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.

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.

Earlier this month, Akeneo welcomed more than 300 members of the Akeneo family to Paris, France for the latest edition of the Akeneo PIM Summit. Over the course of two days, partners, customers, and special guests gave attendees a look at how PIM is being used to solve omnichannel challenges, examined the ways PXM is reshaping the PIM market and unveiled innovations to the assembled PIM devotees. If you were unable to join us at Châteauform City George V in Paris, today’s your lucky day. Here’s your chance to look back at highlights from #APS2019 — and if you were lucky enough to find yourself in the crowd on February 6 and 7, now’s your chance to relive some of your favorite moments.

1. Enter the Renaissance Experience

Fred de Gombert’s choice for the right outfit to open #APS2019 was neither an accident nor a fashion faux pas. Instead, the Akeneo CEO hoped to get attendees into the right frame of mind by donning some dapper, time period-appropriate threads as the Summit kicked off.  It’s time for a change in the way we think about a customer’s journey through the purchasing process, Fred declared, and for a renewed emphasis on customer experience in retail; an Experience Renaissance, as it were. According to Fred, this rebirth and transformation of retail norms won’t mean the end of commerce as we know it, nor does it foretell the arrival of the so-called “Retail Apocalypse.” Instead, it will simply see companies in a wide range of industries combine the lessons learned, mistakes made, and successes sustained during recent years of retail upheaval to create a new, experience-focused offering. This transformation won’t be easy, he acknowledged, but will be crucial to the success, and even survival, of the retail industry. “There is no innovation without collaboration,” the Akeneo CEO told APS 2019 attendees. “We need to be humble. We need to share our data and collaborate. We need to work in full transparency with our peers. We need to unlearn everything we know to start innovating and differentiating again. This should start with the experiences we are crafting.”

2. “Work Is Theater”

Fred wasn’t the only speaker to center their thoughts around customer experience, however. After the Akeneo CEO left the stage, author Joe Pine appeared, ready to dispense insights from the modern retail market, or what he calls “The Experience Economy.” As Pine explained, having access to a source of raw materials was once a distinct economic advantage — but as these materials became easier to access, they became commoditized, stripping them of most of their value. Manufactured products and goods then became a driver of value, and when these also became commoditized, a service-based economy took their place. However, in recent years, service-based offerings have become yet another commodity, a staple of survival in the modern market. “Goods and services are no longer enough,” Pine claimed. Instead, brands and retailers must give customers a top-notch experience in order to stand out from the competition. Now, Pine said, the time has come for companies from electronics and makeup manufacturers to restaurants and retail stores to realize that “work is theatre.” And in the Experience Economy, brands and retailers that treat customers to a good show, along with quality products and services, will likely be the ones to come out on top.

3. “There’s No One Experience To Rule Them All”

Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert wasn’t finished with APS 2019 attendees after his time-traveling intro, however. He returned to the stage, albeit without his Renaissance-themed attire, later on Day 1 to give the assembled crowd insights into the Science of Product Experience. While Product Experience is the key to success in the modern market, Fred said it would be a mistake to believe that building one consistent, all-encompassing customer experience across all channels would offer the compelling experiences that convert shoppers into customers. Instead, he opined, it’s important to realize that each touchpoint has its own rules and best practices. “There is no ‘One Experience to Rule Them All,’” Fred explained. “This is a mistake we already made in the early days of eCommerce, when we were trying to replicate point of sales paradigms in a website.” In other words, it’s impossible to deliver the same experience, or even similar experiences, via both a vocal assistant and a social network, for example. What’s more, most buyers aren’t looking for this level of consistency. To satisfy their customers, brands and retailers must create compelling experiences that cater to the context of each channel. That means using the unique capabilities and properties of eCommerce, mobile apps, vocal assistants, social media networks, and other sales channels to develop experiences that are distinct from one another while remaining consistent with a brand’s identity.

4. Product Data Intelligence Takes Centerstage

It’s fair to say that Day 2 of the Akeneo PIM Summit kicked off with a bang. The day’s first keynote featured Akeneo’s Product Marketing Director, John Evans,  and the company’s Head of Product, Emilie Gieler. The pair were on hand to introduce the latest addition to the Akeneo family: Franklin. As Gieler and Evans explained, Franklin is all about Product Data Intelligence and designed to offer brands and retailers actionable knowledge about products. Available as a standalone product known as Ask Franklin, or accessible from within Akeneo PIM as Franklin Insights, the AI-based product library brings machine learning capabilities to Akeneo PIM and automates the product information curation and enrichment process. Franklin’s subscription-based library dramatically increases the efficiency of catalog managers and reduces time-to-market, while giving merchants data-driven insights that ensure the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and effectiveness of generated product data. Franklin wasn’t the only solution to make its grand debut at APS 2019, of course. Gieler and Evans also unveiled Akeneo PIM Version 3.0, the latest update to Akeneo’s original PIM solution. This new release allows users to create and natively enrich reference entities, pieces of common information that are shared among products, like brands, designers, collections, colors, and more. This can help brands and retailers deliver deeper experiences to customers by providing richer product information while also reducing time-to-market. It also includes support for Single Sign-On using a SAML-based authentication system that allows managers to handle all user permissions in a centralized place, as well as a new and improved user interface designed to make the solution faster and more efficient.

5. Myer, SLV, and Obelink named PIM Champions

Akeneo wasn’t the only company to have a chance to stand in the spotlight before APS 2019 came to a close. A trio of customers also had their moments in the sun, taking a moment to pose on stage with a trophy (and a Ziggy of their very own) after taking home one of APS’ four awards. Obelink, along with its partner, Induxx, were named the winners of the conference’s “Rising Star” award (formerly known as the Rookie Award.) This was Induxx’s first PIM implementation and was aimed at helping the Netherlands-based outdoor retailer Obelink improve the accuracy and consistency of omnichannel product data. The pair also worked together to implement more efficient workflows, increase collaboration across the retailer’s marketing, eCommerce and translation teams, and boost their customer experience. Meanwhile, Australian retail giant Myer and implementation partner eWave walked away as winners in the Best B2C Project category. As Robert Schwab, Myer’s senior project manager, explained in his keynote address on Day 1, Myer invested in a PIM solution in hopes of improving product information quality. The project also helped Myer, Australia’s largest and oldest department store, decrease time-to-market, make product enrichment easier and more efficient, and give customers a more compelling experience. But worldwide B2B lighting manufacturer SLV and its partners Portaltech Reply will likely go down as the week’s big winners. The pair took home two distinct awards — the Best B2B Project and the People’s Choice Award — for their PIM implementation efforts, and their crowd-pleasing video submission. The pair worked to help SLV centralize access to data, improve distribution processes, and allow them to make processing and printing their annual run of hundreds of thousands of “Big White” catalogs easier and more efficient using Akeneo PIM. Thanks to all our customers, partners, and sponsors for making the 2019 Akeneo PIM Summit such a special event. We can’t wait to see you again next year!