How can organizations work to not only create good customer experiences but to create custom and memorable ones by mobbing beyond just using new technologies? Read the full article on Forbes…

• Speed up time to market
• Improve product data quality
• Make it easier to introduce new products
• Remove the need to transfer information from spreadsheet to spreadsheet
• Simplify the supplier onboarding process
• Reduce the time it takes to review product information
• Increase bandwidth for marketing

Giving suppliers a cloud-based environment to provide authoritative product information makes it easier and faster to get products to market and to add new products to your catalog.

Managing Product Information from Suppliers

There are several options for retailers to collect product data directly from suppliers. They are, after all, the experts in their products and should have the most up to date and reliable information. Here are a few of the ways retailers have to tap suppliers as a valuable resource for gathering product information.

Option 1: Manual Input

Every supplier has different formats and product content and it’s common for product information to be brought together from fragmented sources into cumbersome and confusing spreadsheets. As a result, retailers need to manually collate and organize product data that suppliers manually provide, and load it into their PIM for further enrichment and classification into catalogs.

Manually inputting product information is a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone task.

Option 2: Supplier Portals

Instead of manual input, some retailers instead rely on supplier portals in an attempt to resolve these issues. However, supplier portals are typically set up by the suppliers with little regard for the information that you need. In this setup, suppliers still have slightly different product information standards and each supplier uses a different portal. With this setup, your team is still left completing manual tasks to get the information you require.

Supplier portals don’t support streamlined collaboration and communication between teams.

Option 3: Supplier Product Onboarder

A supplier product onboarding solution that integrates with your PIM gives you the best of both worlds. This solution enables your suppliers to directly provide their product information in the format that you require. With seamless integration with your PIM, both suppliers and retailers/distributors can improve collaboration, increase productivity, and deliver high-quality product information.

Enable your suppliers to directly provide their product information using the format that you require.

The Akeneo Onboarder

The Akeneo Onboarder is a new product that complements Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition and allows suppliers to directly provide product information to the retailer for streamlined processing into Akeneo PIM. There is no need for back and forth emailing spreadsheets or files. Instead, retailers/distributors can define required information attributes and catalog structures, and then suppliers input the product information directly into the Onboarder. The retailer can then review and accept the information and enrich the data in Akeneo PIM. This optimized process significantly increases productivity by removing the need to manually reformat or convert product data.

The Akeneo Onboarder makes it easy to:
–   Increase productivity
–   Expand product offerings
–   Ensure security

Suppliers benefit from having more control over the information provided to the retailer, and can also propose new products for the retailer to carry. If the retailer accepts the new products, they are automatically added to the retailer’s catalog. As a result, suppliers and retailers can both recognize the business benefits from an expanded catalog.

The Onboarder also allows your organization to maintain control over product information. You can easily accept or reject product data but still eliminate tedious manual enrichment tasks. Plus, providing suppliers with the ability to directly submit product information increases accuracy which supports better product and customer experiences. These productivity improvements give your team more time to focus on expanding product catalogs and other key enrichment tasks.

Simplified Product Information Enrichment Processes

Setting up the SaaS-based Akeneo Onboarder is simple:

1. The retailer creates supplier accounts
2. The retailer defines product information requirements
3. The retailer sends supplier invitations via email
4. The supplier accepts the invitation and logs in to Akeneo Onboarder
5. Products that need to be enriched are displayed on a clear grid
6. Completely enriched products are automatically sent back to the retailer/distributor for approval and subsequent integration into the retailer’s Akeneo PIM instance

Capabilities

Within the Akeneo Onboarder retailers and distributors can:

• Define supplier product data requirements
• Allow suppliers to directly provide product information
• Enable suppliers to propose new products
• Streamline product data management approval workflows
• Easily review and accept or reject product information
• Mass-approve and accept new products from trusted suppliers
• Scale to support up to 2,500 different suppliers

Improve Supplier Product Information Management Using Akeneo Onboarder

By having a dedicated UI for your suppliers to input product information, you can be sure that you always have the complete and accurate information you need. The Akeneo Onboarder helps streamline these processes and workflows so you can increase productivity and get products to market faster to drive more sales.

Interested in learning more about the Akeneo Onboarder or want to learn more about Akeneo PIM? Just give us a shout and we would be happy to answer any of your questions.

Kian Gould, founder and CEO of AOE, explains this shopping shift and how they implemented Akeneo PIM to help manage the products of numerous retailers and ensure that customers are receiving one consistent user experience. For the complete story, check out the interview:

Interview Transcript:

My name is Kian Gould. I’m the founder and CEO of AOE. And we have built a very high-scale omnichannel multi-merchant marketplace solution, that we call OM³. And it’s powering most of the world’s airport’s digital experiences – now and in the future.

What main retail and eCommerce trends do you witness in the travel industry?

So, the travel retail industry is really going through somewhat of a transformational phase. They’ve always relied a lot on impulse purchasing. And that is really going away now. More and more, we’re seeing spending per passenger drop. And of course, one of the reasons is that there’s such a vast amount of possibilities to purchase products digitally throughout their journey, whether it’s on Amazon or other channels. And so, the classic travel retail industry has started to suffer. A lot of airports, airlines, and also retailers are trying to combat that kind of disruption by providing real omnichannel digital experiences to their passengers. The crucial thing about that is that, in travel retail, there’s generally much more of a possibility to know your customer because they are passengers, and they are flying. So you have more information on them. And that makes it possible to personalize, recommend, and build experiences that are much more catered to each of these passengers. Which is, of course, very different from a classic retail environment where you really have anonymous visitors coming into your store.

