Drivers of strong ROI include decreasing the amount of time your employees spend updating spreadsheets and streamlining your entire eCommerce operation. Implementing PIM helps you increase profits reducing costs and increasing revenue. This article discusses how PIM helps you save money by reducing product management overhead. Part II covers PIM’s ability to realize further savings through decreased returns and improved on-site conversions. Part III summarizes and goes into more detail on PIM ROI over a three-year period.

Overview: The Astonishing Volume of Detail in Product Management

Managing multiple product SKUs in an eCommerce business tends to be time-consuming and expensive, especially if the product management team relies on manual processes. To understand why this work is so laborious, think about the amount of detail in a product manager’s workload. Table 1 describes the level of detail tracking required in a company with 30,000 product SKUs in its first year of operation. Each SKU contains 70 attributes, e.g. size, color, prices, images and so forth. If the company has its eCommerce site translated into three languages, that means the product management team has to keep track of 2.7 million data values.

Table 1 – the number of data values a company has to manage as its expands it product portfolio, channels and language localizations.

As the company grows, the data challenge expands with it. If, as Table 1 shows, the company adds 10,000 SKUs, a new language and an additional channel in its second year, the number of data points under management balloons to 6.2 million. In year three, with one more language and channel, they’ve got 13.5 million data points on their hands.

A data management load like this requires a lot of man-hours. Product enrichment is critical to conversion rates, low return rates, and overall profitability, so skimping in this area is not an option. Without the right automation tools, even the most efficient product management team is going to be quite expensive to maintain. And, the work will suffer from productivity and accuracy challenges.

Drivers of Product Management Inefficiency

It’s not an indictment to say that manual product management is inefficient. This is just a reality. You may have the most diligent product managers around. They will still be less efficient that a good PIM solution. Here’s why:

• When people do the work without the right tools, it takes a long time and is error-prone.
  • Spending time manually emailing, importing and exporting product data.
  • Relying on email and phone to communicate changes about products or get questions answered.
  • Cutting and pasting product information from spreadsheet to spreadsheet.
  • Manually updating nearly identical SKUs.
  • Looking for and correcting product images and videos.
  • Manually correcting product data in multiple locations.
  • Looking for missing data.
  • Repeating all of these tasks across multiple channels and localization efforts.
  • Fixing all the inevitable mistakes from the manual processes.
• Without PIM, the team managing each channel probably has to oversee its own collection of product data. Or, the teams may circulate eternally out-of-date spreadsheets of product information and waste time correcting product listings.
• Localizations lead to complexity. More languages, differing units of measurement, and slight product changes from regional market to regional market mean more complexity.
• Multiple stakeholders in different groups (or even different companies) often have to collaborate on product management processes. The more contributors there are and the more separated they are organizationally, the more inefficient the product management process will become.
• Most eCommerce systems on their own are not well suited to implementing global strategies. Rather, they tend to be good for immediate merchandizing around specific events like Christmas or high-frequency sales. They are usually devoted to the single channel of eCommerce. Localization and multiple channels, such as print catalogs, are challenging to implement.

Savings from Product Management Productivity Via PIM

A PIM solution saves you money by reducing the amount of time employees must spend administering products for an eCommerce site. With PIM, there is one authoritative product data set. This leads to time savings across multiple channels and makes product managers more productive. It also helps eCommerce sites and print catalogs become more engaging and profitable.

A good PIM solution provides all the stakeholders in the product management process with a connected, intuitive tool to track and manage product details. PIM enables employees to avoid repetitive, dull and error-prone tasks. For instance, PIM will automate the process of making sure a shoe listed as “Blue, Size 11” on an American eCommerce site gets listed as “Blau, Größe 44“ on the German localization without any manual data entry steps. Multiply that process by 30,000; and you can start to see the advantage for the company described in Table 1.

Multi-channel businesses make the PIM advantage more pronounced. Businesses where multiple teams have to coordinate their product management efforts also benefit. The PIM tooling streamlines the process of getting the work done.

PIM provides a number of intangible benefits which can contribute to greater success and profitability. These include a reduction in frustration that stems from having to deal with millions of data points – often on a rushed schedule – as well as the stress of handling errors. Reduced errors on the eCommerce site and richer product detail will result in higher customer satisfaction. And, spending less time on a time-consuming task brings opportunities to spend more time on merchandizing.

