According to the Data Marketing Association, the number of catalogs mailed in the United States recently fell to 9.8 billion in 2016—which is down considerably from the peak mailing of 19.6 billion in 2007.

Print is dead. Except it isn’t.

Print is a major driver of both online and offline sales.

Many online and in-store purchases are inspired by seeing items in a catalog. While websites excel at focused searches, print catalogs more readily lend themselves to product discovery and casual browsing. In short, print catalogs continue to be an important element of any omni-channel strategy.

According to Kurt Salmon, Lands’ End eventually presented a pop-up survey to customers placing orders on its site asking if they had first looked at the catalog, and 75% of them said “Yes.”

Print catalogs outperform website traffic in many areas:

• Higher average order size
• More frequent orders
• Better customer retention rates

Print is still a massively powerful channel for many retailers and manufacturers. Print is responsible for significant increases in direct marginal revenue and is a key brand driver.

Print is awesome. If only it didn’t have to be so expensive.

Of course, everyone knows that while the returns on catalog production can be great, there is a huge cost and hassle factor associated with their production.

Today, we’ll focus on how companies can centralize and utilize their product information across print, web, and other channels using Akeneo and Pim2catalog.

Pim2catalog is a connector for Akeneo and InDesign built by long-time Akeneo partner Naolis. It allows small and medium sized companies to easily and quickly build customized print catalogs using the product information contained within Akeneo PIM.

How does it work?

1. Pim2catalog allows merchandisers to work within Akeneo to develop their catalog merchandising plan using product descriptions already available from within Akeneo. Merchandisers utilize generic labels to develop their catalog strategy without having to worry about design details.
2. Akeneo then outputs a standard InDesign file with the products based upon an unlimited number of totally customizable design templates (if you can do it in InDesign, you can use it as a template).
3. The design team can then manipulate the file and tweak the design just like they would any other InDesign file.
4. If any changes are made to the product catalog during this process (and there usually tons of them!), these changes automatically flow into the InDesign document—seamlessly ensuring that the product specifics are accurate as-of the day of printing.
5. The merchandiser can then quickly and easily output specialty catalogs aimed at specific target markets with high frequency. The template allows for easy insertion and support of holiday or other moods and themes. The copy and design can be as elaborate and customized as the team chooses.

The merchandiser can then quickly and easily output specialty catalogs aimed at specific target markets with high frequency.

Akeneo PIM Summit 2018 : How to add print catalogs in your multichannel strategy.

Prior to Pim2catalog, merchandisers were really faced with just two options for creating print catalogs:

Traditional Manual Process

This labor-intensive process is familiar to anyone who has created a print catalog in the last twenty years. It usually involves cutting and pasting product descriptions, imagery, and/or links from spreadsheets and product databases. Product descriptions are manually cut and pasted into pre-set templates. This creates lots of opportunity for all kinds of errors, which requires lots and lots of proofreading and lots of last minute stress (and typos) as changes in product specifications come in at the last minute. Additional localizations make every iteration exponentially more complicated.

The end-result is very high quality but the cost and stress put into achieving this result is painful.

Automated Catalog Generation

Several years ago a number of solutions arose that allowed for the direct creation of PDF files by combining design templates and content from .csv files. This sounds ideal, but the reality is more sobering. The highly templated nature of the process allows for very little page variation, call-outs, and the visual and textual flair that creates sales.

Customers just don’t want a catalog that looks like it was auto-generated.

They desire more variety in design and presentation than these direct-to-PDF solutions can provide.

Pim2catalog gives merchandisers a hybrid of both worlds: beautiful and highly impactful custom catalogs with much of the speed and efficiency of automation. Using Pim2catalog allows retailers and manufacturers to automate as much or as little of the process as they like. They can customize every page or just lavish extra attention on one or two areas and take a more templated approach for the rest.

Efficiency gains vary, but gains of 30-50% are average. One customer reported that their main catalog used to take six months with 7 people but now only takes two months with 2 people—while maintaining the same level of product information and design.

Many companies initially adopt Pim2catalog expecting to use it primarily to showcase their entire product line. However, the increased speed with which they can publish specialized catalogs often means that they quickly adopt their strategy to sending out more, but smaller and more focused, catalogs that are also cheaper to print and mail.

Some companies, such as B2B companies or sellers of large numbers of parts and/or SKUs, have found that they don’t need to create print catalogs at all. They simply keep their product catalog available as a PDF and output new PDFs with updated product information as often as once a day. Overall, companies that adopt Pim2catalog find that:

• Production times and costs are cut by 1/3 to 1/2
• Product description errors virtually disappear
• Catalog managers are much calmer and happier

Pim2catalog: Only on Akeneo

It began by being built atop .csv files before Akeneo was founded; the same .csv files that so many Akeneo customers relied upon but found endlessly frustrating before they too discovered PIM.