How do shoppers respond to this omnichannel buying experience?

You always have to ask yourself the question, “Why does a person decide to shop through one channel versus another?” And what it comes down to, in our experience, is that it’s very much about this kind of microsecond decisions. Where it depends a lot on convenience, it depends a lot on pricing, it depends on how desperately I want a product at that moment. This is really what we’re seeing that the customers are looking for. If a product is not available at that moment when they want it, they will not come back to check it at a later stage. If the product doesn’t have a good price now, they will not try to come back to check if it has a good price later. They will try to find another channel that has it at a better price. So, a lot of the importance in this channel is, that you’re really providing a value and that it’s accepted by these travelers to help them along their journey. Either through convenience or through an actual good value proposition, cost-wise.

How do you power an omnichannel commerce strategy for your clients?

So, what we’ve done, because we work for these big, massive airports that have a lot of different systems that have to be integrated. They have physical retail, they have physical food and beverage. They have a lot of channels that their customers use. Whether it’s the website or the app but very often it’s also third-party websites and apps that have to be fed that content. We had to build a solution that is truly agnostic to where traffic comes from, where products come from, and where they’re fulfilled. So we built something that we call, OM3. The Omnichannel Multi-Merchant Marketplace Suite. And that basically enables these multi-retailer venues to take all of their products, all of their services, integrate them all into one solution and then provide it to the customer independent of what channel they’re using (even if it’s not their own channel). Through APIs, through voice APIs, we can integrate with virtually any channel that you can think of.

Can you give us an example of a successful omnichannel project?

So, we’re now live at three airports around the world. Frankfurt was the first to embark on this journey. We then went live in Heathrow and in Auckland. We’re currently doing projects with several airports and major airlines around the world. This is not only a project, this is a new strategy and a new solution approach that we have taken with that. You’re going to see much more of that in the future of these kind omnichannel experiences, that are driven by passengers and multi-retailer venues. One of the most challenging aspects of building this solution was that you have products coming from multiple retailers. They all have their own ERP, or POS, or PIM systems. The data and the attributes are not necessarily aligned. The big challenge is, how do you take all this data and then present it to the customer in a way that they can relate to it. A simple example, one retailer could call a color black and the other one could call it noir. At that moment, you wouldn’t be able to match those two products in a certain category anymore. So, a lot of the work that has to be done, is to consolidate all that data. And then, make sure that independent of what the sources of the retailers, we can present it all to the customer in one common user experience. In order to achieve that, we decided to use Akeneo as a PIM solution for all of the products. We had to then customize the solutions significantly because there are some very specific requirements in travel retail. Amongst them, is that every product comes with a certain concession fee that is paid by the retailer to the airport when it’s sold. Certain products are only allowed to be sold in certain volumes. Which are restrictions imposed by the brands. You cannot buy more than two Chanel Number Fives as one passenger, for example. There are restrictions on volumes of liquor. Then there are also restrictions on whether we can deliver one product from this terminal to another. Because one is domestic and one is an international terminal. Also, sometimes products sit in warehouses. One is a bonded warehouse, the other one is actually not a bonded warehouse. So all of that is functionality that had to be developed specifically inside of the PIM system. So that, we make sure that we never try to sell a product to a customer that we’re not allowed to, or that we cannot sell to them. That requires quite a sophisticated PIM solution and we integrated that seamlessly into our whole OM3 platform.

Want to learn more about the omnichannel advantages of PIM?

Check out the complete customer story of AOE and our Frankfurt Airport Project.

About Kian T. Gould

Kian T. Gould is the CEO and Founder of AOE, one of the leading global Omnichannel E-Commerce and Digital Transformation experts within the Open Source space. He is a regular speaker at many global conferences and a well-known expert in airport digitalization. For the past 15 years, his company AOE has assisted global Fortune 1000 companies with their Digital Transformation and Omnichannel E-Commerce strategies.

About AOE

AOE is a leading global provider of services for digital transformation and digital business models. AOE relies exclusively on established Enterprise Open Source technologies. This leads to innovative solutions, digital products and portals in agile software projects, and helps build long-lasting, strategic partnerships with our customers. In our daily work, such diverse systems as PIM, CRM and E-Commerce are integrated.

Here are 5 steps to get it done with a PIM solution.

1. Collect and prepare your current product data

Once you’ve adopted a PIM solution, the first step is to collect your existing product data and prepare to enrich it for use in your channels. This data usually comes from a variety of systems such as your ERP, from marketing systems, and externally from suppliers. PIM will help you through the process of cleaning this data and deciding which sources have the best attribute data. Plus, once these workflows are established, they are not only helpful when implementing a PIM solution, they can also be used when on-boarding new items.

Once your data is in the PIM, a range of powerful data validation, editing, localization, and export options become yours, giving you the tools you need to quickly expand into new channels and locales, significantly speeding up time-to-market.

