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…

However, developing and maintaining impactful product information can be a challenge. There’s a gap between supplier information and the final customer experience that must be bridged. The number of product SKUs and markets served keeps increasing for growing companies. What’s more, in an omnichannel world, those final customer experience platforms are becoming ever more varied and customized: online marketplaces, mobile, voice, print, and POS to name just a few. Every channel has different requirements and global companies must use the correct pricing, size charts, measurements, and language in accordance with the region they are selling in. Customers are wary of purchasing products from sources that have inconsistent or incomplete product information. For many organizations, implementing a PIM solution provides the functionality they need to improve their product information management, and in turn, their customer experience management. For more details, check out this interview with Mark Smith from Ventana Research. Mark explains why organizations should invest in PIM solutions and talks about the current PIM market, trends, and future expectations.

Interview Transcript:

Hi I’m Mark Smith, the CEO and chief research officer at Ventana Research. And I specialize in many areas, but one of them being the product information management (PIM) market.

What is Ventana Research’s focus?

At Ventana research, we do a lot of market research that helps provide insights and best practices to help organizations drive better time to value and to make sure they pick the proper vendors to help them achieve their goals. So one of the things we accomplished this last year, was our benchmark research on product information management (PIM), which looked at the state of the PIM industry but also looked at the objectives and the opportunities organizations face in front of them. That provides really important insights where companies need to get rid of spreadsheets, they need to find dedicated tools, and trying to find better value from their overall products.

What are your current observations on the PIM market?

At Ventana research our views of the PIM market have basically been the same over the last decade. Businesses need to take control of their own destiny, manage their product processes, and have the right information to be able to support it. Part of those market trends include the need to not only better enable business professionals to manage the information but also work together as a collective team and share product information across the supply chain of their customers to their manufacturers in a much more efficient way than they ever have before.

What emerging trends do you see in Product Information Management (PIM)?

Some of the key emerging trends in the PIM market involve stepping back and thinking about, “how do we actually get more people to not only support the management of PIM product information but also how it is consumed ”. One of the key trends is around product experience and understanding what is the product experience that customers and consumers expect. But how easy is it to manage that information or to be able to share it, right? Customers expect to have beautiful information about the products that they are searching for or to potentially purchase. When I mean beautiful, those things might be video, they might be images, they might be ratings, there’s a whole collection of attributes that are really essential for product information management.

Is PIM a business imperative or simply a nice-to-have?

PIM has become not just an important business imperative but a required one. For product processes to run efficiently across organizations they need to be able to invest in products and the information that describes the products. In fact, the information is probably more valuable to a company than the product itself. Because we have to market it, we have to sell it, we have to service it. We have to be able to understand that PIM is a foundational piece to how companies actually operate both internally and externally. The business imperative is that PIM becomes the investment place for all participants to get access to product information. And that really is seven days a week, 24 hours a day for consumers or for the people who support it on a daily basis. This is how they collaborate and work together to have a better result.

How can companies justify investing in a PIM tool?

Building a business case for PIM involves stepping back and thinking about some of the practical dynamics of what companies are supposed to do. “How do we provide product information to our customers and consumers?” Typically, organizations will find issues they currently have with customer satisfaction, customer experience within their digital commerce systems, or their website doesn’t provide the right kind of product information that actually describes the product, so what do they do? They actually then go online and chat and call the call center. If you step back and think about that digital commerce, sales and marketing, contact centers, all those have access to and a need product information. If we want to be efficient in our organizations, we need to understand how to prioritize those requirements to drive a business case for making investments in PIM. If organizations do that, it’s a pretty simple equation. It’s a requirement to be effective in supporting the needs of the company and the value in the products and services that they actually provide to the marketplace.

PIM has traditionally been for B2C companies – is PIM relevant for B2B companies?

PIM is just as important to business to business (B2B) marketplaces and organizations as it is for B2C. Manufacturers have suppliers who have information about parts and that information that comes in to make a whole product or manufacturers need to share that product information to their distributors or end retailers. That whole B2B spectrum requires having a common set of business information around the products. Products are the centerpiece of the efficiency and the value equation in a B2B organization. And in fact, it’s actually a little bit more complicated with different organizations who have demands for varying interfaces in which they need to share information on a real-time basis comparatively to B2C where I’ve got to make sure I have the right information in my commerce system, those things can be actually much more easily automated compared to the core of what B2B’s mission is. Their mission is to be efficient, to drive the value from the supply chain all the way out to the demand chain of their retailers or customers.