Naolis and Akeneo started their partnership even before Akeneo PIM launched. Once the Naolis team understood what Akeneo was building, they immediately signed up to be one of Akeneo’s first partners. The first version of the connector was shipped in time for the Akeneo PIM launch. Every updated version (of both Akeneo and Pim2catalog) has improved the integration and user experience. Akeneo PIM and Pim2catalog are now both very mature products with rock-solid reliability, ease of use, and integration.

Akeneo PIM’s channel management allows for product data to be customized for specific channels with descriptions and technical attributes that are tailored to that outlet. This allows companies to have different formats for online versus print.

Pim2catalog is only available on Akeneo PIM.

Pim2catalog is an open source project supported by an annual subscription featuring an SLA-backed support agreement. You can try it out via the Akeneo Marketplace or from Pim2catalog’s standalone website.

During the APS, more than 220 people, from 70 companies, in 14 different countries joined us in Paris. What a wonderful occasion to meet and discuss the market trends and prepare our communities for their PIM needs within 2018.

This event was full of great presentations. A couple of crowd favorites were: our 2017 retrospective, our 2018 roadmap, but also on Jabra’s customer presentation, and analyst Mark Smith’s view on the future of the PIM market.

We, of course, made several product announcements, but the big news you did not want to miss was about the acquisition of Sigmento by Akeneo and the anticipated Q2 launch of PIM.ai, a machine learning powered tool to help our customers gathering additional product data and accelerate the time needed to prepare product sheets.

The APS was an opportunity for our customers and partners to meet and network with our ecosystem as well. And the evening party was one of those great moments where everyone enjoyed themselves and had focused on having fun – the Akeneo way!

The event ended with the Akeneo Project Awards ceremony where 5 of our customers and partners received awards for the best B2B & B2C Akeneo projects, the rookie award, and the audience award.

If you want to relive the event, take a look at #APS2018 on Twitter and Instagram or check out our photos album!

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, and sponsors for being here with us and being part of this amazing journey, we can’t wait to do it again next year!

Now it’s time to implement our customer feedback into real product changes and solutions that will bring value based on our key themes. Our product innovation must:

• be simple
• save users time when enriching product data
• have features and wording that is obvious and relevant
• be friendly

<<< New product grid featuring the vertical and collapsible side bar >>>

Design Inception

To inspire new ideas, we conduct innovation games between product owners, developer squads, and UX designers to identify problems and develop solutions. The innovation games are a series of brainstorming sessions where teams can bring in their own ideas, choose some from existing feedback, or select from the Idea Manager.

Creating a strong collaborative environment facilitates discussion between all teams so ideas are better integrated to work together, rather than being disparate features.

Initial Design

Our UX designers begin the initial design process by considering the core functionalities of PIM such as the product grid, navigation menus, product selection, family filters, and then ideas develop from there. Once new features are determined, the UX designer will:

• Identify a problem to solve
• Look for the norms/conventions
• Apply business logic
• Implement discussions between appropriate teams
• Prototype the new feature
• Validate the prototype with the lead product owner
• Create a simple test prototype for validation

We know some prototypes will fail the test. Our goal is to prove usability, business value and productivity gains.

Example of an Invision prototype

Internal Testing

Once the initial prototype is created it moves to our internal testing process. We assess the prototype by having our own employees compare the functionality of the new feature with the old. We use the System Usability Scale (SUS) to objectively determine the usability.

Everyone who tests the feature rates it using our standardized form. Then the scores are averaged to determine the score of the new feature, which is then compared to the previous score. Initially, we test using internal employees who can apply a critical eye to new features. Anyone is welcome to test the new feature – except for the product team because they know all the insider tricks.

External Testing

Based on internal testing results, the product team will iterate multiple designs until they create something that can be presented to end users. Product owners and UX designers collect feedback and then reject or approve the new design.

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For example, Martine a project manager at a famous retailer, notified us, that it might be less risky to move the final confirm button in another area than the other buttons involved in the mass edit step by step workflow, and we did it. It’s a very simple improvement but all that improvements put all together make our UX better.

By the twist of fate, the same client can sometimes reject a feature he demanded by giving a lower score than the current feature or at the opposite give us very interesting tips.

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So how did our UX design process impact Akeneo PIM 2.0?

Designers often feel tied to global logic and stuck in the UX stack that previous versions included, even if there is a way to do it better. They don’t want to freak out their users with a completely new design that makes them feel like all their previous experience using the product is obsolete. But at some point, that legacy UX becomes a prison.

So In Akeneo PIM 2.0 we have broken out of the constraints of our previous UX stack and completely refreshed the design and global logic behind the interface. The inception of this new UX began a year ago in September 2016. This revamping project was a huge undertaking that took six months of prep utilizing a full-time squad of developers and all product owners.

Of course, we remain focused on our main goal: creating an intuitive PIM solution that facilitates your daily tasks while increasing productivity. We hope you’ll find that Akeneo PIM 2.0 does just that.

Akeneo PIM 2.0 provides a completely refreshed and optimized user experience. Akeneo PIM 2.0 has always hoped to be simpler, lighter and more comfortable.