Add Up Your Efficiency Gains

In our experience working with numerous multi-channel businesses, we have observed that our PIM solution enables product management efficiency gains of about 50% and can go up to 70% and even more. To understand what this means in terms of dollars, consider the example in Table 2. Modeled on a typical client of ours, this hypothetical company updates 33% of its 30,000 SKUs in the first year. At 5 minutes per update, using a manual process, it will cost the company $25,000 to update its eCommerce catalog in the first year – assuming a fully allocated labor rate of $30 per hour.

With PIM and a 50% bump in productivity, product updates will take just 2’30 minutes. This translates into a savings of $12,500 in year one, $27,917 in year two and $43,056 in year three as the product count grows along with the number of updates.

Table 2 – Projection of savings from the implementation of PIM in product management.

As Table 2 shows, PIM helps save money by making product management more efficient. There are many other ways that PIM contributes to increased profits and ROI. These will be covered in the next articles in this series.

Want to talk to one of our experts to better understand how PIM could decrease costs while increasing revenue at your organization? Just want an idea of how much it would cost to setup Akeneo?

Contact us for a free consultation, or try taking Akeneo for a test-drive.

How PIM Boosts your revenue, Part 2 >>

Chatbots create a dialog with humans that simulate a natural conversation and help users find products or services that fit their situations. The promise of chatbots has created huge investments and high expectations across the retail universe. While chatbots are used for a variety of tasks from customer service to internal analysis, we are focusing on how chatbots can be utilized as a new retail sales channel. Continue reading “The Critical Infrastructure Needed to Power Retail Chatbots”

Truthfully, we don’t even really like the term “project management tool” at all because it implies additional work in the form of assigning tasks, defining dependencies, and creating more hassles and bumming everyone out with administrative overhead.

Product managers don’t want to spend their time creating Gantt charts – they just want all their team members to effortlessly know what they’re supposed to do next. So that’s what we built it directly into Akeneo.

The Teamwork Assistant automatically flags next activities and gently guides team members on what to do next… without any outside tools or complex configuration or extensive admin time.

We believe that the way we built this feature is fundamentally disruptive as you don’t need to hire a project manager, Akeneo will automatically do the job for you!” Camille Fourmond – Product Owner at Akeneo

No Project Manager Required!

Teamwork assistant dashboard & completeness

Raising funds has never been an end-goal for Akeneo, but this is a significant milestone for the company. A step further in our mission to make product information management accessible for all: brands and retailers, marketers and technologists, large enterprises and small businesses.

When we started this journey four years ago, we had the firm conviction that product data was the hidden gem for any brand or retailer. An asset – yet to be explored and understood – but incredibly impactful and structuring in a digital strategy. And with the rise of omnichannel, we believe more than ever than the market deserves a simple yet powerful tool to unleash the power of this asset.

This is still the beginning of our journey, and we are happy to use this opportunity to bring product information management to the next level. So, what are we going to do with this money?

• Significantly invest in our product. We are launching our Cloud Edition, and we still have a lot of ideas we want to explore to continue easing the daily life of marketers and helping them to produce always better product content. We are doubling the size of our R&D team (BTW if you want to join a great team: check out our job section).
• Continue to enable our community to build great services and products on the top of our platform. We are true open source believers, and we are – more than ever – committed to creating a dynamic ecosystem around Akeneo PIM.
• Expand our operations in new countries (UK) and reinforce our teams in the US and Germany.

Benoit, Nicolas, Yoav and I would like to take this opportunity to thank personally:

• Our early adopters who made the crazy choice to trust us when Akeneo PIM was still a Powerpoint deck or a buggy beta version.
• Our early investors (inc. Kima Ventures and Nestadio Capital) for the exact same reasons!
• Our outstanding community for its benevolence and its support: you are our true wealth.
• Last but not least: our fantastic team who has turned this idea into a tangible and an easy to adopt product. Akeneo is a family – and I’m grateful and humble to have the opportunity to work with so many talented people.

The best is yet to come! #PIMforAll

 

 

Click here to download the full press release.

The marketplace assists:

• Akeneo clients who needed to expand the capabilities of Akeneo and/or connect Akeneo to external systems like Magento or Demandware.
• Technology partners like TextMaster who wanted to leverage Akeneo to power additional sales for their own products.
• Integrator partners who wished to build and maintain new extensions for use by the entire community.