Importing your data into your PIM is also the perfect time to teach your team how to collaborate within the program.

Pro-Tip: Akeneo offers the Akeneo Onboarder, which gives your suppliers a cloud-based environment to easily provide their product information directly to you. We also offer a range of ready-to-rock import tools as well as a huge worldwide ecosystem of integrators.

2. Organize your products and attributes to scale data enrichment

With thousands of products to manage, it’s critical to find ways to ensure your product information processes will scale. A PIM should make the process run smoothly and make it easy for marketers to find and enrich the right product information. For example, Akeneo PIM helps simplify the process by allowing you to create families and attribute groups. Products in a family can share a set of attributes, so as new products are added to the family, they automatically inherit the shared attributes. These attribute values can be updated sequentially or as a mass action.

Another capability of Akeneo PIM is an attribute group. This feature enables you to group attributes together to better organize related attributes and give more visibility to those teammates responsible for providing and validating those values, as well as to help organize the team’s work across a range of products. For example, you can group together name and description into a “marketing” attribute group,  size, weight, and color into a “Technical specs” attribute group, and images and files into a “media” attribute group. The product form will display these attributes together to make editing simpler. You can further control who does what by assigning permissions on attribute groups to specify who can edit those attribute values.

These capabilities save time and can enable teams to better focus their enrichment activities.

Pro-Tip: Akeneo PIM allows you to set a completeness check for each product listing to ensure no product is published to a channel unless it is 100% complete and ready.

3. Classify your products

In addition to managing attributes and attribute groups, PIM lets you structure your catalog in categories. These categories should be broken down into groups that customers are actively searching for. When figuring out your own product categories, it’s a good idea to consult with your eCommerce managers who have deep knowledge of how your customers are browsing for products.

For example, Fossil makes it easy to search for and find watches based on who it is for (men or women), by watch type (where types vary whether it is a man’s or woman’s watch), and by different features such as strap material and color. Some categories will vary dynamically based on if the product is on sale, is a new product, or is a best seller. By grouping your products into specific categories that customers use to search, you’ll greatly improve the browsing experience and chances of a sale.

Pro-Tip: Akeneo PIM enables huge flexibility in structuring your catalog. You can classify products differently for different channels in order to deliver the right product experience by channel or locale.

4. Write awesome descriptions to be relevant and impactful

Just because your data is present and accounted for doesn’t mean that it’s doing its job. To create truly high-quality product information your team needs to utilize their marketing skills to create compelling and emotionally impactful product descriptions that work for each channel and platform. PIM gives your team the bandwidth to do this high-value work by automating the tedious manual work that used to occupy 90% of their day. They can now take the time to consider questions like:

How should your product make buyers feel?

How can you make your product stand out from alternatives?

An emotional connection has proven to be important for buyers, even in a B2B scenario.

The “voice” of your brand is discernable across multiple touchpoints. PIM makes it easy to ensure this voice is consistent and appropriate for every channel. Managing your eloquent, emotional descriptions and related media in your PIM will make it easier to localize, as well as ensure your brand’s voice is consistent across all channels. Here are some things to consider to ensure your product descriptions accurately represent your products:

• Successful brands have consistent editorial styles and tones. Apple prefers the minimal approach, relying on brilliant images and a few perfectly chosen words to convey their message. The Peterman Catalog, on the other hand, sells every product with an enticing short story. Think about how you’d like to present your products to the world, and how your descriptions can serve this goal.
• A good product story conveys emotion and should include more than just specs and usage information. Try to tell a story about your product with words, images, or both. Customers get a better sense of how they might use a product when they see it in context. An image of a GPS on a jogger’s wrist, or an athletic shoe on a trail runner’s foot, give customers an innate sense of the product’s purpose and how it could become a part of their lives.
• When creating any product description, write strategically so you optimize your product to appear in search results (a practice known as SEO or search engine optimization). Choose words or phrases that people are searching for. Just be sure to avoid “word salad” descriptions—customers want to see recognizable language, not a string of adjectives and nouns designed for algorithms. For optimal SEO, ensure that every product that goes live has metadata.

Pro-Tip: Unleash your marketing team’s creativity for massive increases in conversions and revenue.

5. Create associations among products

Using your PIM, you can create sets of seasonal items in advance of actual seasonal sales, and associate several products you want to market together. For example, in Akeneo PIM you can set up a “collection” association type and group together spring or summer items months in advance. Similarly, you can create a cross-sell association to support selling related items, such as a computer and a printer, a camera and a bag, or a t-shirt and jeans. With the flexibility in Akeneo PIM, associations can be made at the individual product level or at the product model level such that different variants of a product – by size, by color – can be managed without having to specify the association for every possible combination of colors and sizes.

Pro-Tip: Akeneo Enterprise Edition provides for unlimited numbers of collections—allowing your team to prepare for every holiday and every season.

PIM is a Key Solution to Effectively Power Any Merchandising Strategy

By delivering high-quality product data that is complete, accurate, consistent, relevant, accessible and up-to-date, PIM is the essential tool for merchandising.