Ready to give it a try?

Download the Akeneo Community Edition or if you want a more customized test experience, feel free to contact us for a consultation. Interested in learning more about UX Design? Read the second portion of this blog series: <<< Inside Akeneo: UX Design Part #2 – The Design Process

We understand that businesses may be cautious in migrating from Akeneo PIM 1.7 to Akeneo PIM 2.0. This new release is the most extensive update since our 1.0 launch in 2014. However, following our philosophy of keeping things simple, we’ve worked to ensure the transition will be smooth and straightforward.

Why upgrade to Akeneo PIM 2.0?

You can take advantage of the latest technologies while migrating to new software, and it must be done. We are continually making performance tweaks and enhancements to help you do your job better, and we want you to be able to take advantage of everything Akeneo PIM has to offer. For more information on the benefits of using Akeneo PIM 2.0, watch these videos.

Why a 2.0 and not a 1.8? It is indeed a major release, probably our most extensive. Is it due to a complete re-platforming. Not really! Simply, there is a logic starting a new cycle on the “round number” 2.0 (see our new release schedule for details). The new release schedule allows you to anticipate and plan for future migration projects and control your budget and workload more efficiently.

So, now let’s focus on the how

Akeneo PIM core system

There are significant improvements at the core of Akeneo PIM. To understand the value of this upgrade, please read A short dive into our new release: Akeneo PIM 2.0!

– One single storage with native Elastic Search – A new data model to build complex product with native variations (read the series of blog posts on products with variant) – Last but not least: an entirely new user interface

There is a “new technical stack” and we master it perfectly because we made it with the requirements given to us by our customers. And to be honest, we think it should be our responsibility to deal with this new stack, not yours. That’s the reason why we developed the Migration Assistant to help you in the adoption of Akeneo 2.0. We want it to be easy for you.

Migration Tool: Step-by-Step Assistant

To streamline migration, we designed the Migration Assistant. This assistant walks you through the migration process step-by-step. It records the following:

• your product data, with or without variants
• your catalog structure: families, categories, attributes…
• your personal preferences so they can be implemented into your 2.0 setup.

Today, it’s a command line interface dedicated to developers. All our Community and Enterprise Edition members can download it for free from GitHub and install it on the instance that needs to be migrated.

The philosophy is to move your instance of Akeneo PIM 1.7.x to the new instance of Akeneo PIM 2.0, as a standalone that is fully operational and includes all your data and settings. To make it fully operational, we decided to not handle all your custom codes that need to be copy and test by your own.

The Migration Assistant guides you through the entire process step-by-step.

The Migration Assistant aka “Transporteo” features the migration from 1.7 to 2.0 including Variant Groups and the Inner Variation (not in the alpha version, stay tuned), and we encourage you to adopt it, as we will continue to invest in it for all future minor and major updates.

The Migration Assistant follows a separate release agenda than the Akeneo PIM core product, with one update every two weeks until its stabilization. Some features might not be available as of the launch of Akeneo PIM 2.0 but will be coming soon. We are actively collecting feedback from our clients and partners to enrich it. Please check its scope before starting your migration.

There is one limitation, with some third-party systems connecting to Akeneo, it won’t automatically reconnect the dots for them. Simply because the assistant cannot update the settings of an external engine.

Focus on product models

“Variant group” and “Inner Variation Bundle” no longer exist and are replaced by “Product Models” which are now native for all of you. We promise it’s the last major change on this key capability.

To make the transition easier, the Migration Assistant is designed to support in a variety of use cases. For example:

• T-shirt based on size and colors
• Screws based on diameter and length
• Eyeglasses or chairs based on color
• Mattress based on dimensions
• Smartphones based on color and screen size
• Beers or teas based on packaging
• Fruits compotes based on flavor
• ….

Import/Export with third parties

In Akeneo PIM 2.0, we did not make any change in the structure of the import/export, nor on the catalog structure. All of your flows that fuel Akeneo PIM with families categories, attributes, and products without variation will continue to work. Nevertheless, there is an exception as permissions now apply, so just be careful with who can trigger the jobs today. Imports/Exports dedicated to the variant group and inner variation bundle are no longer supported and need to be reallocated to the new business logic.

We now apply user permissions on classical imports and exports

API

New and improved tools facilitate and accelerate the migration and integration with other third-party solution such as:

• the API documentation website
• our brand new API PHP Client
• the Postman collection to play around with the API endpoints
• advanced developers can rely on the Swagger’s framework

In Akeneo PIM 1.7, the scope of the API was limited to the Community Edition features, now it’s open to all features including the Enterprise Edition such as published products or approval.

All your connectors that rely on the API will continue to work.

From now on the recommended way to develop connectors and the only way to develop them for the Serenity offer #stability

 

<<< already in the 1.7 vs new in the API >>>

What about Serenity Mode?

For all of our customers who have chosen Akeneo Enterprise Edition in Serenity mode – you have nothing to worry about! All updates and migrations will occur automatically, both for Akeneo 2.0 and all future versions.

