akeneo PIM, however, makes sure your information is perfectly tailored to the context of each marketplace, be it Amazon, eBay, TMall or anywhere else. This provides a competitive advantage, as customers who can seamlessly transition between channels without losing context typically immerse themselves more deeply in a company’s story, are more likely to make new purchases, and remain loyal customers. Make marketplace magic! Contact us 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.

Instagram is far from an anomaly, of course. The social network’s parent company, Facebook, already offers eCommerce capabilities, as does fellow social networking app Snapchat. These new social media-driven sales efforts are just the latest in what has been an explosion of sales channels in recent years. Decades ago, merchants needed to worry about just a single channel (their physical store) but now exist in an omnichannel world, selling products everywhere from brick-and-mortar buildings to virtual reality apps. While omnichannel commerce can present new complications and concerns to brands and retailers, it also presents a massive opportunity for success. According to recently released research, adding a single channel can boost a brand or retailer’s revenue by as much as 38 percent, while adding two channels can lead to growth of 120 percent, and adding three can result in an increase of nearly 200 percent. But simply starting sales on a new commerce channel doesn’t guarantee that revenue is about to come pouring in. Brands and retailers that do decide to widen their offerings need to make sure that their products and their team are ready to make their debut on new channels. Here are a few tips to make sure your omnichannel efforts bring an increase in revenue: 1. Use PIM to standardize, correct, and enrich product information No matter what channel you’re selling on, product information is crucial for success in the online age. When they decide they need (or simply want) to make a purchase, customers typically take to search engines like Google to find the object of their desire. But if your product information isn’t readily available, search engines won’t be able to find your products — meaning that customers won’t be able to find them either. That product information also needs to be highly consistent and accurate — most customers won’t purchase a product they aren’t sure suits their needs, nor will they buy if product information is missing — and emotionally resonant, if you want to turn shoppers from browsers to buyers. Add it all up, and product information becomes crucial to any omnichannel sales effort. By using a PIM solution to manage your product catalog, you can ensure that your product information is accurate, consistent, emotionally compelling, and ready for its omnichannel debut. 2. Tailor product information to your new channel Just like snowflakes, no two channels are alike. Each has its own unique properties and requirements for merchants selling their products. On social media, for instance, showcasing images can improve the conversion rate on a product. Marketplaces, meanwhile, bring their own challenges. For example, marketplaces like Amazon have specific product listing requirements, meaning you may not be able to provide the same emotional context or experiences as your own website. As Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert explained at this year’s Akeneo PIM Summit, “there’s no one experience to rule them all.” Each channel requires a unique and tailored experience in order to resonate with customers, so make sure your new store is built to take advantage of the differences between each channel. 3. Take advantage of channel complementarity Once you’ve optimized product information and gotten your new sales channels off the ground, make sure they’re working together to drive sales. You can do so by embracing the complementary nature of omnichannel marketing and sales. Take global retailer Walgreens, for example. The company has engineered its omnichannel experience to take advantage of each channel’s advantages and capabilities and uses them to improve the experience across the board. Pharmacy customers, for example, can use the company’s mobile app to order a refill for prescriptions, then present their mobile device at the register to pick up their medication. By providing valuable product data and information to both customers and employees along every step of the journey, your various sales channels can help fuel increased offline and online sales alike. Get ready to go omnichannel There’s clearly no shortage of potential rewards for brands and retailers who embrace omnichannel selling — that is, if their product information is managed and enriched properly. To make sure your company is ready to go omnichannel, make sure your product information is accurate, consistent, and emotionally compelling. Then, tailor that data to the properties and requirements of your new channels, and take advantage of omnichannel complementarity. That way, whether it’s a new Instagram account or the latest addition to Amazon, you can ensure your new channel becomes a successful one. Go omnichannel! Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or find out how to triumph over your omnichannel competition with Fred de Gombert’s speech at APS 2019.

In the digital age, customers crave information. The constant connectivity offered by the internet and mobile devices gives buyers an endless opportunity to educate themselves and scrutinize every facet of a product or service before they make a purchase.

This new era of information means that brands and retailers are finding their products are under the microscope of consumers 24 hours a day. But, what happens if that information is wrong?