A PIM solution is the central platform to capture all product knowledge, comments and suggestions from your teams across your organization and across all touchpoints. It works cross-channel and delivers a compelling product experience to your customers wherever they are. But PIM can be more than a container – it can deliver product information, provide insights, and offer recommendations to make product information management a linchpin for any merchandising strategy.

Product data quality doesn’t come easy, but we can help make it a lot easier. Give us a shout to talk to one of our business analysts or solution partners about best practices that you can adopt for product data quality.

 

To do this at scale, your team can benefit from tools that make localization processes more efficient and enable you to deliver better product experiences, even in a complex environment. Considerations for accomplishing this task and selecting the right tool for the job include:

• What is the best way to manage translation at scale?
• How do you manage multiple metrics and standards?
• How do you adapt product information for cultural specificities and localization?
• How will distributed teams collaborate on editing product information?
• How can you ensure compliance with the rules and regulations for each market?

Product information management (PIM) provides the infrastructure you need to think globally while acting locally.

The Foundation to eCommerce Growth: Product Information Management (PIM)

PIM is a business application designed for marketers and eCommerce teams that makes it easy to address new markets and methodically prepare product information to be translated, localized, and deployed to relevant channels and touchpoints.

PIM is critical to any eCommerce internationalization strategy.

PIM Benefits

• Easily manage and adjust product information at scale: PIM makes it easy to manage and edit product information across an entire organization. Mass edit capabilities allow you to update large amounts of product data at once and ensure that the product information that shows on any channel is exactly what you specify. Business rules can help automate attribute fields and categorization for a localized product mix. Whether you need to modify descriptions and images based on specific cultural requirements or simply need to include different measurement systems and sizes, PIM can handle and automate many of these tasks to simplify the product enrichment process.
• Increase localization efficiency across distributed teams: PIMs provide translation capabilities that can manage the job of translation without users ever needing to leave the PIM. These translation plug-ins provide users with a choice of automated or manual translation services and significantly accelerate the translation and localization processes with streamlined workflows across global teams. What’s more, distributed workflows allow local contributors to modify product descriptions based on local needs while keeping headquarters staff informed and in charge of the global process.
• Accelerate time to market: PIM speeds up time to market by optimizing all the workflows associated with product information management. Product information can be automatically pulled from supplier ERPs and other data systems to populate and update product descriptions. The final product information can then be distributed to eCommerce storefronts, marketplaces, and print catalogs in the required formats. No more days wasted with tedious copying and pasting information to and from spreadsheets.
• Ensure quality control, legal compliance, and risk management: PIM tools that offer validation workflows and a business rules engine can better control product information quality and be sure that products are properly represented across every market. What’s more, countries have variable rules regarding labeling, licensing, and merchandising. These rules are often more strict for highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and food & beverage — where for example different states and countries require different labeling for ingredients, country of origin, health warnings, etc. By using PIM, organizations can ensure that these rules are met and as a result better manage their risk.
• Improved conversion and return rates. The final outcome of all your hard work is more accurate and compelling product information and a better product experience. This naturally increases conversions and decreases returns. Profits follow.

PIM is a centralized tool that makes it easy to address new markets and prepare product information to be translated, localized, and deployed to the relevant channels and touchpoints.

What to Look for in a PIM Solution

There are a number of PIM solutions on the market. Here’s what to look for:

• A centralized platform that allows your team to handle all product information enrichment, localization, translation, etc. in one place.
• Integrated enrichment process: Look for a solution that ensures comprehensive, complete, and accurate product data. The best tools offer workflow-driven processes so product data changes can be reviewed and validated for accuracy. You should also look for a completeness tool to be sure your product information is fully enriched and populated before spreading it to sales channels.
• Automation tools that can eliminate some of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks required in product information translation and localization including metric system conversions, currency conversions, as well as actual content translation.
• Workflow and business rules that validate and control product information quality, improve localized asset management, and manage locale-specific attributes, which makes it possible to maintain catalogs in multiple languages within a single PIM.

PIM acts as a single source of truth for all product information.

PIM the eCommerce Internationalization Accelerator

PIM is the platform you need to power your internationalization strategy. Optimized workflows and tools ensure that your products look good and are relevant across every channel, in every locale, and in alignment with your brand. Interested in seeing how a PIM could support your growth plans? Contact us today or sign up for a demo.

Shopify Plus, the leading cloud-based, multi-channel commerce platform, was built for high-growth, high-volume businesses. Akeneo PIM complements Shopify Plus and enables merchants to efficiently manage and scale their product catalogs, centralize product information from multiple internal and external sources, and deliver product information reliably and consistently wherever it is needed. The integration between Akeneo and Shopify Plus is possible thanks to a new connector that is available on Akeneo Marketplace. The plugin connects both platforms and makes it possible to seamlessly spread product information to multiple Shopify Plus stores as well as to other sales channels including marketplaces, print catalogs, and POS, among others.