We invested a lot of time and energy so you don’t have to.

Still using Akeneo 1.5 or 1.6?

To take advantage of the step-by-step Migration Tool, you’ll need to first update to Akeneo 1.7. Don’t worry, we have an easy-to-use guide so you can update before the big Akeneo 2.0 migration!

Want to learn more about Akeneo PIM? Ready to purchase Akeneo 2.0?

Take a look at some of our blog posts or contact us to be put in touch with a sales representative.

We need to accommodate a range of diverse personas from 20 to 65 years old, including the day-to-day user, managers who want to report, and IT and admin staff that need to customize and maintain the software.

<<< Stéphane Giraud, Lead UX Designer prototyping >>>

What makes us different?

We design the UX with the mindset that it will be used by many different people across a wide range of roles and responsibilities. We are committed to avoiding a design that looks fancy but is hard to use. Instead, we take our time to create a simple interface that is intuitive and efficient to use. So how do we do this? Well…

We take our customer feedback seriously.

Customers are struggling to match applications to the speed of their business demands. And one of their most significant challenges is becoming “stuck” within their day-to-day needs and not having the right technology to help ease this paralysis.

Because of this customer concern, we scaled our implementation strategy to regularly implement our customer feedback into real product changes and solutions, and the very first step was setting up a framework to support this feedback.

One example of this is how Akeneo approaches our release schedule. To date, Akeneo has had a remarkably stable release schedule. However, we have decided to change it to gain in reactivity and flexibility – and to continue to address our customer needs. Moving forward, we will issue a major launch every September with minor releases in December, March, and June. 

Collecting Great Feedback

From a UX Design Perspective, we’ve found that product feedback surveys where respondents choose from a pick-list of limited options do not deliver an accurate understanding of what our customers need. The extent of PIM user needs can’t be reduced to yes/no or rating questions from 1-10. Instead, when we focus on the business challenge that our customers are trying to solve, we can create a better solution that aligns to overall goals. We then reconcile this input. And this is simply what we did to build the new UX in 2.0. Our customers told us that wanted a more simple and intuitive user experience – and that is what we delivered. 

 

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For example, our customers were consistently asking for a decent Project Management Tool feature. It was an acute need for many clients. The knee-jerk reaction was to quickly implement a classic Project Management Tool on top of Akeneo PIM. There are many solutions available on the market, and the implementation would have been swift and easy. But it struck a chord with us! Why should we ask our end users to be stuck in project management when they should be focused on their core business: the process of Product Enrichment. Thus we entered a design cycle, and the Teamwork Assistant was born.

<<< new Dashboard reporting the Teamwork Assistant >>>

 

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Our customers explained the challenge they wanted to solve… but it was still up to us to figure out how to interpret the problem and find a workflow solution that felt intuitive and efficient.

The first step of any UX design strategy is to build the right framework or process to facilitate the use of great feedback and resist the temptation in choosing the easiest solution.

Idea Manager

We maintain a list of all the ideas generated by our end users. Every idea is recorded, whether it was produced in a feedback interview, or shadowing session, by a salesperson talking to a potential buyer, or from the help desk personnel talking to an active user.

Each product owner tracks the implementation status of new ideas. We also monitor where the ideas come from so product owners can go back to the user to investigate and flesh out the suggestion or conduct an additional study to assess similar needs with other users.

When the same idea is requested by multiple sources, we track that too. If a lot of users have the same suggestion, and it is proved there is a business value, it then becomes prioritized and moved into the product roadmap. If an idea is not PIM centric, it isn’t ignored, but instead, it is submitted to the marketplace team to be built outside of the core product as an integration or extension.

23% of all ideas shared since the beginning of Akeneo PIM has been implemented. We don’t collect customer feedback just to make our customers feel like we are listening to them; we actively implement their ideas into new product features.

Customer Interviews and Visits

Each product owner conducts two to three interviews every month with current clients regarding specific features, and the team leads one face to face visit each month. In the past, we have conducted feedback interviews on topics like dashboards, modeling complex products, media management, etc. The only requirement for end users to participate in the interview process is that they have been using Akeneo PIM long enough to understand the primary functionality. These interviews stir up new ideas, establish a cycle and multiply the value of the direct connection with our clients or markets.

Each product owner conducts 2-3 client interviews per month challenging a specific value proposition.

Shadow Sessions

Interviews are great, but sometimes users don’t even know what changes they need to make operations run more smoothly. Every organization wants to optimize for productivity/collaboration, but users may not precisely know what features or additional functionality they need to make it happen. This is why we host “shadowing” workshops.

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For example, workshops enabled us to detect that setting up one view required a user to complete 3-4 tasks. In the new release 2.0, 3-4 tasks are still needed but now are grouped into one unique location instead of being distributed across multiple locations. Testers reported a better performance score compared to the previous feature.