The marketplace has been a big hit since its initial launch 18 months ago and has significantly accelerated overall market adoption of Akeneo while increasing partner revenues and client satisfaction. We currently have 25 different extensions from 14 different companies in the marketplace with another 15 in active development. It’s a great start. But we can do more! We want to make it even easier and more profitable for our partners to create and promote an ever-increasing variety of quality extensions. So we’ve created a dedicated team and a package of services devoted solely to improving the success of our marketplace partners. Continue reading “Back to the Future: Akeneo PIM Marketplace Accelerator”

Abandon your cumbersome and confusing spreadsheets for product information management software!

How using PIM can change your life:

1. Centralize your data.

Many merchants struggle to keep their product information up to date and consistent across all platforms. Data quality issues make trying to list products across multiple channels a nightmare. Using product information management software, you can easily centralize all of your product data in one location. There is no need to continue stressing about spreadsheets or the different formats of the various e-commerce platforms. All of your product data is in one place.

Centralize your product data.

2. Streamline your workflow.

Many companies have trouble maintaining product information across every spreadsheet in every department. A significant amount of time is spent updating SKUs because of spec changes, new products or a variety of other reasons. Using product information management software program simplifies this process. Utilizing a PIM allows you and your team to spend more time on strategic merchandizing duties rather than constantly making mundane product updates. Updating product information within the system will ensure that all channels are synced with the same information.

3. Data quality is consistent.

Maintaining data quality can be difficult especially when information is constantly getting changed/updated. It can be challenging to bring together data from suppliers and new merchandise, while also keeping track of varying data requirements for each e-commerce channel. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t have the robust tools to handle data in this way because it is simply not designed for it. Akeneo PIM includes a data completeness widget to make maintaining data quality a breeze. This tool allows you to see what data is missing or incomplete for every product. Now, there is no reason products should be pushed to market with incomplete descriptions or missing information. Akeneo makes sure your products always look their best.

Data completeness widgets make sure your products look good on every platform.

4. Expanding your product catalog is easier.

When your product information management is a mess, it can be a daunting task to even consider adding new products or locations … because every new product family, channel or localization axis creates exponential complexity in keeping all product data up-to-date. As a result, expansion plans can be curtailed. Using product information management software each product has its own data page and can be sorted based on your preferences. Employees can put data in appropriate sections, as well as add descriptions and other media. Having all of your products supplied with correct data means they are ready for market as soon as possible. As a result, it becomes much easier to support additional products or locations.

5. Supplier data is no longer a pain.

Suppliers don’t sell directly to customers, so the information they provide tends to be minimal and/or not-customer-ready. There is also a good chance that the data they provide is inconsistent with your company standards. It’s your responsibility to maintain consistency within your listings to ensure customers understand exactly what they are purchasing. With Akeneo, suppliers on-board easily into the product information management system and can populate updated product data automatically. No more spreadsheets. No more cutting and pasting. No more outdated product data.

6. Export product data across multiple channels

As a large e-commerce distributor it can be difficult to ensure that every product on every channel is complete with descriptions, images, and other necessary information. Akeneo provides multiple connectors to make exporting easy. Your products can be exported to any e-commerce platform. Akeneo only exports the information relevant for each platform. This ensures that products are displayed with correct prices, measurements, colors, and other details.

Present your products across all e-commerce platforms easily.

Your Life: Simplified.

Akeneo’s product information management software eliminates many of the tedious tasks that make maintaining your e-commerce catalog a pain. Centralized data and handy completion widgets make maintaining your product information simple. You can finally feel confident that regardless of the platform, your products will look great. Your time can be spent doing your actual job rather than maintaining spreadsheets and updating SKUs. And, with Akeneo’s data import and supplier on-boarding tools, making the change from messy Excel Hell to PIM has never been easier. Want to see if Akeneo’s product information management software is right for you? Sign up for a demo and one of our Akeneo architects will take you through a guided tour.

Translation and localization are easy with the use of product information management (PIM) software.

