Rumors of the demise of industrial manufacturing may have been greatly exaggerated. While anyone who’s listened to media reports in recent years has heard tales of vanishing industrial manufacturing jobs, particularly in developed economies in areas like North America and Europe, the space still drives massive amounts of revenue. In the United States alone, industrial manufacturing produced $2.33 trillion last year, good for more than 10 percent of the U.S.’ economic output, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and account for half of U.S. exports. But while there’s no shortage of rewards for companies in the space, challenges abound. Industrial manufacturers have a long list of hurdles they need to clear before they can find success. Large product catalogs and massive internal teams often mean these companies struggle with digitization and eCommerce efforts, tend to manage product data in ERP and PLM systems, and lack a logical place to manage marketing product data. What’s more, these companies typically exchange data regarding highly technical products in very specific formats. Fortunately for industrial manufacturers, Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions can help them clear these hurdles. PIM and PXM are designed to enable manufacturers to more efficiently and easily manage large product catalogs and prepare for a successful transformation to eCommerce. As a result, industrial manufacturers typically report increased conversion, reduced returns, and significantly increased marketer productivity after adopting PIM. But how do PIM and PXM help you and your company solve these industrial manufacturing challenges? Allow us to explain.

Go digital

One of the biggest sore spots for industrial manufacturers when it comes to digitization arises when the company decides to open up a digital commerce channel. While omnichannel commerce can have serious advantages for those who do it right, adding new channels can be particularly challenging for industrial manufacturers. The typically massive size of their product catalogs, for instance, often means extra time and effort when it comes time to update product information online or add a new channel. Making matters more difficult, these catalogs are typically filled with highly technical products, which require even more commitment and management. PIM and PXM, however, can make the enrichment process far easier. By using business rules engines and validation workflows, for example, you can easily eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks and ensure that only accurate, consistent, and contextual product information is presented to customers.

Scale sustainably

Simply enriching your catalog once is not enough, however. Product information also needs to be frequently updated to reflect changes in a product, better fit a new platform. Making these updates and changes can be just as daunting as initially enriching information, however. What’s more, as new products are added to existing catalogs, these larger catalogs are typically more difficult to manage efficiently and effectively, and the challenges grow even greater when dealing with the kind of highly specific and technical data that industrial manufacturers typically handle. By using PIM and PXM solutions, however, industrial manufacturers can transition to digital commerce successfully and sustainably. The scalable, flexible structure of PIM, paired with a visual enrichment interface designed for marketers and other tools and capabilities, allows your company to make updates and changes to product catalogs easily and efficiently.

Efficiently handle industry data formats and govern data

It’s not just the highly technical nature of product data that can cause industrial manufacturers to struggle with product information management, however. This data is also typically expressed and exchanged in unusual, highly specific formats. These formats do offer advantages to industrial manufacturers, such as better communication between suppliers and distributors, reduced costs, and accelerated time-to-market. However, they can also make it harder to manage product information and assets for omnichannel commerce. PIM and PXM, however, are specifically designed to manage data in these unusual formats. This will help your team more efficiently and easily manage product data and descriptions. What’s more, PIM can also help your team more efficiently and easily implement data government and management processes and procedures. Use your PIM to identify missing or incorrect data, establish governance policies, fix and correct incorrect or low-quality data, and maintain and update your data governance plan to ensure your customers are only given accurate, compelling, and consistent product information.

Integrate seamlessly

Efficiently handling data is only half the battle, however. In an information-heavy space like industrial manufacturing, your company also need to be able to seamlessly communicate and manage data across multiple data management tools and systems, including DAMs, ERPs, and more. It may sound simple, but managing your product information and specifications across all of the different data systems you have is often easier said than done. Fortunately, PIM can help your team simplify data management by integrating disparate systems and tools via our network of open-source connectors. This will help prevent errors or inconsistency in product data and help your team work faster and more efficiently. 

Boost productivity

In the digital age, speed is king. Your team needs to be able to move quickly, getting products to market as fast as possible, in order to keep up with ever-evolving customer trends and demands. 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 — with a range of features designed to boost productivity. These include automation features, which help remove repetitive, tedious tasks from your team’s plates, validation features, which can ensure that enriched product information is approved and updated as soon as possible, and completeness features, which structure your team’s workflow across channels and locales, allowing them to focus on what matters most and become more productive in the process. Use PIM features like automation, validation, and workflow controls to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive tasks. That way you can manufacture and sell more products, more quickly, boosting revenue and improving relationships along the way.