Providing customers with accurate and compelling information is the most fundamental purpose of Product Information Management software. The data that makes up this information is what informs your customers about your product, and has a significant impact on their decision to purchase. If you provide them with incomplete or inaccurate information it can heavily weigh this decision against you and result in a lost sale. However, if you are able to provide them with a product experience that’s error-free, comprehensive, and compelling, you can eliminate these lost sales, differentiate yourself from the competition, and even secure additional sales.

Reaching this next level product experience requires a foundation of high-quality data, which itself requires a proper data governance policy. Today we’ll explore how you can provide your customers with this high-quality data as part of your PIM implementation.

Correcting poor data and establishing governance can be an overwhelming task. It’s not uncommon for enterprises to have significant issues with their data for a variety of reasons. This could include multiple acquisitions or divestitures, application upgrades, rapid expansion, or a general lack of emphasis on data governance around their product information.

Fortunately, PIM is here to help.

A PIM project provides the ideal opportunity to implement data governance and cleanse your data.

During a PIM implementation, the cross-functional teams and technical resources needed to fix your data issues are already invested in the project. It’s just a matter of making data governance a priority.

Admittedly, this is often easier said than done, as PIM projects are often implemented as part of a larger eCommerce project, in which time and resource restrictions are a factor. A common scenario we see in Akeneo projects is the integrator or customer deciding early on to just move their ERP data directly into the PIM, without any cleansing effort. This is usually because the integrator or customer is more concerned about tangible deliverables related to connectors, customizations, or migration into the eCommerce platform, and cleansing, unfortunately, becomes an obvious place to cut corners. This is a mistake and means that while your product team may be using a fancy new tool, customers will still be seeing the same inaccurate data they saw before the project.

So, as you implement your PIM project, how can you establish proper data governance? Below are some key steps that must be considered in any PIM project to make sure you’re providing your customers with the best product information possible:

1. Identify the missing or incorrect data

Before you can improve your data you must first identify what information is missing or incorrect. This may  seem easy and obvious, but can be more difficult than it appears, particularly for larger catalogs with millions of lines of product information data. Product marketers — or as we call them at Akeneo, “Julias” — are often the most valuable in uncovering bad data, as they have the most intimate knowledge of each product and product attribute. Your Julias can provide a fantastic starting point that your technical resources can then supplement. For example, Julia may know that there are multiple variations of a dimension attribute (3X5, 3 by 5, three by five, etc..). She can then inform a developer on the IT/Integrator team, who can quickly export the data and run queries to isolate the data and see all the possible variations.

2. Establish a governance policy

Once your data issues have been uncovered, you must determine what the correct data values are and establish policies to ensure consistency across your catalog. For example, in the dimension example provided above, the product team may sit down and collectively decide that they want the dimension value to be standardized as “3X5” across the entire catalog. Another example could be more focused on the business process itself —if Supplier A provides excellent product images while Supplier B provides poor low-resolution images, a policy could be enacted to retake all of Supplier B’s images, while automatically using all Supplier A images. Establishing these policies is vital to standardizing your data, and Akeneo PIM provides excellent tools to help with this process. The use of completeness and attribute options are particularly powerful tools in Akeneo that can be of great assistance in building these policies.

3. Fix the source of the problem

Once poor data has been identified, it’s time to fix the source of the problem. The product ecosystem can be complex, and fixing the source of the problem requires you to understand exactly where each piece of product information is coming from. There can be many different causes of the problem including poor supplier information, incorrectly mapped data coming from another system like an ERP, or even human error, like the inconsistent use of an attribute value across a product team. Resolving the issues will depend on the problem itself. A mapping issue will be resolved by the IT team, human error must be fixed by standardizing data entry processes, and external issues, like poor supplier information, could require escalation by the purchasing team.

4. Correct your existing data

After the source of the problem has been resolved (and you’re confident it will no longer create issues) you must update your existing catalog. A data migration (like when implementing Akeneo) provides the ideal opportunity to fix this data. Once your business team has identified all the data issues and determined the correct values, the IT/integrator team can programmatically correct large amounts of data before migrating into the new PIM.