Akeneo Solution Partners

To implement this integrated solution, Akeneo works with multiple partners that offer skills and competency in both Shopify Plus and Akeneo. Here are some Akeneo solution partners who can help merchants build and run their digital solutions successfully:

Guidance

Guidance is a digital commerce agency based in Los Angeles that serves growth-oriented mid-market and enterprise branded manufacturers and merchants in both B2C and B2B. The agency offers industry-leading practices in multichannel retail strategies, mobile, customer experience, innovative visual design, UI/UX and complex system integration. Since 1993, national flagship retailers and consumer brand manufacturers have relied on Guidance’s expertise to facilitate more than $5 billion in web, mobile and social commerce. Brands including Foot Locker, Munchkin, Sole Society, Burlington, Johnny Was, K-Swiss, Robert Graham, Yamaha, Burlington, and others have engaged Guidance to build more than 300 world-class, omnichannel websites and apps that captivate and engage users and accelerate growth. “Our partnership with Akeneo and Shopify Plus is a great example of an ecosystem coming together to bring brands, merchants, manufacturers, and distributors the most advanced technical commerce solutions available in today’s market with one goal in mind, accelerate growth for our mutual clients,”  says Jeff Herrera, VP, Marketing and Channel Development at Guidance.

Redstage

Redstage specializes in design, development, growth, and strategy for digital commerce globally. The company provides support for a multitude of diverse market demands, with scalable services for enterprises of any scale. Redstage’s capabilities enable the agency to build profound eCommerce experiences and conquer even the most unique B2B & B2C challenges for clients. “Empowering online stores with the latest technology is at the heart of our brand philosophy,” says Hasan Elkomey, SVP of strategic partnerships at Redstage. “Akeneo PIM, combined with the Shopify Plus platform, is a powerful blend of such technologies, enabling businesses to streamline and simplify back-end processes so they can focus on bigger initiatives and scale faster. I’m excited for what’s to come as we continue developing the future of eCommerce together.”

Blue Badger

Blue Badger is a boutique eCommerce agency that has been making an impact in the eCommerce world since 2015. Founded on our passion for being excellent at the technical aspects of building, updating and maintaining an eCommerce website, today we proudly work in collaboration with some of North America’s finest retailers. We believe we have the experience and skills to take your eCommerce business to the next level of success. “As an official partner of both platforms, Blue Badger is extremely happy to see how Akeneo and Shopify complete each other in a meaningful way,” explained David Benchetrit, Blue Badget co-founder and head of client services. “Shopify’s streamlined approach to eCommerce makes it possible to go from zero to live in a matter of weeks, but the tradeoff is that in exchange they drastically limit the ways in which merchants can define and enrich their products. Enter Akeneo – whose easy-to-use PIM empowers merchants efficiently to manage product knowledge and expose it to their sales channels through a set of robust and powerful APIs. When these two best-in-class systems are used in tandem, incredible synergies can be found, because each system is both focused on the one thing they are amazing at while compensating for a weakness in its counterpart.”

Akeneo and Shopify Plus

As an open-source solution, Akeneo provides the flexibility to add new functionality to address specific and unique business processes. This capability also allows for easy integration with other systems that are either sources or destinations for product information. If you’re a Shopify Plus customer and are looking to deliver compelling product experiences, check out Akeneo PIM and the Shopify Akeneo Connector and see how you can enable a better omnichannel experience with high quality, comprehensive product information.

Requirements: Ease of Use, Customizability, Integrations

Any PIM that claims to be the best in the market needs to handle the big three PIM requirements with aplomb.

Easy to Learn and Use

Ease of use is critical so that your team can increase productivity rather than getting bogged down by complicated and confusing tools. As marketers and eCommerce teams are the experts on the products and know how to best describe and display product information across all sales channels, it’s critical that these users have a business application that makes them more productive and agile – and not have to work using overly technical interfaces or rely on support from IT to get the job done.

“The intuitive user interface and well thought-out workflows reduce the training effort and allow for a very short ramp-up phase for new users.”
– Matthias Ackeret, Online Marketing Manager / PIM Project Manager at Axon Lab

Customizable to Suit Your Needs

Create the perfect solution for your organization’s specific needs. We understand that every catalog is unique, so our solution has been built to support all types of catalogs – from simple to complex, defining how families are set and which attributes apply, what associations are made between products, and how you categorize your products – for the utmost in flexibility.

“We were looking for a simple and intuitive solution that gave us total freedom in the way we wanted to present our products.”
– Amandine Marousez, Project Manager and Business Analyst at Zodio

Integrates with Your Existing Infrastructure

The purpose of PIM is to centralize product information and streamline the process of collecting, enriching, and spreading your product data to all your sales channels. Therefore, it is critical for the PIM to be able to easily connect to other systems and tools. We’ve worked with numerous technology partners to develop an ecosystem of extensions to simplify integration with the other tools and systems you are already using.

“The PIM, a valuable tool for a fast digital transformation!”
– Renaud Montin, Marketing & Digital Manager at Eram

What Does the Best Product Information Management (PIM) Software Include?

Here are a few of the attributes of Akeneo PIM that make it the best option for managing product information.

Product Information Flow

Akeneo PIM helps your organization by helping marketers to collect, enrich, and distribute product information to your sales channels.

Collect: With a range of customization and integration capabilities, you can import data from multiple heterogeneous data sources. What’s more, you can prioritize data sources to ensure that you’re collecting from the most trusted source information.

