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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Joshua Warren:

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

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

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

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

1.    Enabling Omnichannel Product Experiences

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

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

2.    Supporting Cross-Border eCommerce Growth

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

3.    Onboarding Product Data

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

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

4.    Streamlining Catalog Management

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

PIM: The B2B Product Information Hero

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

Boston Office Grand Opening

To mark the occasion, we held a gala celebration with nearly 100 guests, including employees, customers, partners, industry analysts, friends from French Tech Boston, as well as members of local community organizations including the President of the Somerville Chamber of Commerce and representatives from Somerville’s Office of Strategic Planning & Community Development. Located in a newly renovated former MBTA trolley repair facility, the celebration’s “steampunk” theme embraced the building’s past merged with its technological future as our US base of operations. Check out the pictures from a fun evening of networking and celebrating!

Continued Expansion

The opening of our new office marks an exciting time for Akeneo. Besides physical global expansion, our ecosystem and community of partners continues to thirve as well. Our community continues to play a vital role in our progress and we can’t thank our partners enough! We are excited to see what the future has in store for Akeneo.

Want to Join In On the Fun? We’re Hiring!

That’s right. With all of this expansion, we need a strong team of individuals ready to tackle the challenges of product information management. To support the US and Canadian markets we are hiring for numerous roles in our Boston location – apply to join our team today!

The Rise of Omnichannel Customer Experiences

The digital transformation has boosted the importance of omnichannel customer experiences in recent years. Ten years ago, a company could simply put its catalog on the web as an online store. But then five years later, they needed to also offer a mobile experience to ensure they would not lose customers to the competition. Today, shopping experiences must make it easy to buy at any time of the day, from anywhere, and through a variety of devices. As a result of this evolution, the boundaries between eCommerce and point of sale are less and less visible: the customer comes to a brand by clicking on an advertisement, then goes to the website before ending up in a store.

In the era of digital transformation, the boundaries between eCommerce and point of sale have become increasingly blurred.

But this omnichannel logic is not limited to the ability of a company to offer its products or services through all channels in the same way. The customer experience must be adapted and contextualized for each channel to support the customer’s buying journey. If a website allows you to organize products by category, the mobile experience will favor a more visual style, while in-store advisors will be able to answer specific questions to address the smallest details sought by the customer.

The Added Value Lies in the Complementarity of  Channels

Omnichannel offers the opportunity to combine the benefits of the different channels, each with their own specificities. The winning strategy is to offer differentiated product experiences, depending on the channel used. Who has not experienced the disappointment of going to a store, after doing research online, to get additional information from a merchant who merely opens a web page to read … what you have already discovered yourself? At a time when all information is now available online, the physical channel must offer added value that the buyer cannot find elsewhere. The seller must therefore offer personalized support and recommendations useful to the act of purchase. Global personal care and beauty retailer Sephora understood the benefit of this approach. Their in-store sales clerks have become “beauty consultants” who take advantage of digital technology to offer personalized advice to customers. At the same time, Sephora also follows their clients’ comments and questions on social networks in order to identify opportunities for improving the experience.

Each channel must provide valuable product data and information to help the purchaser through the buying journey.

Organize the Product Experience in an Omnichannel Context

Companies have no choice but to manage their product information across a variety of sales channels. In addition to ensuring consistency across channels, brands must also embrace new channels and take into account their unique characteristics. For example, with social networks, broadcasting images can improve the conversion rate on a product. Imagine that by clicking on the image of a product on Instagram, the consumer could discover your product with a description adapted to its uses, and make an emotional connection with the item and your brand. In addition, with the rise of voice technologies, organizations need to manage product data very precisely to provide the experience customers expect. Voice inquiries tend to be at least 15 words including phrases like “where,” “how,” and “what.” Organizations must understand how customers interact with these channels and provide optimized product descriptions in order for their products to be discovered using these new technologies. To effectively work with all of these technological situations, organizations must have solutions in place to manage channel specific product data and emotional descriptions. Marketplaces, meanwhile, bring their own challenges. For example, as certain marketplaces like Amazon have specific requirements, you may not be able to provide the same emotional context or experiences as your own website. Organizations must find a way to convey their message across both their website where they have complete control and across marketplaces where they must fulfill certain requirements. It becomes urgent for brands to realize that omnichannel is not only about managing customer interactions but also about providing contextual information and a product experience that meets customer expectations. It is, therefore, necessary to organize product data and to define a data model to help broadcast the right information to the right channel. The next generation of product experience management (PXM) solutions make it possible to easily launch offers across channels by providing the necessary contextual information. This is the critical component for brands to optimize their omnichannel customer experiences.

Remember: Omnichannel isn’t just about managing customer interactions across channels; it also requires providing contextual information to match customer expectations.

Interested in learning more about how Akeneo PIM solutions can help you deliver omnichannel customer experiences? Contact our team.