What if I don’t have access to the product information I need?

For organizations that don’t have all the product information, they can start to establish a shareable product catalog. Establishing a product information network where information can be provided or supplemented by manufacturers or distributors and brought into a product information network, as we call it at Ventana Research, is a starting point to build a more robust set of PIM processes. Now augmenting information can sometimes be challenging without having the right kinds of technology because now we actually need to be able to enrich it from multiple parties, not just inside the enterprise but across the entire value chain.

Is PIM the same thing as MDM?

In the PIM market there are a set of different views on the marketplace. Is it master data management (MDM) where we manage the masters of our product data? Or is it on the PIM side as a business application? At Ventana, we take a business-centric approach. We look at PIM as an application that’s used by business professionals and as well as the extended customers and consumers that access that information. PIM has master data management built inside of it. Many organizations have other issues in regards to data and enterprise where they go to manage customers and products and employees and all those multi domain types of responsibilities. Now a company’s MDM infrastructure may or may not be useful to PIM but PIM can operate as a standalone environment because it’s focused on the business, the people who are actually held accountable for the product processes and the outcomes from them.

What’s the next big thing in PIM? Will AI and machine learning (ML) have a role?

The PIM software market is going through a pretty interesting transformation because it’s not just about the administration of the product data itself, but it’s about the usage of it, it’s about the consumption of it. How do we enrich that product experience? By using things like artificial intelligence and machine learning we can start to better understand our own product data. Looking at challenges and issues, we can automate the exception notification, we can prompt people, and we can also then drive further automation. If we know there’s a high confidence level that product information’s being enriched by particular sources or a network of certified sources, that actually can be brought together in a much more automated way. We need to streamline the process around product information, and to do that AI and ML play a critical role. Just as ensuring that product information is up in the cloud, cloud computing and sharing information becomes easier. It all becomes much more streamlined when we have access to that information. And I think the other thing that comes from the both of those is that PIM is going to dramatically change over the next three years because customers and people in the enterprise are going to frankly want to ask about products, they’re going use their voice, they’re going use chat bots and voice bots. They’re going to want to actually get information delivered to them in the way that they actually understand it in the natural language that they hear and that they understand. It’s a pretty dramatic change where PIM will go and changes are already happening in other software segments as we started to use mobile devices, consumer devices to get access to information that we expect any time of day anywhere on the planet.

Has the PIM research conducted by Ventana revealed any interesting findings?

At Ventana Research, one of the interesting pieces of work that we did recently was the work to understand about how to build high quality and complete product information. One of the challenges that companies face in building complete product information is areas around product information quality and how do they have the opportunity to improve the outcomes of their product management processes. So this white paper help provide the insights and some opportunities to learn how to drive better results from their existing investments.

Want to learn more about the business values of PIM?

Download the complete report from Ventana Research: Building High Quality and Complete Product Information: Using Best Practices and Technology Investments to Optimize Product Value. Or if you’re interested in learning more specifically about Akeneo PIM, contact us for a demo.

If you are an avid reader of this blog, have attended one of our conference sessions, or participated in our Akeneo PIM Summit, you have no doubt heard us say this before. We fundamentally believe that comprehensive product information and the ability to deliver a better product experience will become a critical component in retailer and eCommerce vendor strategies. Why? Because as brands and retailers compete hard for sales and market share, delivering a compelling product experience will become instrumental in increasing sales conversion rates and reducing product returns.

The proof behind this is in results reported by our customers:

• 4x increase in conversion rate,
• 40% reduction in returns, and
• many who report significant gains in catalog management productivity.

Product Experience Management (PXM) is not just about accurate and comprehensive product data.

Akeneo PIM provides the foundation and the workbench for marketers and catalog managers to assemble and organize data from various sources. Today we announced an update to Akeneo PIM and a new Supplier Data Manager product. Together, this solution makes the product information management process simpler, more productive, and even more comprehensive. Now retailers and distributors can offer suppliers a secure, cloud-based PIM-like environment to provide product information from the most accurate source – the supplier! The combination of Akeneo PIM and Akeneo Onboarder will further streamline the process of getting accurate and comprehensive product data so retailers and distributors can, in turn, deliver it at the right time to the right place. With the time-savings and productivity this provides, marketing and eCommerce teams can now focus on creating an emotional connection with the buyer.