Conquer Industrial Manufacturing Challenges

It isn’t easy to be an industrial manufacturer these days — but PIM and PXM can help. By using product information and product experience management solutions to enrich and manage your product data, your team can expand to new channels and locales more efficiently, handle industry-specific data formats with ease, and boost their productivity. Solve your problems with PIM! Discover how Product Information Management and Product Experience Management can help you conquer common industry challenges by registering for a demo! Want to learn more about the basics of PIM? Download our eBook Product Information Management 101 today!

But while expansion can lead to increased revenue thanks to the addition of new customers in these faraway markets, it’s also a stressful time for many brands and retailers and brings with it a huge amount of tedious and time-consuming new work. This is largely a product of just how much needs to be done in order to make these efforts successful. Product descriptions must be translated into local languages, multimedia assets like photos and videos must be made relevant and appropriate for new markets, sizes and measurements must be converted into the correct weight, and prices and taxes must be updated to meet new standards and regulations — and all that is just the beginning.

Expanding to new markets is often easier said than done

It’s enough to turn any expansion effort into a months-long marathon of complications, confusion, and pain. Unless, of course, you’re expanding with help from product information management (PIM). Akeneo PIM can help your company more easily expand to new markets by improving translation and localization processes, giving you product information that will make buyers in any market take notice of your offerings — and make a purchase. That’s critical, because brands and retailers who miss the mark on translation and localization often see their expansion efforts fall flat as they struggle to connect with new customers.   Don’t believe us? See how improving translation and localization with PIM can help your next expansion effort succeed with ease.

Talk the talk

The first, and perhaps most obvious step in expanding to a new market is translating product information into the local language. But this step isn’t as simple as it may seem. But it’s not enough to simply plug product descriptions or data into a translating software and call it a day. You also need to localize these descriptions in order to ensure that the content aligns with local dialects, norms, and slang. Expanding to new markets and tailoring product data is also a numbers game. European companies expanding to the United States, for instance, must ensure that they convert all measurements and numbers to local units. That means converting clothing sizes to their American equivalent, making sure that all measurements are expressed in yards, feet, and inches rather than meters, centimeters, and millimeters, and even converting prices from the Euro to the U.S. dollar. No matter what country they’re in, shoppers expect to do business in their native language, using measurements they understand and pay in their local currency. If you don’t give them these capabilities, they’ll simply find another seller who can.

55% of surveyed customers buy only from merchants who present product information in their native language.

Go global, stay local

Language differences are just the start of the subtle differences in product information expanding brands and retailers must master in order to find success. There’s no shortage to the amount of information that must be adapted when a company crosses borders — even something as similar as color can complicate expansion. In many countries, for example, purple is associated with royalty or nobility — but in Thailand, violet is more associated with death and mourning than the upper class. Getting these cultural differences wrong can result in disaster for expanding enterprises. And just like with translation and conversion, localization affects more than just words on a page. Marketing teams must also ensure that product images are relevant and appropriate for new markets and that measurements are expressed in a way that would make sense to a local. If these assets aren’t relevant to customers, they’ll likely move on to another merchant that’s willing to show them exactly how this product fits into their climate, region, and lifestyle.

56% of buyers say that finding product information in their native language is a bigger factor in their purchasing decision than price

Stay on the right side of the law

Customers aren’t the only group that your company has to please when selling cross-border, however. Expanding to new markets means complying with a host of new regulations, from tax codes and country of origin rules to labeling regulations and health statues. Take the European Union — when companies first start selling in the EU, they have to comply with some of the most stringent regulations in the world. These rules govern how products in seemingly category, including electronics, toys, textiles, and more, are made, labeled, and sold. What’s more, companies must also now contend with data privacy protections like GDPR. If your business finds itself on the wrong side of these laws, they could be fined, or see their products held or seized at customs, costing both time and money. Certain industries have even more regulations to worry about. Brands and retailers working in industries such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals, banking and financial services, and food and beverage are more highly regulated than many others, meaning that they must deal with even more changes to product data.

33% of firms say that complying with local laws and regulations is their biggest challenge in international commerce

How PIM can help

There’s clearly no shortage of product information challenges to contend with when expanding across borders. From simple language translation and unit conversion to more precise localization and even complying with the local rules and regulations, these roadblocks can slow down expansion efforts or cause brands and retailers to struggle in new markets. This is what makes it so imperative to ensure that product information is comprehensive, relevant, and accessible — and why expanding businesses would be wise to invest in product information management. By using PIM solutions to expand and enter new markets, your business can cut down time to market by as much as 300 percent, boost sales by 400 percent, and reduce returns, all while making your marketers more productive. Go global while staying local. Contact us get your PIM project underway, download our eBook Product Information Management 101 to learn more about how PIM can help your business, or check out our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands to find out how to make sure you stay on top of the competition.