Localization

Localization is the process of adapting product information for every market you’re selling in. This includes changing the languages, currencies, payments, measurements etc. of products to reflect the market. By utilizing PIM, the localization process can be simplified, however, it is important to adapt your company’s operations to streamline this process. A localization team should be set up that includes internal and external support employees to ensure that your product information is accurate and updated. The 5 Steps of Product Localization: 1. Translate the product description 2. Modify multimedia content for the appropriate market (models, photos, videos, etc.) 3. Translate/convert weights, sizes, measurement, prices, etc. 4. Optimize for local SEO 5. Ensure that pricing, taxes, and return policies meet local standards/regulations Your localization team should have both internal and external employees. Internal employees should include a project leader or manager who understands the company brand or style. This person provides guidelines and new content to be localized by the external team. In contrast, the external team should be a group of strong translators, lead by a supervisor who oversees that translation projects are completed in an efficient manner. You can even increase revenue and decrease returns by localizing product information. By completing this process for every product, customers will have a clearer understanding of what they are ordering. In e-commerce return rates can be as high as 50%, with up to 8.1% of sales being spent on reverse logistics when customers return items. By reducing confusion and disappointment, customers receive the correct products with their desired specifications (size, color, etc.), which results in fewer returns and increased revenue.

Increase revenue and decrease returns by localizing product information.

Translation

Translation is an inherent part of the localization process. In order for product information to be localized, it needs to be in the native language of the market. This may seem simple, but creating accurate product description translations is more complicated than people think.

Translation is more than just transferring from one language to another, translations need to have the proper “voice” for product descriptions to be clear.

Translation can be completed through the use of two types of translations, human or machine translations. Human translations are ideal, they have better “voice”, which ultimately results in a higher conversion rate. Unfortunately, manual translations can be difficult to integrate with other product information, take a long time, and are expensive. In contrast, machine translations are cheap, fast, and can be integrated easily, but they usually have bad accuracy and “voice” and therefore, low conversion rates. So what is the solution? Ideally, you want a hybrid of manual and machine translations. The best meshing of these translators use machine computer pattern recognition in conjunction with manual translators who can utilize automated workflows.

Ideally, you want a combination of manual and machine translations to speed up the translation process and ensure proper brand “voice.”

As mentioned before, part of creating your external localization team includes finding qualified translators, who have experience within your specific e-commerce industry (beauty, tech accessories, etc.). Most importantly, the translators must also understand and adapt to your brand’s voice and style. These individuals will be able to take your product translations to the next level, rather than getting stuck with machine-only translations.  

The Benefits of Using PIM for Translation and Localization

Managing product information is a major pain point, and every new market becomes another translation and localization project. However, there are two major benefits to utilizing PIM that make this process much easier.

• Simplify the process: By using PIM you can select only the specific fields that need to be changed for localization. Common attributes can be transferred over and then exported to your various marketplace and e-commerce platforms.
• Organized workflow: With a customized PIM solution, teams distributed around the globe can work together smoothly and easily. By organizing the workflow, e-commerce merchants can increase the speed of localization and translation, so that your products can get to market faster.

Akeneo PIM makes translation and localization easy by simplifying the entire process and organizing the workflow.

Akeneo PIM

With Akeneo PIM you have all the tools to make translation and localization changes easily. From streamlined workflows for your entire global enterprise to integrated translation tools, Akeneo PIM has all of your bases covered. The cumulative benefits of simplified processes, reduced returns, and an organized workflow makes it easy for your e-commerce brand to continue to expand to more locations and channels. Without PIM, this growth would become a nightmare, but with Akeneo PIM it’s easy. You can be sure that your product information is accurate, and up to date for all of your locations, all the time. Want to learn more about Akeneo’s translation and localization capabilities? • Contact us • Get a FREE demo or • Download our eBook on localization and translation for e-commerce companies.

When we launched the first beta of Akeneo PIM at the end of 2013, we did so with the strong belief that product data would become a key asset in the deployment of a multichannel strategy, and that marketing teams needed a tool to enable them to regain control over data.

But not just any tool.

They needed a modern, open and simple tool that was:

• Simple to learn and use every day: Team productivity and data quality are closely tied to the usability of the tool manipulating your data.
• Simple to customize: Each catalog is unique. Regardless of the number of products, attributes and variations in a catalog, the PIM tool should adapt without requiring systematic development at every change or enrichment of the data model.
• Simple to connect: A PIM tool is a data hub. By itself, it is useless. It needs to be able to easily exchange data with systems surrounding it.

We worked on this concept of simplicity for the last 3 years. And with over 2 new installations of Akeneo PIM every hour worldwide, we believe that we are on the right track!