Consistency but no uniformity

Akeneo’s philosophy has always been to enable brands and retailers/distributors to drive consistency, but not necessarily uniformity. With our product experience management solution, you can build consistent product information but differentiate it based on sales channel, or locale. This contextual product information will be the future of PIM and the basis for PXM. Product experience management puts the customer at the center of every interaction and resulting transaction. As a result, the product experience you deliver significantly influences the customer experience.

A quote from our CEO Fred de Gombert sums up the importance of product experience management nicely:

As brands and retailers realize the power of personalized product experiences, PXM is going to emerge as a key category and practice and will add a new business dimension that was often overlooked in PIM. It makes product data even more strategic and helps marketers boost sales.

PXM can be a complex undertaking and its enablement will require purpose-built tools. We’ve got a lot more planned to enable our customers to make PXM a reality. We invite you to watch this space!

Get out your power drill.

A Product Information Management system, or PIM for short, is the right tool for all your catalog management jobs. Update an entire product line? With the touch of a button. Need customizable access for your contributors? No problem. Translate products into German? Chinese? French? Bien sur! Export personalized assortment to multiple platforms? In the blink of an eye!

PIM is the powerful tool that addresses all your catalog management needs.

Catalog management software is the crucial tool for building capacity, which in turn fortifies growth and bolsters expansion into new locales. With the right PIM system, you control the pace of your business destiny.

How do we do it?

Akeneo PIM is your toolbox for the collection, enrichment, and distribution of product information.

Automatically collect or import data from whatever source you like. Akeneo provides the ability to integrate with virtually any data source such as ERPs, vendor portals, spreadsheets, and .csv files.

Enrich product descriptions with marketing details, technical data, and media files. Ensure that all product information is included before items are exported with our completeness widgets.

Distribute your products easily through a variety of sales channels (print, mobile applications, marketplaces, e-commerce website, etc.). You have complete control over every aspect, and transforming digital to print is as easy as the click of a button.

Total freedom in the way you want to market your products.

Akeneo PIM makes managing your team easy.

Advanced Rights Management: Akeneo PIM gives you complete control over the type of access for each user. Whether users are internal employees or external freelancers, you determine exactly what they can or cannot construct.

Approval Workflows: Maintaining editorial control over your content is a necessity. However, it would be a herculean task to enrich every product yourself. You can view, approve (or reject) and generally keep tabs on all that your contributors have appended with our super-easy workflow validation engine.

Teamwork Assistant: Speaking of tabs, Teamwork Assistant makes it easy for teams to manage themselves. Tasks that need to be completed are displayed on an easy-to-use interface, personalized for every team member. Teamwork Assistant even helps keep your team on track by automatically generating reminders as deadlines approach.

Catalog management made easy.

So why Akeneo?

• Easy to learn and use – with Akeneo PIM’s intuitive user interface, your team can spend less time training and more time doing.
• Customization is not an issue – we understand that every project is as unique as our customers, so our solution is built to support all types of catalogs.
• Streamlines workflows – from product introductions, updates, or even full production of printed publications, Akeneo PIM provides users multiple tools to make the entire process efficient, trackable, and complete. And with your next collection around the corner, you’ll be ready!
• Connections made easy – we have worked with numerous technology partners to develop an ecosystem of extensions to simplify integration with the other tools and systems you are already using.
• Open source makes for better business – the open nature of Akeneo encourages users to customize their PIM to fit the way they do business. As a result, there is a thriving community of integrators to help make that happen.
• Spreadsheets are so yesterday – you want to grow and expand your business for today’s marketplace, so why use an outdated catalog management tool to help you achieve that blueprint?

The question isn’t why would you use Akeneo’s PIM software, but rather Why wouldn’t you?

This presents a major opportunity for eCommerce companies to generate additional sales:

• Better weather increases people’s spirits
• Well-earned vacations often trigger buying
• Summertime features a variety of celebrations that encourage gift giving and other shopping (graduations, weddings, prom, mother’s day, father’s day, etc.)
• Increased outdoor activities trigger the purchase of many goods (camping gear, swimsuits, sports gear, summer camps)

What’s more, some vendors order new and cheaper products just to include in seasonal sales. When the season is over the changeover of collections (especially in fashion and apparel) encourages businesses to empty stock as much as possible before their fall/winter collections are released.

