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!

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

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

What is Product Experience Management (PXM)?

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

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

What Happened to PIM?

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

Why is Product Experience Management So Important?

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

It is customary at the dawn of a New Year to offer the traditional prognosis on the trends that will contribute to growth in our industry over the next twelve months. This is always a risky exercise, but especially in these times of great uncertainty and change, which often transform enlightened prognostications into esoteric predictions. One must admit that 2018 was an eventful year for the retail and eCommerce ecosystem. Giants like Toys’R’Us or Sears collapsed, while others like Dollar General or Warby Parker thrived. Amazon, meanwhile, keeps growing, but is now doing so by replicating traditional brick-and-mortar sales models. The democratization of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are intriguing and sometimes worrying, as voice assistants gradually settle into our homes. What’s more, this is all happening in a geopolitical environment that has perhaps never been so unstable and tense. It is difficult in this context to predict what will happen in 2019, as contrary signals abound. Who can guess whether we will see a retail apocalypse, or a useful and necessary industry transformation? So, instead of playing Nostradamus, I prefer, at the beginning of this year, to pause and reflect on our role as technology companies in this great upheaval.

Technology to the Rescue?

Although we have known for a long time that even the best spot is never a given to strike gold, we still turn to technology as a miracle solution, especially in these times, when brands and distributors are urged to act quickly and innovate. Not a year goes by without a new trend or technology appears, destined to revolutionize the customer experience only to add to the growing list of false promises or poorly executed concepts (remember chatbots?). Ready-to-use fast-innovation is a lure, an empty promise. Technology itself has never made innovation. A CRM will not find customers, an eCommerce site will not sell products by itself, and a PIM will not manage your product data for you. It takes time, investment, both human and financial, and strategy to reinvent oneself. Technology has a crucial role to play and can become a great catalyst for this transformation, but there is an urgent need to rethink how it is built and shared.

Hyper-Transparency is the Real Solution

Now more than ever, we need the fundamental values of transparency and collaboration provided by open source offerings to stand up to the challenges of tomorrow. The biggest threat facing the world of retail and eCommerce today isn’t Amazon, but black boxes and technological obscurantism. This time must come to an end. To overcome this period of uncertainty, we must enter the age of hyper-transparency and collaborative experimentation. Benjamin Franklin understood it well, even in colonial times. He refused to patent any of his (many) inventions, believing that they could, and should, eventually be improved by his peers and future inventors. Innovation must be done collectively, which requires us to share our knowledge, victories, and failures, and feed each other, allowing everyone to grow and experiment. This necessary revolution in the way we design and consume technology has already begun. This has been proven by the recent acquisitions of open source players, including Github, acquired by Microsoft, Magento, purchased by Adobe and Mulesoft, bought by Salesforce.com. You can count on us to proudly carry the torch in 2019.

Happy New Year to each of you!

You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

It’s All About Products

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

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

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

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

Resolution #1: Take Product Information to the Next Level

Always Deliver Accurate and Complete Product Data

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

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

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

Contextualize Product Information

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

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

Resolution #3: Expand Product Lines and Target Markets

Grow Your Product Catalog

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

Expand into New Markets

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

Resolution #4: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Remove Tedious Work and Automate Processes

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

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

Resolution #5: Innovate More

Take Advantage of the Latest Technologies

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

Support Your New Year’s Resolutions with PIM

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

This holiday season, your eCommerce store will have visits from both loyal and new customers – providing a huge opportunity to significantly improve sales revenue. There are several aspects to consider as you prepare your online shop for the holiday season. In particular, you must consider one important yet often overlooked aspect: streamlining product data across multiple channels using product information management (PIM).

Omnichannel Optimization

Product descriptions are the key source of information for online buyers. Incomplete or outdated information can cause sales conversions to decrease. A PIM solution, like Akeneo, can help organizations maintain all of their product information in a centralized repository. This data can be utilized by the entire team and a variety of systems including warehouse point-of-sale solutions and a wide array of digital sales channels like web and mobile. Using a centralized system for this critical information provides organizations with numerous benefits. Let’s dive deeper into each one.