<<< New step by step workflow to set up a view >>>

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We work with our clients to observe how end users interact with Akeneo PIM and take note of how users navigate the system, which tasks most impact productivity and to detect where time is wasted. Because of this, we can understand where UX improvements need to be made, and whether or not the users realize the impact that specific optimizations could have on their workflow.

Up next is Part 3 in the UX Design series. After conducting a dedicated roundtable with many stakeholders, learn about how we implement customer feedback into real product changes.

Ready to test-drive Akeneo PIM, or interested in a free consultation? Contact us today!

Interested in learning more about UX Design? Read our complete blog series:

<<< Inside Akeneo: UX Design Part #1 – The Philosophy

Inside Akeneo: UX Design Part #3 – The Build (stay tuned) >>>

User Experience (UX) is the heart of Akeneo PIM

Akeneo PIM is UX driven. Our ultimate goal is to create an easy-to-use product information management (PIM) system with all the functionalities and features to serve a wide range of end users. We talked with Stéphane Giraud, Lead UX Designer, and Nolwenn Poirier, Product Owner, to discuss the origins of UX design and how that influences our philosophy at Akeneo.

The History of UX Design

UX Design is a buzzword in many software companies. It has been focused on and celebrated by the major tech organizations of the world – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). Prompted by GAFAM, the “Mobile First” and “Ease of Use” philosophies emerged around 2010 and remain major components for UX design strategies today.

While UX design has been increasingly trendy since 2010, its roots actually began for over 40 years. Today, UX design is considered a science. One of the largest proponents is the Nielsen Norman Group, created by Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen in 1998. The group has published numerous studies on a variety of UX topics including managing forms for usability, navigation menus, eye tracking, and more. Today their philosophies are still taught in school and incorporated into UX designs.

What makes a good user experience?

Do not Market Your Design

For any software company, it is important to get end users interested in your solution early on at the pre-sales stage. These individuals will ultimately be the people who interact with your solution on a regular basis and are some of the key players in the decision-making process. Fortunately, or unfortunately, their impressions sometimes rely on non-objective criteria, like their personal feelings towards pre-determined workflows or other features.

Software companies often feel a strong temptation to deliver what the end users think they want. Although understanding and considering what your users want is important, we believe it is the job of the UX designer to figure out what types of changes and features the users actually need.

It’s the job of the UX Designer to understand the customer needs that may be hidden in the shadows.

Pay Attention to Trends

Web technologies are moving at lightning-fast speeds and GAFAM regularly proposes (or rather imposes) their own rules which can dictate what defines the “best” user experience. They want to set these user experience standards because:

• A consumer who adopts your codes and conventions can remain captive in keeping and maintaining your technology for years.
• It’s another way to stay ahead of the competition: if these organizations rewrite the rules they can set the pace, thereby forcing other organizations to either copy them or step up their game.

Think about many recent UX/UI design trends: Skeuomorphic, Flat, Metro, Fluent… these were all introduced, discarded, and/or forced onto consumers by GAFAM.

It can be hard to escape. When managing a website or eCommerce platform, there is often a strong desire to innovate with great design, style, or unique content in an effort to attract new customers. In fact, it’s common for eCommerce companies to drastically refresh their website design every 3-5 years to look “current” and implement the latest SEO techniques and mobile requirements. However, that innovation is limited on practical level by UX conventions that consumers can understand.

For a software company like Akeneo, it can be challenging to integrate an easy-to-use interface with the required business logic components. Unlike an eCommerce website, many of the concepts we need users to understand at glance have not been established by GAFAM… or anyone else.

So what are the secret ingredients to creating a great user experience?

In the past, KPIs for UX were limited. Some organizations tried to equate clicks or time spent on a page with good or bad design. Today, user interface (UI) technologies, primarily performance and fluidity, have significantly improved. KPIs can be measured more confidently  and rely on cloud technologies that can more accurately measure meaningful performance and interaction metrics.

But even with advanced technology, you can’t reduce UX to just clicks.

At Akeneo we have an established UX philosophy. We believe that the user experience must:

• be simple
• save users time when enriching product data
• have features and wording that is obvious and relevant
• be friendly

We believe that simplicity is a strong driving factor in the adoption of new technologies and can help you quickly shape your skills while:

• Reducing overhead
• Boosting performance and productivity
• Accelerating participation across functional teams to improve product information
• Allowing you to focus on your core business and increase sales

Because Akeneo PIM is one unique application, the relationship between UX design and business logic is simpler and more consistent.

Interested in seeing a great UX?

The only way to determine what makes one UX better than another, is to dive in yourself and understand how the underlying functionality and UX interact.

That’s why we offer our community edition for free. It doesn’t make sense for us to try to convince you how great our UX is if you can’t even explore it on your own.

You can’t assess a UX based on facts and figures or by just looking at pretty screenshots. You have to USE it.

To truly evaluate the UX of Akeneo PIM compared to other solutions we suggest that you:

• Create  two or three business use cases
• Identify and profile the key users within your organization that will use Akeneo PIM on a daily basis
• Build an assessment grid for those users to grade each product
• Unleash the users to test product options
• Compare notes and assessments

Ready to give it a try?