5. Maintain and update your data governance

Product information is dynamic. New products and technologies are constantly being phased in and out, and your governance policy must be designed to accommodate every change. When you add a new product line you must review the new line’s product information and adapt your existing policies and procedures. This is necessary to ensure that you are continuing to only provide your customers with high-quality information. It’s also important to remove data that has become irrelevant. For example, if a brand no longer exists in your catalog we recommend you delete it from your systems. A large B2B or B2C enterprise selling hundreds of brands at a time could easily end up having dozens of outdated “ghost” brands in their systems after several years if they’re not actively cleansing them from their product catalog.

Clean and complete

Akeneo provides many features that help you cleanse product data and establish governance. The use of attribute options, metrics, prices, and custom and reference entities ensure that only correctly formatted and predetermined values make it to your customers’ eyes.

Completeness is another important Akeneo feature designed to ensure a product isn’t exported to your channels until all important product attributes are filled out. Completeness also helps the business team structure their workflow across channels and locales and is the basis of productivity tools like Projects and Views. The rules engines allow the automatic transformation of data by the PIM based on predetermined business rules, and Proposals are a validation workflow to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Finally, Akeneo has recently released a new tool known the Akeneo Onboarder. The Onboarder allows suppliers to interface directly with the retailer’s Akeneo environment and provide data in a predetermined format.

There are also options outside of Akeneo that can be used in conjunction with the PIM to help ensure data quality. Developers can write scripts and utilize regular expressions in their language of choice (PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc.) to parse relevant data and cleanse it based on pre-established business logic. Customers can also use more traditional means to fix their data issues, such as emailing or calling a supplier or other internal teams directly and requesting better data.

Iterate to Great

It’s important to remember that it may be unrealistic or even impossible to correct all of this information in a single effort. Instead, it’s best to take an iterative approach. A PIM implementation is a great opportunity to start the process; during this migration, you can focus on the most critical data issues and establish governance using Akeneo’s many available features in the PIM. Once live, you can then progressively work towards improving your data by assigning your product team small side projects around certain attributes or parts of the product catalog.

It’s easy to get caught up on the latest new technologies surrounding the ecommerce space, but it’s important to remember that these new technologies are ultimately just tools. A new tool may dazzle your customers with how it presents your products, but if there’s no effective data governance policy in place your customers will still be seeing the same inaccurate or missing information that could impact their purchase decision.

Interested in learning more about PIM? Check out Adam’s session at the 2019 Akeneo PIM Summit for more info, or download our PIM 101 eBook.

 

 

According to recently released research, 86 percent of buyers say they are willing to pay more for great customer experiences. In order to provide shoppers with these enhanced experiences, however, companies must make sure their product experiences are up to par. That means using a Product Information Management solution to serve as the foundation needed to control product information and a cornerstone of eCommerce and omnichannel operations. But there are plenty of PIM solutions on the market, and just like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. Each platform has its own strengths, weaknesses and unique capabilities, making it crucial that you find a solution that can meet both your current and future needs. With that in mind, here are six of the most important features we think you should consider when selecting a PIM solution:

1. Integrate and Connect with Everything

Perhaps the most critical factor when selecting a  PIM is the solution’s ability to integrate with your current technical stack, as well as information resources you plan to implement down the road. If you can’t easily connect your PIM to your internal ERP system data, supplier’s product data, online storefronts, mobile apps, POS systems, print catalogs, or other systems, you’re missing out on some of the primary benefits of implementing a PIM solution in the first place. The best PIM software for your organization will include connectors that facilitate interoperability among your systems and streamline operations. What’s more, just like current interoperability offerings, the size and strength of a PIM’s existing ecosystem is a huge factor in the long-term viability of the solution. PIM systems are not one-off projects — they are constantly growing and evolving to support more connected systems and technologies. Finding a PIM with a healthy and substantial community of integrators, technical partners, and developers will help support your evolving, long-term efforts.

Some changes are unplanned, so pick a solution with a long list of supported systems.