Quickly Launch New Product

The holiday season is a prime time to launch new products and roll out exclusive bundle offers for customers. To quickly spread the news about new product launches, associated content must be updated instantly across all sales channels. PIM solutions can help streamline this process and ensure that any update made within the system gets distributed to all of the appropriate channels. PIM can also further help improve sales as it supports the multi-channel marketing of seasonal campaigns and bundled offers.

Ensure Seamless Synchronization and No Duplication

PIM centralizes all product information into a single-window interface, which prevents multiple entries of the same product information. This ensures that all information is maintained with the latest, up-to-date details and shared across all systems including online and offline channels.

Reduce Returns by Standardizing Content

Product returns are higher for eCommerce retailers than in brick-and-mortar stores. According to research firm Optoro, return rates range between 18-35% and up to 60% of those returns end up as non-liquidated inventory, costing retailers 20-30% of the sale price of the product. Returns occur due to products having incorrect sizing information, items not matching descriptions, or just general unfamiliarity with the product. All of this boils down to one main problem – having incomplete or inaccurate product information. PIM can help reduce returns by standardizing product page details with ‘how-to’ videos and previous customer reviews/ratings to help purchasers make well-informed purchase decisions.

Enhance The Customer Experience

A PIM system allows customer-centric product categories and structures to be created independently of the ERP system. This setup makes site navigation significantly more customer-friendly. When customers carry out specific searches using parameters like size, technical specification, or category, all the relevant products show up. This shortens the customers’ search process, helps them locate specific products quickly, and helps them buy products faster. PIM provides relevant product information, easy navigation, and effective search results to help build confidence and enhance the customers’ buying experience.

PIM: The Critical Tools to Enhance Sales

Customers have high expectations when it comes to shopping for products online. In order to increase sales and decrease returns, you must ensure that product information is complete and consistent across channels. Today, product details no longer only include the standard parameters like weight, dimensions, and price, they must also include QR codes, ‘how-to’ videos, vendors, retail stock, reviews/ratings, and more. This is what customers expect. In the future, customer expectations will continue to increase so the complexity of product details in online stores will also increase significantly. All of these external elements make having a PIM system critical to not only managing all of your product data for internal purposes but to also increase your online sales. Interested in seeing how PIM can help you improve sales? Sign up for a demo of the Akeneo PIM solution.  

About Aravindhan Anbalagan

Aravindhan is a senior content writer at Ziffity with more than 8 years of experience. He enjoys writing about technology and the latest digital trends.

About Ziffity

Ziffity is a new age Digital agency focused on serving the connected world through design, technology and e-Marketing services. Our solutions include experience design for web and mobile, B2B/B2C eCommerce, PIM, AEM, AI chatbots, machine learning, and digital marketing. To learn more about what Ziffity does, check out their website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding and Determining Scope

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

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

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

PIM Best Practice #2: Identify Team and Define Processes

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

Select Your PIM Team

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

Define Processes and Roles

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

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

PIM Best Practice #3: Ensure Team Training and Adoption

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

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

PIM Best Practice #4: Determine Your Catalog Structure

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

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

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

Kiss Spreadsheets Goodbye and Simplify with PIM

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

In fact, there are several mistakes a business can make that will lead to product disapprovals or even account suspension. In order to help businesses keep their Google Shopping ads live and thriving, we met with Google to find out what the most common Google Shopping errors are. This is what we found.

Top 10 Google Shopping Errors:

Error 1: Missing Required Attributes

Remember those 10 required attributes absolutely every feed must include? It’s very common for marketers to miss one or two. Common issues include additional attributes required for specific types of products. For example, those selling clothes need to also include color and size.

Skipping any required fields can lead to product disapproval. If possible, analyze your feed before submitting it to Google to ensure all required information is included.

Error 2: Duplicate Product Titles

Many advertisers will submit multiple products with the same title. This common practice can directly hurt returns, as a product title is a key driver of clicks and sales. A good title helps shoppers determine whether the product is right for them. A bad title does not intrigue shoppers and will not lead to conversions.

Consider this attribute a great opportunity to drive more sales by infusing basic titles with keywords and selling points that matter to shoppers.

Error 3: Discrepancy Between Shopping Feed & Landing Page Content

Product ads should always successfully link to the related product page. This brings us to the next error: discrepancies between the Shopping feed and the landing page.

Imagine clicking on an ad and landing on a page with different product details. Maybe the product listed is now more expensive, in a different currency, or in the wrong color. This leads to a bad experience for the shopper and a possible account suspension for the seller.