According to recently released research, physical sales still outnumber online purchases, but the gap is speedily shrinking, with eCommerce making up more than 13% of all retail sales volume as of 2019. What’s more, that number is set to rise as the number of online shoppers — currently totaling 1.92 billion people and set to top 2 billion people by 2021 — continues to climb, with researchers expecting eCommerce to comprise nearly 20% of global retail sales by 2021. The proposed reasons for this online migration are myriad — some have cited convenience, while others have claimed price is the major motivating factor for the switch. But increasingly, it seems that consumers are making the move to eCommerce in search of better shopping experiences — 80 percent of consumers, in fact, said that the quality of a company’s customer experience make a major difference in whether they choose to shop with them.

In other words, when it comes to eCommerce, it’s all about the experience

But how can you be sure you’re providing the best customer experience possible to your eCommerce shoppers? The answer lies in your product experience. Product experience is the backbone of any compelling customer experience — it optimizes product data, information, and assets, creating a single source of truth for all of your products, and ensuring that customers who come to your eCommerce site find exactly the experience they were expecting. And, with Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions, your team can harness the power of product experience and use it to create a compelling experience for all of your eCommerce customers.

You don’t have to take our word for it, though. Here are three ways PXM helps make sure your eCommerce experience exceeds expectations:

1. Eliminate errors and cease customer confusion

No matter what they’re buying or where they’re buying it form, consumers like to be informed about potential purchases. According to researchers, a whopping 85 percent of consumers visit eCommerce sites to research potential purchases and help them make a decision — even if they plan to eventually make a purchase in-store. What does that mean for your eCommerce experience? It means that if there’s any sure fire way to guarantee your customers have an enjoyable experience when shopping online, it’s providing them with accurate, consistent, and emotionally compelling product information. But while that may sound simple enough, giving customers this information is often more challenging than it seems. That’s especially true for department stores like Myer, which often must manage massive product catalogs, or fashion brands like Kurt Geiger, which need to keep up with changing seasonal trends and product assortments. What’s more, most retailers aren’t handling this data efficiently — many still use inefficient legacy solutions like Excel spreadsheets, which often lead to errors or inconsistency in product data. PXM helps you eliminate these errors and accelerate time-to-market by creating a single source of truth for all product information. That way, your team can make sure online shoppers are able to find any information they’re looking for at the drop of a hat, simplifying and improving your customer experience while boosting sales conversion rates and reducing returns in the process.

2. Work faster, not harder

Tom Petty may have said it best — the waiting often really is the hardest part. These days, speed is of the essence, and if your team isn’t moving quickly enough, you’re likely to lose customers to a brand or retailer who is willing (and able) to meet their need for speed. Managing product information is often a laborious, tedious, and time-consuming process, one that forces your team to use energy and resources on repetitive tasks, leaving them little time to perfect product experiences. PXM, however, can eliminate some of these issues, and help your team work more effectively, by removing many of these repetitive tasks from your employees’ to-do lists using automated business rules engines. PXM also offers workflow, validation, and approval features. These tools are designed to help your team identify exactly what needs to be done to optimize product information and get new items online, what their role is in that process, and prioritize the various tasks that need to be completed. By helping your team work more efficiently, PXM unlocks their true potential and allows them to focus on what really matters — creating that accurate, consistent, and compelling content that turns shoppers into buyers. Help your team improve your eCommerce customer experience by giving them the tools they need to perfect individual product experiences efficiently and effectively.

3. Go glocal

As more consumers continue to head online when it comes time to make a purchase, they’re also increasingly buying products from brands and retailers based outside of their own country. Research shows that cross-border commerce now brings in more than $200 billion a year, a figure that has been on the rise since 2013 and accounts for one-sixth of global trade revenues. But while consumers are seemingly more willing than ever before to make cross-border transactions, they have some clear preferences when dealing with international brands and retailers. Most importantly, they demand to do business in their own language. Three-quarters of surveyed consumers told researchers that they prefer to do business in their own native tongue in one recent study. But simply speaking the language often isn’t enough. Your eCommerce experience also needs to ensure that consumers can find measurements and other product data in units that are familiar to them. Marketing teams must also ensure that product images are relevant and appropriate for new markets and that measurements are expressed in a way that would make sense to a local. If these assets aren’t relevant to customers, they’ll likely move on to another merchant that’s willing to show them exactly how this product fits into their climate, region, and lifestyle. PXM helps you effectively and efficiently localize your product information to offer the best cross-border eCommerce experience possible. It helps you translate information into new languages, and ensures all product information that needs to be adapted for your new locale gets a facelift, giving international customers a compelling and satisfying experience from anywhere in the world.

Perfect your product experience

Perfect your product experience! Discover how PXM can optimize your product information, and help your team create compelling customer experiences and excel in eCommerce by eliminating errors and inconsistencies in your product information, helping your team work together more effectively and efficiently, and easing the localization process. Contact us get your PIM project underway, download our eBook Product Information Management 101 to learn more about how PIM can help your business, or check out our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands to find out how to make sure you stay on top of the competition.