Seasonal sales events provide retailers and eCommerce organizations with a great opportunity to generate a lot of profit and empty out their stock.

This stock changeover occurs across the globe, requiring organizations to be agile in managing product information and promotions. If your product information infrastructure isn’t ready for this tidal wave, you could lose business. You need a tool that can support complete and accurate product information across all sales channels.

Managing Seasonal Sales with Product Information Management (PIM)

Having the ability to quickly prepare specific product offerings and provide the most relevant information is the largest challenge/goal of prepping for seasonal sales. However, this challenge can be overcome by using a robust product information management (PIM) solution. PIM helps omnichannel companies organize, enrich, and publish relevant product data across all of their sales channels.

How PIM Helps

PIM creates an always-up-to-date product information database that can house summer-specific media, descriptions, and other product information. This streamlines the data enrichment process and ensures that all of your products look great across all of your channels.

• Simplify product selection: PIM makes it easy for product managers to select groups of products or add new products to the catalog for specific seasonal sales. Vendors can include certain products in these catalogs only for the time of the sale to create a limited-time catalog or product groupings.
• Make it easy to add and modify emotional data: Since consumer buying behaviors are largely driven by instinct rather than true need, having product data that appeals to those emotions is critical to maximizing conversions. PIM makes it is easy to add specific seasonal attributes like summertime pictures, evocative product descriptions, etc. Plus, by using a dedicated product grid, you can update the information only for the selected products that are relevant to the seasonal sale and quickly switch out the information as the seasons transition.
• Streamline workflows to get sales up and running: When it comes to seasonal sales, time is of the essence and organizations can’t afford to miss the seasonal window. A long enrichment process could doom your sale. PIM significantly increases productivity.

PIM makes it easy to manage and enrich specific product groupings for seasonal sales.

Example PIM Workflow

The best PIM solutions include tools that help streamline product enrichment. Here’s a sample product enrichment workflow that can be implemented using PIM:

1. Select products: Team members can easily select which products they want to enrich, update, or include in their summer sales using the intuitive product grid. Advanced search tools help streamline product selection by showing only the information needed.
2. Set up the project: Product managers can quickly set up enrichment projects with their teams using integrated project management tools. Managers can set due dates, while automated workflows keep all team members on track.
3. Bulk edit: Team members can quickly edit large product groupings with bulk editing. They can mass edit, editing several products at the same time for the same attribute values, or edit sequentially, editing several products in a row without returning to the product grid.
4. Verify product information completeness: The most robust PIM systems include completeness tools to make it clear to your team which products are completely enriched and which are still missing information. For specific seasonal projects to the system ensures completeness for specific attributes that can be defined for each product group in that project. These tools ensure that your products look great across all platforms and that your team members always know what to do next.
5. Publish: PIM makes it easy to publish complete product information across platforms, including the ability to publish different versions of product information based on specific locales or platform requirements. For example, you can publish summer pictures in the US and winter pictures in Australia at the same time. Or, you can choose to create channel specific promotions, like a web-exclusive sale, and publish product information only on that channel.

PIM Makes Managing Products for Seasonal Sales Easy Breezy

PIM is a productivity tool that makes managing your products for seasonal sales easy. It’s an automated solution for keeping all of your product information centralized, organized, and up to date. It makes it possible for you to seamlessly manage all of your last-minute sale changes and additions to the product catalog. Never again worry about copying and pasting product information from spreadsheets with the accompanying inevitable mistakes, missing information, and delays.

Prepare for seasonal sales with a PIM solution that accelerates time to market and increases productivity.

Of course, PIM is not just for summer sales. PIM gives you agility all year long whether you want to do a limited-edition collection or want to do a small specialty catalog for back-to-school. PIM makes seasonal and contextual sales easy all year long. Responding to customer moods and rapidly changing trends in a timely manner is critical.

Meet customer demand and boost sales with relevant product offerings all year long.

Ready to revolutionize how you handle product information and start boosting your seasonal sales or promotional events? Contact us for a guided tour.

Slighter Longer Answer:

MDM (Master Data Management) is an IT-led initiative focused on creating a centralized “golden record” of master and reference data across many domains: customer, product, location, supplier, financial, etc. The objective is to create accurate and consistent information accessible to everyone across the organization. PIM (product information management) is a subset of MDM that focuses on delivering high-quality and accurate product information and is most frequently used to support merchandising and marketing. As a business-led solution rather than an IT-led initiative, PIM typically represents a much easier and more cost-effective implementation than a more ambitious and organization-wide MDM deployment.