Access our Community Edition Online Demo or for a more customized test experience, contact us for a consultation.

Interested in learning more about UX Design? Read the next portion of this blog series.

Inside Akeneo: UX Design Part #2 – The Design. >>>

A PIM supports the different needs of both the Vendor Manager and the Product Manager in fulfilling their distinct roles:

• The Vendor Manager focuses on supporting existing vendors and onboarding new vendors and is deeply involved in those relationships (e.g. KPI analysis, contract renewal, etc.)
• The Product/Category Manager manages onboarding new products and improving product quality. This involves enhancing product descriptions with the e-tailer’s own vision and branding while adapting that data to the target audience. The product manager’s vendor relationship relies on micro moments such as onboarding a new collection, marketing promotions, etc.

A PIM supports strategic vendor management across the portfolio of vendors and a better product experience for end buyers, resulting in lower returns with increased traffic and conversion.

Reduce Risk in Experimenting with New Product categories or Geographic Expansion

Marketplaces can fuel rapid growth in new product categories and/or geographic markets. Partnering with marketplace vendors can radically speed up entry into these new markets. Partnerships slash inherent risk as well.

Allowing partners to carry the burden of additional inventory and logistics reduces the need to invest heavily in an untested market and provides the opportunity to explore new markets with relatively low risk. Once market demand is proven, the risk of brand investment drops significantly.

Net Addition and Diversification of Revenue Stream

A commonly overlooked benefit of a marketplace strategy is revenue diversification.

A smart marketplace approach can be as profitable as direct sales for the sponsoring brand.

Even if margins are higher for direct sales, the revenue increase in a marketplace approach outweighs the cannibalistic effect of marketplace sales. If you don’t offer a product/service that the buyer wants, where they want it, and with the right shipping offer… you will lose the sale. Marketplaces help you retain some of that revenue while building customer satisfaction.

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Ricard Case Study

Ricard decided to test opening a new sales channel as a departure from its historical business model. The Marketplace LesNouveauxCavistes offers independent and local liquor stores an opportunity to expand their offerings online. The marketplace, powered by Mirakl marketplace management software, launched at the start of 2017. It provides the following benefits:

• A new channel approach for beginners, early adopters or experts to discover new products, featuring more than 3,700 references with advanced advice and great content.
• A simple and easy path for 70 Independent Liquor Stores to test an initial online sales experience and boost revenue.
• A chance for Ricard to earn additional revenue through a new direct sales channel and then expand the program for larger growth.

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What are the risks of a Multi-Vendor Marketplace Strategy?

The biggest risk in hosting a multi-vendor marketplace is damage to brand reputation from non-performing vendors. Studies show that if something goes wrong in the transaction with a third-party vendor, 85% of the customers blame the seller and not the marketplace brand itself.

The second biggest risk is from poor customer experience when sellers don’t provide high quality product information. This degrades the shopping experience and increases the number and severity of downstream problems with customer satisfaction following the transaction.

Critical Tools for A Successful Multi-Vendor Marketplace Strategy

The two critical tools needed to solve the brand risk challenge of launching a marketplace are:

• The Online Marketplace Management software
• Product Information Management software

Online Marketplace Management software

Good Online Marketplace Management software is a key requirement for launching a marketplace. There’s no need to homebrew software. Excellent best-of-breed tools (such as Mirakl, used in the Ricard study above) enable you to automate vendor relationships within the marketplace.

Online Marketplace Management software needs to provide full control over quality and KPIs for service levels, response time, logistics, customer ratings, etc. This allows you to easily maintain quality levels to protect your brand from non-performing vendors without a lot of time-consuming manual reporting and management tasks.

Product Information Management software

Product Information Management (PIM) software is the final piece of the puzzle in creating a thriving marketplace.

Akeneo PIM is tailored for marketers to easily personalize workflow processes, leverage the product family data structure to simplify and streamline data capture, and easily assign responsibilities across the organization. It’s powerful, flexible, easy-to-use, and integrates with virtually every storefront, marketplace, ERP, and digital asset management tool available. And it’s open source.

You can take our suggestion of choosing Akeneo as your PIM of choice with a grain of salt (although seriously – it’s open source – why wouldn’t you at least try it out ). But what you shouldn’t take with a grain of salt is that a PIM is an absolute necessity in a successful marketplace process.

Better product descriptions = Higher Customer Satisfaction Better Conversion Rates Lower Return Rates

If your biggest risk in implementing a marketplace strategy is reputational damage from sub-standard product listings (and vendors), the best way to mitigate that risk is to ensure that every product listing in your marketplace meets your quality standards for product description and detail. Better product descriptions equal lower returns and higher customer satisfaction.

With Akeneo PIM, it’s easy to ensure that every product description on your site, whether your own or one of your marketplace partners’, is complete, accurate, and up-to-date.