With that in mind, we here at Akeneo have come together to help you power your product experience, create a compelling customer experience, and win over shoppers in the experience economy. Check out our new infographic to find your must-have guide to product experience below!

To learn more about powering your product experience, visit our PXM page today!

To remain competitive, businesses must be on their toes. They need to adapt and innovate frequently in new and often unpredictable ways. It’s challenging, but with these challenges come opportunities. Those businesses able to offer customers valuable, personalized and engaging purchasing experiences will be rewarded through higher brand loyalty and customer lifetime value. To do so, it’s crucial to have stable foundations from which you can scale and succeed. Magento 2 offers exactly this. Designed for these rapidly changing times, Magento 2’s robustness, scalability and modern architecture allow you to deploy unified, compelling purchasing experiences across touchpoints, with maximum technical performance. We’re going to look at how migrating to Magento 2 can benefit various areas of your business immediately, and demonstrate how incorporating PIM into your M2 migration has the power to supercharge your success.

1. More than just an upgrade

If you’re currently operating on Magento 1, it can be tempting to think of migration as nothing more than a simple upgrade with maybe a few new features. But it’s so much more than that. Structurally, Magento 2 is completely different—there is a marked contrast in how it can affect your company’s performance. While M1 was mainly concerned with the performance of your online store itself, Magento 2 represents more of a suite of solutions including more functionalities and features. These allow for a truly omnichannel approach so that you can meet customers exactly where they are and in a manner that suits them. So, whether you’re a B2B store looking to combine your online store with multiple warehouses and distribution centers or a B2C brand with ambitions of offering personalized interactions, Magento 2 is your one-stop shop.

2. Native functionality

One major advantage of migrating to Magento 2 is the sheer array of powerful Magento features offered natively, out-of-the-box. These provide your business with the tools and flexibility to start delivering value for your customers immediately. Out-of-the-box functionality includes such key areas as Analytics, Merchandising, Checkout, Search, Order Management and much, much more, each designed to cover each and every one of your s commerce needs. What’s more, with Magento 2, you’ll have access to an increased number and diversity of extensions in Magento Marketplace which undergo quality assurance checks for consistently high product quality.

3. Unrivaled performance

If there’s one thing the modern-day shopper craves, it’s speed. Time and time again, research shows that slow-loading and poor-performing pages will see customers leave a site, unlikely to return in the future. Why would customers stick around when they can go to a competitor site which has the speedy and intuitive navigation they crave? Magento 2’s global content delivery network and secured cloud infrastructure offer unmatched speed in the industry (50% quicker than Magento 1) and is 99.99% SLA. This, combined with Magento’s software-hardware evaluations, means continuous, optimized, and consistent commerce performance for your site.

4. Deliver on customer experience

We already know that keeping customers engaged, entertained and delighted at every step of the purchasing journey is a major challenge for any business. Fortunately, with Magento 2, you’ll have the native functionality to address this head on. Here are just some of the areas in which Magento 2 is tailored to the often demanding needs of the modern-day shopper:

• Elasticsearch – Magento 2’s powerful search engine scales horizontally and vertically, allowing customers to navigate through search results with speed and ease.
• Experiences – Responsive themes and Page Builder allow you to easily create and edit engaging websites, and enrich them with content to provide immersive digital experiences.
• Check out – New two-step checkout, Instant Purchase option and PayPal integration provide your customers with quick and seamless checkout experiences for increased conversions and repeat-customers.

Maximize M2 migration success with PIM

Remember when we told you that PIM could be used to help your team maximize the success of your M2 migration? The key benefit of a PIM is that it consolidates, manages and enhances all your product information. It collects data from all your sources, enriches it, and then automatically publishes to your sales, marketing, and digital channels. This means that you have a single source of truth for product information, which increases efficiencies and wipes out errors in product data. To see PIM in action, check out our latest case study which shows how an Akeneo PIM implementation transformed our client’s operations. In the context of migration, you can also draw on a PIM to enrich and re-export your product information from Magento 1 to Magento 2! And then once you’re up and running on Magento 2, a PIM will complement Magento 2’s features by transforming your internal processes and providing the capabilities to expand to new markets and beyond. Combining a PIM solution with your M2 migration allows you to maximize your digital commerce success and see results! Make the most of your Magento M2 Migration! If you’d like to learn more about any aspect of an M2 migration, then get in touch with us today. Our team of commerce experts is on hand to provide a smooth M2 migration for long-term digital commerce success! Or Check out Vaimo’s blog for a guest blog post from Akeneo on PIM & M2!

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.