However, by interacting with our customers and partners, we realized we still could bring still more simplicity to additional areas:

• While our technical environment is actually quite standard (LAMP platform), it is still difficult for some of our customers and partners to completely overcome the challenges related to the underlying infrastructure: application server, database, cache, etc.
• Some of our users don’t customize Akeneo very much or at all. They wish they could easily update Akeneo without going through specific upgrade procedures.

To address these recurring requests, we are presenting today Akeneo Cloud Edition: A release offering the same features as Akeneo Enterprise Edition, but fully hosted and managed by our teams in a hyper-streamlined environment. This simplified environment will allow product teams to focus on what’s essential: Products.

This is not just a simple offering to host the Akeneo solution in the cloud. Akeneo Cloud Edition will enable customers to switch between two modes at any time:

• Serenity mode is designed for users who do not require advanced customization. They can use Akeneo with the same benefits as those offered by a SaaS solution (with transparent and automatic updates) while still benefiting from the contributions of our ecosystem (extensions in the Marketplace).
• Advanced mode enables the most demanding users to customize Akeneo with the same level of granularity and freedom as the on-site version of Akeneo Enterprise Edition, but without any of the challenges associated with a technical infrastructure.

This is the real innovation of Akeneo Cloud Edition: Being able to choose between the simplicity of a SaaS solution and the flexibility of a PaaS solution at any time!

And to help all of you benefit from Akeneo Cloud Edition in Serenity mode, we are currently working on a new web API that will support the addition of more connectors for any third-party technology. It will be available in all editions of Akeneo (Community, Enterprise and Cloud), version 1.7 and above.

And since we’re talking about the product roadmap, we are pleased to announce that Akeneo Cloud Edition Advanced mode is already in use by some of our customers, and will be available to all in March 2017. Serenity mode will be available in September 2017.

We sometimes hear that it is impossible to combine the scalability of an open source solution with the peace of mind provided by a SaaS solution. However, we strongly believe the two are compatible. We’re particularly excited about this new edition because Akeneo Cloud Edition is the first PIM offering the best of both worlds: The only Open SaaS PIM.

In the coming weeks, we will continue to publish a series of articles providing technical and functional details about this new edition. We may even have a few more surprises in store for you! Stay tuned…

 

 

 

The holidays are a wonderful time of year, and for e-commerce, this includes the biggest shopping days of the year – Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Of course, there are plenty of other things to look forward to during the holidays like ice skating or spending time with family, but if you’re still managing your product information in spreadsheets, you’re not going to have time for any of those things. Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate a tremendous amount of revenue for retailers. Just last year shoppers spent a total of $4.45 billion between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Cyber Monday also held its own hitting a new record of $3.07 billion in sales, a 16% increase from 2014. Overall online shopping during the holiday season (November and December) is as popular as ever, with last year’s sales totaling $70.1 billion, a 14% increase from the previous year. It doesn’t look like things will be slowing down in 2016 either.

In 2015, online sales totaled $70.1 billion during the holiday season, a 14% increase from 2014.

With all of the price changes, available discounts, and special holiday products getting added to your catalog during the holiday shopping season, there are not enough hours in a day to maintain and update all those spreadsheets – you’re going to need catalog management software.

Simplify Your Workflow with Catalog Management Software

A PIM software – product information management – can simplify your workflow and help manage all of your catalog changes for Black Friday regardless of the channel, platform, or location you’re publishing to. The PIM enables you to enrich product data and change only the information that needs to be changed while ensuring that all other data remains the same. This control is crucial when you’re looking to update media, pricing, or any other information for the holidays.

Manage all of your product information easily with a catalog management software.

Manage your product catalog in 5 steps:

Get ready for next year!

Unfortunately, it is too late to get your PIM up and running for this Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but there is no reason to wait until next year. Implementing PIM will allow you to handle last minute pricing changes, product features, and marketing needs and still be on time for dinner with friends. Be prepared with product information that is enriched and translated for all of your platforms before the chaotic season even starts. Plus, with Akeneo PIM’s proven success at increasing productivity by 50%, you can take your extra time to grow your business in time for next year. Ready to deck the halls instead of spending your time managing product information? Get ahead of the game for the next holiday season by setting up your catalog management software today! Sign up to get a demo with one of our Akeneo partners.