Enrich: Once all basic product data is imported your team can enrich product data with technical data, usage data, rich marketing descriptions, and other media. Product information completeness widgets combined with built-in validation controls ensure that all necessary product information fields are complete and consistent before items are exported to your website or marketplace. As part of the enrichment process, products can be classified into one or multiple catalogs based on your unique catalog organization.

Distribute: Once product information is enriched you can easily manage your products throughout a variety of sales channels (print, mobile applications, point-of-sale systems, eCommerce websites, etc.). You have complete control over product distribution with the ability to select the products and relevant attributes that you want to include in each channel. Or, if you want to distribute your products via print you can use one of our connectors to create beautiful print catalogs.

The best product information management software will help you throughout the entire product enrichment and data publication process.

Features That Matter

Akeneo PIM’s standard and advanced feature set further supports this flow of product information.

Standard Features: included in all versions of Akeneo PIM

Import and Export Data: Akeneo PIM simplifies the import and export of all types of data. Our solution allows you to pull and use data from virtually any source—from your ERP to Excel.

Organize and Classify Products: Every product catalog is different, which is why we give you the power to organize and classify your products however you choose. With Akeneo PIM you aren’t restricted to a specific format or stuck using predefined attributes; you have the flexibility to make our solution work for you.

Edit and Translate: Once information is imported into Akeneo PIM you can effortlessly edit or add new products to the catalog. You can define the attributes, complete product sheets, add media, and more. Plus, extensions make it easy to translate product information into the languages you need for your various channels and markets.

Completeness Widget: Inaccurate or incomplete product information negatively impacts sales, returns, and brand equity. Akeneo PIM helps you ensure that product information is complete for every single item with an easy-to-view completeness widget.

Extension Ecosystem: Our extensive marketplace of extensions continues to expand the functionality of Akeneo PIM. It includes integrations with a range of well-known marketplaces, print catalog design tools, and more.

“The out-of-the-box features of the PIM formed a solid basis to realize visible results quickly and early.”
– Matthias Ackeret, Online Marketing Manager / PIM Project Manager at Axon Lab

Advanced Features: included in Akeneo Enterprise Edition and Cloud Editions

Versioning & publication: Our versioning feature allows you create duplicate versions of your product catalog so you can easily revert back to an older version as needed or to create seasonal and specialty catalogs. You also have an audit trail of product information changes over time.

Advanced Rights Management: Akeneo PIM gives you complete control over what users can access and what permissions they have to work on product enrichment. Whether users are internal employees or external freelancers you can specify exactly what product information they can or cannot view and edit.

Rules Engine: Fully customize our PIM using the rules engine, which allows you to create your own automatic actions and triggers. You can define rules to automatically classify products based on attributes or transform technical data into more comprehensive information for consumers. This rules-based automation speeds the process of product data enrichment and onboarding new products.

Product Asset Manager (PAM): Simplify media management for all of your products. Quickly localize, adapt, and attach every image, video, and document that you want to include.

Teamwork Assistant: Teams can easily manage enrichment projects with the teamwork assistant. This easy-to-use interface is personalized for each team member and displays exactly which enrichment activities need to be completed. The teamwork assistant even helps keep your team on track by automatically generating notifications as deadlines approach and further improves workflows by helping them focus only on the relevant information that they need to complete.

Validation Workflows: Organizations want to maintain control and consistency across catalogs, but there is no way one person can be responsible for enriching every product. Approval workflows make it easy for managers to view and approve or reject all of the product information that contributors have added to the catalog.

Advanced product management tools make Akeneo the best PIM to keep your team on track across multiple product enrichment projects.

Akeneo: The Best PIM Offered 4 Ways

We understand that PIM is not a “one-size-fits-all” type of product. Every organization has unique needs which is why we offer the best product information management software in four different setups.

Community Edition

Get all of the standard features of Akeneo PIM, including access to our marketplace of extensions. This version is perfect for people looking to explore everything the best PIM has to offer with full functionality. Plus, it’s FREE, and our active online community can assist you throughout your implementation process and with any technical challenges you may face.

Enterprise Edition

Get everything included in the community edition plus all of the advanced features. This enterprise PIM provides your organization with numerous customization options by giving you full access to the open source PIM code & web API. Maintain complete control over software updates and manage your own technological infrastructure when you use the Akeneo Enterprise Edition.

Cloud Edition: Flexibility Mode

Flexibility Mode is exactly like the standard Enterprise Edition except we handle the technology infrastructure. Store your information on our network of servers and let us take care of the maintenance. You still get all of the standard and advanced features including customization options and control over software updates.

Cloud Edition: Serenity Mode

Serenity Mode means that we take care of everything for you. Want all of the amazing features without having to manage updates or maintain servers? Then Serenity Mode is the perfect solution for your organization.

Best PIM Benefits

Utilizing all the amazing features of a best-in-class PIM benefits your business by:

• Making it easy to add new products to the catalog: Our solution makes it easy to manage your products and their information more efficiently. This makes it possible to quickly add new products (including technical specifications, descriptions, and media) to your catalog.
• Increasing sales and reducing returns: When product information is accurate more products are purchased and less are returned since customers have a better understanding of what they are buying before deciding to purchase.
• Scalability: Besides making it easier to expand product offers, PIM can also help scale your business geographically. Streamlined translation and localization workflows make it easy to prepare product information for numerous global markets.
• Making the product experience consistent across all channels: Forget incomplete or inconsistent product information between channels. PIM allows you to enrich product information once and then distribute it to whichever channels you select. This ensures that your products look great no matter where.
• Increasing team productivity: Your teams are no longer stuck completing an endless list of repetitive enrichment tasks and can instead focus on more valuable activities.

