Reason #2 – Avoid spreadsheet nightmares

Without a PIM system, you will have three options to feed your e-commerce website with product information:

Plug your ERP directly to your e-commerce system

A lot of retailers (especially large ones) believe that everything they need in terms of product information is already in their ERP. Save yourself from disillusion or poor product pages: your ERP does not contain enough information to be used without human enrichment.

Enrich information within your e-commerce system

OK – if you don’t have enough data in your ERP, why not simply enrich it directly in the backend of your e-commerce system?

Well, even if tools like Magento have some quite intuitive and simple UI, they are not meant to be used for this kind of purpose. A simple example? When creating a new product in Magento, you have to give a value for every attribute identified as mandatory. If for some reason you don’t already have all the required values for a product (maybe because you don’t have the information yet from one of your suppliers), you won’t be able to create or save an incomplete product.

Let’s be clear on that point: it totally makes sense for a front-end tool like Magento to ask for complete product information, as you don’t want to display poor / inconsistent product pages to your customers. But if you cannot store some “work in progress” product information in your e-commerce system, how will you manage this enrichment work?

Enrich information within spreadsheets

This is usually where Excel comes into the picture. Because spreadsheets often look like a reasonable approach to not waste time on enrichment: everyone knows how to use them and it should not be too complex to import data from Excel into your e-commerce system.

And although it may be a good fit for small and simple catalogs, it will mostly be where a never-ending pain begins for a lot of merchants… To adapt spreadsheets to your own data model (attributes, families, etc.), you will have to make them more complex or multiply them quickly. Experience shows that even for a small catalog, you will end up struggling with dozens of files containing 20+ columns, thousands of lines and multiples tab.

Using a PIM from day one could help you avoid those concerns. A PIM system is not an additional tool for managing your product contents. It is a necessary tool for your own good.

Curious about Akeneo PIM? Want to know more about the solution? Want a demo?

Contact Us Now!

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<<  Reason #1 – Give your product information the time it (really) deserves

Reason #3 – Leverage your recommendation engine / searchandizing tool… >>

Reason #1 – Give your product information the time it (really) deserves

When launching a new e-commerce website, you will have a ton of things to think about: design, SEO, e-marketing, the sales funnel, payment providers, warehouse management, etc.

Structuring your product information will be only one item among many in preparing this project. And you can already bet on the fact that you won’t be able to spend much time on this particular one.

A PIM project is a unique opportunity to spend some time asking yourself the right questions about your catalog:

•      How should your products be classified?
•      How many attributes will you need for each product family?
•      Which ones will be used now or in the near future for faceted navigation?
•      Where does your data (ERP, suppliers, your team, etc.) come from?
•      What is the level of data quality required for your e-commerce website? And for your future channels?

And you know what else? The time you will spend on this project won’t be lost, as it can be reused directly for your e-commerce system integration!

Curious about Akeneo PIM? Want to know more about the solution? Want a demo?

Contact Us Now!

Reason #2 – Avoid spreadsheet nightmares >>

For our German solution partner Basecom, also partner of Shopware, the development of an interface was of course obvious. Thus, they have developed during the last weeks an extension, Akeneo2shopware, which quickly and comfortably enables an easy application of Akeneo and Shopware.

Following the installation of the connector, product information can be transferred easily into the database of the Shopware shop after a few steps. An API key has to be generated and the transmitted category tree has to be chosen after the completed category export. If the existing Shopware website already contains individual attributes, these will have to be transmitted initially into Akeneo by an import job after the installation of a free Shopware extension. As soon as all jobs are created and configured, the connector simply transmits all the products information including images, categories, and product families.

If you want to have a quick overview of the extension, you can take a look at the video below:

You can find the Shopware connector on our marketplace by clicking here!

Also, if you have any question regarding the connector, training or support, you can contact Basecom it-consultant, Steffen Krueger at [email protected].