There are several steps that can help combat this error:

• Make sure that Google always has the most up-to-date product data. That way, the feed will accurately reflect any product or landing page changes that have been made.
• Leverage schema.org markups and use Automatic Item Update.
• Always be aware of mobile links.
• Submit a standardized color (like “dark blue”) in the color attribute and use the title to display specific colors like “midnight blue” or “cobalt.”
• Stay on top of common problem attributes like price, currency, and color.

Provide a good customer experience by ensuring your shopping feed and landing page content match.

Error 4: Empty Product Categories

Google product taxonomies are complicated, and it’s easy for advertisers to include product categories that are incorrect or not properly mapped. However, Google relies on these categories in order to understand the exact nature of a product. Incorrect or missing category data can stop products from surfacing for the most relevant searches and audiences, resulting in poor performance.

There are not many workarounds for this step, so it may require manual work and attention. Advertisers using PIM (product information management) software should consider setting a fallback category in case there is no category assigned to a given product.

Although tedious, making sure your taxonomies are set up correctly is a critical step for Google to understand your products.

Error 5: Adding Custom Columns to the Google Feed

Google allows up to 5 Custom Labels to be used in a Shopping feed. These allow marketers to pair products with any particular data point, such as price range, season, historical ROI, or anything else. However, do not confuse the Custom Label with a custom column.

Including columns that Google doesn’t recognize will cause the feed to be disapproved. Instead, for these purposes, use Custom Labels.

Error 6: Images are Either Invalid or Too Small

An image can say 1000 words—unless they get your product disapproved. Then, they don’t say anything. There are numerous reasons an image could be disapproved, so it’s important to always follow Google’s rules and best practices.

• Be sure the image is at least 100×100 pixels (250×250 for apparel)
• Never add banners, copy, or other promotional information

Not following these guidelines can lead to products being disapproved.

Error 7: Adding Redirect Parameters to the “Link” Column

It can seem obvious to add tracking parameters to the product’s URL. However, each time Google crawls the link, that will lead to a fake click. The result will be a lot of bad data.

Always opt for a plain link in order to avoid fake clicks.

Error 8: Incorrect Format for “Tax”

While Google requires tax information to be submitted, it’s not always easy to do so correctly. Tax rates can vary even from state to state, making it infinitely more difficult to get the data right. Up to four sub-attributes can be provided within the one tax value.

These attributes are:

• Country – optional
• Region – optional
• Rate – as a percentage
• Whether tax is charged on shipping – accepted answers are yes or no

The standard format is: country (optional): region (optional): rate (as a percentage): whether tax is charged on shipping (accepted answers are yes or no).

An example would be: US:SC:6.00:y

Tax rates vary from state-to-state so double check that you have the correct information for your business.

Error 9: Missing GTIN

Businesses can spend hours hunting down product GTINs. It can be time-consuming, but these identifiers are absolutely crucial to any product listing. They allow Google to recognize the product in question. Whether it’s listed in Japan, Canada, or China, these numbers accurately identify the product every time.

There are companies who offer services specifically for locating GTINs, but these numbers can also be found online, on product packaging, or even in supply chain systems and supplier information.

GTINs help Google accurately identify products regardless of where they are listed.

Error 10: Keyword Stuffing or Promotional Text for Product Type

Marketers often try to add keywords or promotional information to the product type in order to stand out from the crowd.

For example, turning: Shoes > Sneakers into Shoe > Sneakers > Shoe > 50% Off.

Product types however simply do not function this way. This will not help make a product more visible or appealing. In fact, it can lead to account suspension. Keep the product type clean and clear; save the exciting information for another attribute like Description.

Keyword stuffing could lead to your Google Shopping account being suspended.

Prevent Google Shopping Errors with Productsup

Be sure to always keep these common feed errors in mind, as they can directly impact your returns! To learn more about Google Shopping ads, check out the complete introduction from Productsup here.

About the Author: Marcel Hollerbach, CMO

Marcel Hollerbach is the Chief Marketing Officer of Productsup where he is responsible for international marketing and business development for Productsup, the leading SaaS platform for online retailers being used by enterprise customers in over 20 markets. He began his journey studying IT business in Würzburg and Stanford and shreds on the guitar in his free time.