Akeneo PIM helps you expand your business and increase sales.

Ready to use the best product information management software?

Utilizing the best PIM software allows your business to grow and flourish. Using the best tools, your teams can increase productivity and get products to market faster. What’s more, by having complete product experiences you can increase conversions while decreasing returns. Akeneo PIM is the solution you need to scale your business and improve product experiences.

Contact us today to schedule an Akeneo PIM demo – the best PIM available.

Brian, who has worked with companies including Epson, Vitamin Shoppe, Kate Somerville, and Sole Society, has seen first-hand how retailers and manufacturers are grappling with the ever-growing challenge of managing their product data across myriad sales channels. In the interview below, he reveals his thoughts about PIM and why he views product information as a critical part of every company’s eCommerce foundation.

What’s your experience and understanding of PIM?

I’ve had PIM on my radar for years. The topic comes up regularly in our eCommerce discussions with clients, particularly B2B and B2C sellers that have a large and diverse volume of products. Companies often underestimate the importance of solid, clean product data, not to mention the effort it takes to organize it well and the tremendous value it delivers to both buyers and end consumers. We at Guidance believe that PIM is an important part of the eCommerce ecosystem, particularly as product SKU counts grow larger.

What makes PIM an important part of the eCommerce foundation?

In eCommerce strategy, we talk a lot about building scalable and stable foundations, and we view product information as a critical part of that. Product data feeds multiple facets of eCommerce systems, and having it available in a consistent format is increasingly important, particularly as sales channels evolve. PIM ensures that product data is configured and delivered in a fast and consistent fashion to all channels, which is an enormous advantage for merchants. If you look across manufacturers, retailers, and brands, the places where they need to use product data have continued to expand. So PIM is becoming an increasingly important part of most eCommerce foundations.

What value do you see in PIM for businesses?

Data can be very powerful when it is properly used. For sales teams in the field selling products to B2B buyers, having the right product data in front of them is really important so they can pull up information like product compatibility right on the spot. We have clients that sell medical equipment, for instance, and it’s really important for their customers to know which parts go into a given piece of medical equipment to make it work best for its intended use. PIM provides everyone an excellent way to obtain and grasp that detailed, accurate product information. I would argue PIM is more important than ever. Too often we see companies trying to move into digital commerce or expand their eCommerce channels without having a core product data foundation ready, and they have to step back, rework things or invest in ways they wouldn’t have had to otherwise.

What are the top three reasons why eCommerce sellers should adopt PIM solutions?

Number one, PIM offers a structured approach to creating, organizing and standardizing product data. Too often, it can become cumbersome and unwieldy for companies to manage product data using spreadsheets. This traditional method prevents businesses from effectively normalizing product data, that is creating very specific yet flexible formats for data that can then be presented in a range of environments like a website or an Amazon product listing. In a nutshell, PIM allows for the easy structuring and formatting of product data for different intended sales channels. Number two, PIM empowers businesses to collect product data efficiently. For companies that are not using PIM, one of their key complaints is the difficulty of identifying and assembling product data. For instance, when one of our clients received a request from one of their large retail partners, Home Depot, employees had to scour through 15 different sources, talk with six departments and even call its factory in China to obtain the exact product data they needed. The whole process was very time-consuming and inefficient. In contrast, PIM allows a company to be nimble and to respond instantly to market demand for quality data. As a result of that, PIM can be a competitive advantage to a company if it is doing this better than a competitor. Lastly, PIM ensures data quality, because it provides merchants with a structured workflow for reviewing and finalizing product information. For example, if you have different levels of people within an organization responsible for the accuracy of product data, PIM has a system in place that allows a particular data unit to be systematically circulated and sent to the right people for final approval. Ultimately, with streamlined data management workflows, businesses can create higher quality product data to help them sell their products.

Do you see an interest in the market for open source PIM solutions?

I do see a real market interest for open source solutions like Akeneo. Just as companies responded positively years ago when Magento provided its open source eCommerce platform, companies now are similarly looking for open source solutions for PIM. The flexibility of an open source PIM is exactly what many companies in this market need.

About Brian Beck:

Brian Beck is an eCommerce expert who brings more than 20 years of experience helping top-tier multi-channel retailers, B2B firms, and high growth eCommerce companies achieve business results worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He currently serves as SVP of eCommerce and Omnichannel Strategy at Guidance.

About Guidance:

Guidance is a customer-centric commerce service provider dedicated to growth-oriented mid-market and enterprise branded manufacturers and merchants in both B2C and B2B with industry-leading practices in multichannel retail strategies, mobile, customer experience, innovative design, and complex system integration. Since 1993, national flagship retailers and consumer branded manufacturers have relied on Guidance’s expertise to facilitate more than $5 billion in web, mobile and social commerce. Brands such as Foot Locker, Johnny Was, Robert Graham, TOMS Shoes and others, have engaged Guidance to build hundreds of world-class, omnichannel solutions that enhance customer experience and increase business performance. Learn more about Guidance at https://www.guidance.com/about.