Akeneo PIM makes it easy to enforce quality standards. If you’re already using Akeneo PIM for your current product information you can simply extend your existing product information quality standards to your marketplace partners. Likewise, Akeneo will automatically import your partner’s product data from a variety of spreadsheets and ERP systems or other sources. Akeneo then flags SKUs that need additional product information, media files, or translation for accurate completion.

Managing your marketplace using Akeneo PIM benefits your partners as well, since no reputable vendor wants to post product information with incomplete, outdated, or erroneous information.

Conclusion

Multi-vendor marketplaces can be a great strategy to extend product offerings and expand geographic reach while increasing customer satisfaction and revenues. In order to reap the rewards of your marketplace, be sure to arm yourself with two essential tools: Online Marketplace Management software and PIM.

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Over 40,000 merchants worldwide choose Akeneo.

Find out what Akeneo can do you for you with a test-drive or a free consultation! Contact us for more information!

<<< Part#1. Multi-vendor marketplace: Is it right for you?

What’s Keeping You Awake at Night?

The biggest competition in today’s online eCommerce market is the massive multi-vendor marketplace. In the early days, the big A’s – Amazon and Alibaba – helped to increase online shopping, getting consumers and business customers alike accustomed to buying online. Their victories were your victories.

But today, that balance has shifted. Now, eCommerce executives need a strategy to compete with – or risk becoming little more than suppliers to huge multi-vendor marketplaces. The Big A’s compete on product, price, and volume, offering a large range of product options through a product inventory that is almost impossible to match. Amazon accounted for the majority (53%) of the growth in US e-commerce sales for last year…. and that phenomenal growth was largely based on the marketplace model, where third-party sellers offer products alongside Amazon’s own.

Tactics to best compete with Amazon and Alibaba are on the minds of many eCommerce executives these days. As well they should be.

Adopting the Multi-vendor Marketplace model with a product quality focus:

To remain competitive, many large and mid-size companies need smarter approaches to merchandising. One promising approach is to transform a traditional eCommerce site into a multi-vendor marketplace by offering an increased range of higher-quality products without the risk of inventory, logistics, or servicing investments. This approach provides a unique competitive advantage against the Big A’s. Another approach is to shorten the value chain, bypassing wholesalers and buying directly from brands.

Two technologies are key to a successful marketplace: a marketplace management platform for onboarding and managing sellers, and a product information management (PIM) application. A PIM ensures that the right mix of products are presented in the most efficient and effective way possible, giving customers the best value for each product category. For maximum efficiency, the marketplace platform and PIM application need to be tightly integrated. Using the Mirakl marketplace management platform in combination with Akeneo PIM can make the move to a marketplace strategy efficient and highly successful.

Why is product information a key driver for a successful marketplace?

• Personalization requires high-quality product information
• Omnichannel needs product data that is consistent across all touchpoints
• Intelligence from new sources – such as Chatbots – relies on accurate product data

There are massive opportunities in the creation of carefully curated horizontal and vertical marketplaces that can provide customers with incredible value for given product categories or market segments.

Here are two examples that illustrate how a marketplace approach can succeed:

The first example is Deco.fr (M6 Web Group), a specialized online store that sells to a highly targeted audience of women age 25-45. Approximately 40% of the audience was upscale. The store featured household goods and had significant traffic. Specialized brands are a key part of their portfolio. Deco.fr decided to transform its strategy from a traditional model to a marketplace approach using Mirakl as the marketplace management platform and Akeneo as the PIM system. The key goal was to reach critical mass at the end of the first year through a focused effort to onboard 75-100 vendors via the Mirakl platform – with an average of 1,000 offers each – for a total of 80,000 SKUs managed in Akeneo PIM.

• The Mirakl system made it easy to onboard the new vendors and all the new product information was smoothly managed in Akeneo PIM.
• The PIM uses access right managements that allow vendors to upload product information to the system where Deco.fr marketers can enrich the product data.

Using the marketplace approach, Deco.fr could promote additional vendors and brands, with more relevant product information to a larger audience, and engage customers in new ways such as personalization. Deco.fr relies on Akeneo PIM to deliver their full range of product information across channels in whatever formats are required – for standard descriptions, videos, demos and more. Now Deco.fr is a successful marketplace with the ability to grow and expand in France and even to new countries.

Delamaison is a second example of a successful marketplace approach. Delamaison is a specialized store featuring household goods including home decoration & garden products.

Using Mirakl as their marketplace management platform and Akeneo as their PIM, Delamaison offers highly curated and trusted selections of inventory to their customers which result in higher conversion rates. Thus, for many eCommerce players, adding a multi-vendor marketplace can be seen as less of a radical shift in strategy and more like leveraging existing competitive advantages. And quality product information is critical to that success.

What are the consumer advantages of Multi-Vendor Marketplaces?

Marketplaces provide customers with more product offerings, fair prices, and an optimal customer experience.