2. Be Easy to Use

PIM shouldn’t only play nicely with your technical stack, but with your team as well. PIM is a system that you and your team, along with outside users, must adopt and use every day. Just like any other system within your organization, the best interfaces are those that are so intuitive they are nearly invisible, so look for a solution with an intuitive interface that doesn’t require your team to sit through hours of training. On the flip side, the sheer amount of product data alone can be overwhelming to face. Therefore, the best PIM interfaces will provide a clear path to managing and enriching products and give a clear overview of the entire product catalog’s status.

If your team feels like they need a separate product management tool for data enhancement, then your PIM has failed you.

3. Automate Repetitive Tasks

Do the PIM platforms you are considering simply provide a different place to enrich data and fill in missing fields, rather than give you dedicated features to improve product data? This is a table-stakes requirement. The best PIM software will also include features designed to automate and eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline processes. Find a solution that can do some of the work for you by performing bulk actions and tracking completeness before publishing and validating work. Automating manual, repetitive tasks frees up your team and lets them focus on value-add activities.

The best PIM software will optimize your product information management processes and unleash your team’s creativity.

4. Offer Customization

As we mentioned, your PIM needs to be both able to support your current processes and capable of changing to adapt to future processes including the structure of your catalog. The best solutions conform to the way you do things – not the other way around. This typically requires some customization in terms of importing, exporting, structuring and managing data as well as personalizing UIs — make sure your PIM offers these and other customization options before you make your investment.

A good PIM solution adapts to meet the needs and goals of your business and products — not the other way around.

5. Support cross-border commerce

If you do business in multiple countries and manage information in several languages,  you don’t want to have to duplicate everything just to translate and localize it. The best PIM software will accelerate your go to market and help you manage product data requirements including different metrics and cultural norms for your different locales, without a bunch of tedious manual work.

A good PIM will help you localize product information to speak your customer’s language.

6. Have Flexible Deployment Options

Do you want to be able to run your PIM in your own data center, or via the cloud? Depending on your own internal IT strategy, you may want a solution that can support a variety of options to transition as your landscape evolves. Here are a few of the most common deployment types:

• On-premises: The organization is responsible for deploying and maintaining all the applications and data on their own servers, as well as completing all required system maintenance. This provides maximum flexibility and control but requires the most IT resources.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): The application and associated data are hosted by a third party. This means that the organization still maintains these things, but the third-party handles the underlying infrastructure. This allows organizations to have a high level of customization, but doesn’t require as many IT resources on their end.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Everything from the application to infrastructure is maintained by the application vendor. This is the “easiest” deployment option, but offers less flexibility and customization.

Choose a PIM solution that keeps your deployment options open.

The Best PIM Software Will Continue to Evolve and Support Your Business

Ultimately, PIM is a critical component of and between other systems, whether technical interoperability or human processes. Your business will not remain the same forever, so as your technical infrastructure and processes evolve, so must your PIM. Find a solution that you can adapt to your evolving business from the start to help prevent serious headaches in the future. Interested in learning more about PIM? Download our complete eBook Product Information Management 101 for everything you need to know and for a guide on how to convince your key stakeholders that you need it.

Increasingly, industry experts and observers are preaching the importance of data and information management. Some describe data as the new oil, while others call it a new currency, and even more still settle for claiming it could change how companies of every shape and size operate. Managing all this product data, however, presents a challenge. The world of product data solutions is full of acronyms. As a result, it can be difficult to determine what each solution is actually designed to address. Here’s a breakdown of all the acronyms and how they compare to PIM (product information management):

Product Data Solution Comparison

In other words, Harley Davidson sells experiences, not motorcycles. The same can be said of Product Information Management (PIM) systems. You might think a PIM system is just a neat way to manage your business’ product information, but the overall effect that a PIM system can have on your business and your organization can be dramatic and transformational. In the new Journal of digital commerce, John Evans, Product Marketing Director here at Akeneo, provides strategies for managing product information, to help you move beyond the Excel pivot table by looking at:

•      3 main challenges with product information management
•      How product information has expanded and evolved
•      How quality of information impacts online conversions
•      5 key tips for eCommerce Managers managing product information
•      The results – an Akeneo client example

The Journal of digital commerce is a professional trade journal from industry experts and technology partners to help you find your way in the digital jungle. Is time to drive things forward? Read our full article and download your copy of the Journal of digital commerce today:  

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.