Product information management (PIM) solutions help organizations manage and maintain their product catalogs across all of their channels. As a result, the strength of an individual PIM system is only as good as the data that can be put in and taken out of it. In an effort to support our customers with the most open PIM solution on the market, Akeneo has dozens of PIM integrations available in the Akeneo Marketplace. These connectors allow you to easily customize Akeneo in a way that best suits your organization. In this article, we will focus on the PIM integrations that allow organizations to seamlessly integrate with their chosen eCommerce solutions.

Pairing Akeneo PIM with your eCommerce solution will help you scale your catalog and reduce time-to-market.

eCommerce PIM Integrations

This post reviews our PIM integrations with the following platforms:

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Shopify
• Shopware
• Magento
• BigCommerce
• WooCommerce

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud empowers retailers to unify customer experiences across all points of commerce. It supports organizations in their efforts to provide delightful 1-to-1 customer experiences from shopping, to fulfillment, to customer service, in an effort to increase engagement, loyalty, and conversion.

“Creating personalized, omnichannel experiences is now more important than ever for brands. […] By leveraging the power of Commerce Cloud and new integrations from Akeneo, merchants will now be able to manage their product data with greater scale and efficiency.” –       Mike Wolff SVP, ISVSales, Salesforce

The integration with Akeneo PIM allows users to seamlessly push their product catalog to the Salesforce Business Manager by converting Akeneo API data to Salesforce Commerce Cloud XML format for products, categories, attributes, associations, price books, and media. This PIM integration works with both the Community and Enterprise Editions of Akeneo PIM and is compliant with the latest Salesforce Storefront Reference Architecture simplifying the expansion of mobile stores.

Shopify

The Shopify Akeneo Connector simplifies the exporting and importing of catalog data to your Shopify Plus store by leveraging Akeneo PIM to manage and enrich product information. The integration handles the management of all product data including collection, product variations, image exporting, and multiple store sync. The integration enables Shopify Plus users to easily scale and grow their business by using Akeneo PIM to manage and scale their product catalog, centralize product information from multiple sources, and deliver product information reliably and consistently across all sites, locales, and sales channels.

Shopware

The Akeneo Shopware Connector simplifies importing Akeneo product data into the Shopware database. It is an ideal solution for large and ambitious eCommerce projects. This PIM integration removes the need for complex, time-consuming manual edits when importing and exporting data. It automates this process to ensure that your data will always be up-to-date. Using this PIM integration, you can provide accurate product data with personalized content, targeted marketing campaigns, and Shopware’s “Perfect Product Streams.”

“Our Shopware customers are looking for highly scalable product management solutions which seamlessly fit into their IT landscape, provide a perfect user experience, and offer the flexibility to manage the complete product data lifecycle on their own. Akeneo as an open source web application meets all of these requirements and offers low entry barriers and a short time-to-market. Using the connector, we now have the opportunity to deliver integration within days without worrying about data conversion.” –       Fabian Judaschke, eCommerce Consultant, HDNET

Magento

When it comes to Magento, there are numerous PIM integrations created by a variety of partners available in the marketplace. All of them help you easily manage and modify product information between your Akeneo PIM and Magento platforms. Which particular PIM integration will work best for your organization depends on which features you require and which version of Magento you are using.

With four different Magento PIM integrations available on the marketplace, there is sure to be one to fit your organization’s unique needs.

BigCommerce

The BigCommerce Akeneo Connector makes it easy to manage the thousands of products within your BigCommerce store through the Akeneo PIM solution. It works with simple, configurable, and virtual types of products allowing you to easily export and import all required product data. Users can even export their own product categories, complete custom field mapping, export multiple product images, send SEO information, and filter data.

The BigCommerce PIM integration makes it easy to manage simple, configurable, and virtual products within your BigCommerce store.

WooCommerce

If you have a large product catalog and use WooCommerce, you need the WooCommerce Akeneo Connector. This PIM integration simplifies the importing and exporting of product data between Akeneo PIM and your WooCommerce storefront. You can begin by importing your complete product data using CSV of XLSX into Akeneo and then pushing it to market. It is particularly useful for WooCommerce storefronts with hundreds of thousands of products.

Simplify product information import and export between Akeneo PIM and your WooCommerce storefront.

PIM Integrations Streamline eCommerce Product Management

With Akeneo’s PIM integrations, you can keep using the eCommerce platforms you love while easily injecting the power and ease of Akeneo PIM.

Streamline data enrichment projects and keep all your product data up-to-date.

Akeneo PIM simplifies the entire process with integrations that ensure data is imported and exported to all the right places. What we’ve discussed here are eCommerce integrations that are currently available – but more are on the way. Look out for new integrations with Oro Commerce and Spryker which will be available on our marketplace soon. Interested in learning more about Akeneo PIM? Contact us.

In order to better understand the predicted trajectory of voice-activated search Frederic de Gombert, CEO of Akeneo, reviews:

• The increasing popularity of voice search and shopping
• How business must reconsider their keyword strategies
• Managing product information to be “tech-ready”

Read the full article on Retail TouchPoints…