Multi-vendor marketplaces control the buying process for both consumer and B2B goods. To win business, your product offerings need to feature a variety of products presented in a highly compelling fashion, with accurate, complete descriptions that resonate with buyers. If your product presentation doesn’t meet buyer expectations they will go and shop at your competitors. Worse, if you consistently can’t give them a superior product presentation with the information they desire, they’ll stop coming back. And price competition – with multiple sellers competing – ensures that your customers get the best price possible.

Marketplaces allow for rapid and radical increases in product assortment.

With the right software, a Marketplace Manager can typically manage ten times the number of traditional vendors and each can offer a larger selection of products.

Why? The Multi-vendor Marketplace is a more streamlined relationship model.

In a typical vendor relationship, a Marketplace Manager is required to:

• Find new vendors and products
• Negotiate contract terms
• Onboard vendors and their products
• Setup rules to define minimum data quality standards
• Organize merchandising
• Review, suspend, and promote vendors
• Periodically re-negotiate terms and restart the entire process when onboarding a new supplier

However, with a marketplace, you can bring an entire assortment of products onboard as simply as integrating the vendor’s product data. 90% of the tasks (orders, payments, invoices, contracts) can be automated. In the next blog post, we’ll explore how a PIM makes the migration to a marketplace model cost effective and efficient while driving to higher revenue and saving costs.

Part#2. Using a PIM to manage a successful Multi-vendor Marketplace >>>

The table below shows how productivity savings, conversion improvements, reductions in return rates, and increased margin from higher revenue yields a total of $140,629 in gains the first year. Depending on the complexity of your project, you can quickly reach  financial breakeven very soon, accelerate  market expansion and offers can significantly leverage your Return on investment

Assumptions: Table 3.1 shows the entire ROI equation over the three-year period based on calculations from the two previous posts.

• Productivity savings are shown in PIM ROI Blog post #1
• Sales and conversion data are shown in PIM ROI Blog post #2
• Retail average net profit shown at 3% (see Stern.nye.edu)

Table 3.1 – Summary of cost savings and revenue increases enabled by the use of PIM at a company with 30,000 SKUs in year one.

As shown in the first two blog posts, an eCommerce business selling 30,000 SKUs could save $12,500 by improving product management productivity with PIM. As the product list and sales channels expand,  productivity savings increase in years two and three, as shown in Table 3.1 above. The PIM delivers additional revenue increases by improving on-site conversions and reducing merchandise returns.

“R” is the cumulative gains from productivity savings and increased revenue. The average net profit margin is 3% (see Stern.nye.edu). In year one, the $12,500 in productivity gain, added to the $128,129 in increased margin from higher revenue, yields a total of $140,629 in gains.

While omitted from our calculation due to wide variances across industries, PIM is also able to facilitate revenue growth by simplifying expansions into new market and product offerings.

The Math of PIM ROI

ROI is a number determined by the following formula:

ROI = (Net Profit – Cost of Investment) ÷ Cost of Investment *100

As an example, a Net Profit of $25 on a Cost of investment of $20, yields an ROI of 25%, as shown by the equation: ($25 – $20)/$20 = $5/$20 = 25% Your return (The “R”) in this case equals your PIM efficiency savings and increased profits from PIM. Your investment (The “I”) is the total cost of ownership of the PIM system.

Akeneo – Smarter Design, Risk-free, Maximum Value, and Seamless Integration:

What makes Akeneo PIM the superior choice? Low total cost of ownership is just the beginning. Akeneo removes the risk from your PIM decision. With Akeneo PIM, you can try the Akeneo Community Edition as a free proof of concept before investing in the Enterprise Edition. With first-hand system knowledge and experience, you understand how the system works with your product data – the risk simply goes away. Akeneo is more cost efficient by design. We’re open source. A traditional system is a closed box; you pay expensive licensing fees and must work with what’s inside. With Akeneo PIM, you only invest in functionality that solves your unique challenges.   Akeneo PIM delivers maximum value for your budget at significantly lower costs. We’re open source – so the base cost of Akeneo is zero. With Akeneo PIM, you only pay for what you choose. And that means better ROI and higher growth, year after year. The Akeneo Enterprise Edition is smart design for seamless integration into current product enrichment workflows. Rather than clumsily trying to build new workflows to match a proprietary PIM tool, Akeneo enables easier adoption, markedly better user satisfaction, and greater efficiencies. The Akeneo Enterprise Edition includes the standard features of the Akeneo Community Edition plus: – Advanced rights management – Validation workflow – Versioning and publication – Rules engine – Product asset manager – Teamwork Assistant The Akeneo Enterprise Edition is a customizable PIM system, designed for seamless integration across your merchandizing workflows, to deliver maximum ROI. Want to see how PIM could decrease costs while increasing revenue for your organization? Ready to learn more about Akeneo PIM integration? Interested in a demo of Akeneo Enterprise Edition? Contact us for a free consultation. Not ready to talk anyone yet? Try taking Akeneo for a test-drive. << How Product Information Management Makes You Money – Part #2