More Details:

What is Master Data Management (MDM)?

Definition

MDM is a set of processes and tools used to deliver harmonized data to support smooth business operations across a variety of systems and applications. MDM enables organizations to collect, match, clean, aggregate, and distribute consistent and accurate master data to operational and analytical systems.

Purpose

MDM systems typically manage data across multiple data domains including employee, customer, financial, location, and vendor information. As a result, MDM projects tend to be very broad in scope and require significant resources to implement and maintain. The use cases for an MDM system can also span multiple business objectives and functional departments across an organization.

Benefits

MDM helps organizations improve business operations by:

• Decreasing the complexity inherent in globalization and expansion
• Reducing data inconsistencies that can have major impacts on business operations
• Allowing organizations to make edits to data in one area and ensure that those edits are reflected in all appropriate areas
• Providing cleaner data for analysis
• Supporting consistent data across multiple platforms and tools
• Helping meet compliance regulations

MDM helps organizations improve business operations by removing data inconsistencies that can have serious business impacts. However, it is a massive effort with inputs and impacts across the entire global organization.

What is a PIM (Product Information Management)?

Definition

PIM is a product-oriented software solution that allows organizations to centralize and enrich all of their product information to deliver accurate product descriptions and images in a globally scalable multi-channel marketing environment. PIM provides a single source of truth for product data. It makes it easy to enrich products, manage images, and ensure they look great on any platform including websites, marketplaces, mobile, print catalogs, and retail points of sale. PIM centralizes product information to provide a single source of truth within organizations.

Purpose

PIM is the best way to enrich product data and descriptions. It removes the tedious and repetitive tasks that are required when using spreadsheets to manage product information. PIM tools typically connect easily to eCommerce systems. PIM can be useful to marketers, catalog and eCommerce managers, as well as data governance drivers and buyers. Compared to MDM projects, PIM initiatives are faster to deploy, require fewer resources, and deliver business value much sooner. PIM solutions provide three core capabilities :

1. Collect data: PIM can collect and centralize product data from numerous sources including databases, ERPs, flat files, media systems, and supplier portals. Data sources can be prioritized, and information can be cleaned to seamlessly integrate into catalogs.
2. Enrich data: Once product data is collected, marketing and eCommerce teams can enrich the data with customized product descriptions, specifications, classifications, usage data, translations, and media files. Organizations can also improve their data quality by having a clear picture of which products are “complete” – i.e. have all the necessary data required for publishing – and which ones still need to be enriched.
3. Publish data: With wholly enriched products, data can be distributed to all sales channels like eCommerce platforms, mobile applications, AI-enhanced tools like chatbots, social networks, and marketplaces. Plus, with the right solution, many PIM systems make it easy for eCommerce companies to quickly create beautiful print catalogs with just the click of a button.

Benefits

PIM helps organizations:

• Improve product data quality and accuracy
• Improve overall catalog and product information management processes
• Eliminate redundant work and boost collaboration
• Increase operational productivity
• Decrease time-to-market
• Easily expand into new markets and locales
• Maintain brand identity across multi-touch points
• Increase sales conversions
• Reduce returns

PIM allows organizations to easily maintain and enrich all product information so it can be utilized across sales channels.

MDM vs. PIM? Which is the right solution for you?

Both MDM and PIM solutions offer a similar set of capabilities and can be used to organize critical product data to provide companies with a single source of information. This centralized source of truth provides a stronger basis for making major business decisions and keeps everyone on the same page, but the question remains – which solution is right for you? If your primary concern is increasing sales, adding additional product SKUs, or entering new channels or markets, then you want a PIM. It’s a dedicated, business-centric marketing solution that offers a much faster deployment and ROI compared to an enterprise-wide MDM system. PIM tools also tend to have robust connectors to eCommerce, print, mobile and POS systems as these are the main consumers of accurate product data for marketing and sales. On the other hand, if your use case includes managing other data domains such as customer, financial, or location data, or treats product data as simply another domain, and you have sufficient resources and time for deployment, MDM may be more appropriate for your needs. Want more information about the need for and benefits from a product information management system? Take our self-assessment today to see where you are on the path towards better product experiences: PXM Self-Assessment