After the opening of our office in Boston, we are really happy to prepare for further US developement with Roy Rubin’s knowledge and expertise in the field. Frédéric de Gombert, our CEO, is proud of this recent addition to the team and predicts a healthy and valuable market ahead: “It is an amazing opportunity to be able to receive the best advice from an e-commerce and open source expert such as Roy Rubin. Magento has always been a great inspiration for Akeneo. We are extremely proud to have the two founders on our team. It also confirms that product information management is becoming a key part of building a multi channel retail platform.” Roy Rubin is also very excited to join the team: “Akeneo’s progress has been remarkable and I couldn’t be more excited to join the team as an advisor. The opportunity for an open source, enterprise class PIM solution is tremendous and Akeneo has delivered to the market an exceptional product to address the needs of businesses around the world.”

Having Roy Rubin on our side is great and we are really excited to benefit from the expertise of THE e-commerce and open source leader. He will be involved in the strategic decisions for Akeneo, specifically the company’s short-term goals which include further U.S development.

Prestaneo is an add-on module that allows you to import your product catalogs, from Akeneo, directly into PrestaShop. No more struggle with numerous tools; you enjoy all the power of Akeneo PIM to administrate efficiently your catalog’s information (products, medias, categories…). Prestaneo takes care of importing and updating your data directly and frequently on PrestaShop. PRESTANEO? Prestaneo is currently the only add-on module that connects Akeneo to PrestaShop; it allows you to take advantage of the PIM’s strengths to revolutionize the way you manage products intended for your e-commerce activity.

• Simple: it’s integrated directly into your PrestaShop platform
• Quick: the add-on module imports and synchronizes your Akeneo data directly in your PrestaShop back-office
• Efficient: its design leans on the experience of Synolia’s experts to respect the application’s development standards to make reliable interfaces.
• Complete: Prestaneo is the perfect app to import, manage and embellish all your products data in order to deliver the best customer experience to your online customers.

CURIOUS ABOUT PRESTANEO? You want to discover the power of Prestaneo? All information is already available on GitHub! It’s not enough? There’s even more! Synolia invites you to a dedicated webinar to the Akeneo x PrestaShop extension in English on Thursday, April 7th, at 5:00pm (GMT + 1) and in French on Thursday, Mars 24th, at 11:00am (GMT + 1). Do not wait to register for a complete demo!

You might already have seen this charming creature on our website, depicting a threatening multichannel monster facing Julia, our marketing heroin. Today, Julia tamed the hydra and turned it into a nice and friendly multichannel pet, easy to work with and not frightening anymore.

Falling in love with our tamed hydra and desperately looking for a way to adopt one?

Don’t worry, you will get a chance to get your own Ziggy in a variety of ways:

• by visiting our booth during an event we are sponsoring (like Internet World, Magento Imagine, or IRCE)
• by sharing with us your Akeneo PIM experience (drop us an email at [email protected])
• by contributing to the product (don’t know where to start? check out our contribution guide).

We can’t wait for our Ziggy to travel the world!

Silly Spreadsheets

If you are like many ecommerce companies, you are probably managing your product information in spreadsheets. And, as you know from personal experience, this is a pain in the butt. Spreadsheets were just not designed to handle this kind of work. Every new product added is another time-consuming data entry project. And it’s not just data entry that has to be done once, its data entry across a whole series of spreadsheets over and over. Plus, every time you want to add another platform, channel, or location it can get even more complicated. If you’re relying on spreadsheets to manage all this product information, going multi-channel could drive your team into the ground, but there is something that can help.

Multi-channel ecommerce software can make it easier for your company to enter new markets by removing the constraints associated with maintaining spreadsheets.

Akeneo: Flexible Multi-Channel Ecommerce Software

Akeneo is extremely flexible multi-channel ecommerce software. While most multi-channel ecommerce software is highly limited and designed solely to help push existing product information across multiple channels, Akeneo offers additional levels of flexibility. Akeneo helps you take control of multiple channel challenges by:

Multi-Channel Made Easy

Akeneo’s multi-channel software allows you can change only what needs to change between channels, like altering the picture formats for digital and print. You can export everything in one easy step while ensuring all the rest of your information remains the same. You can be sure that all the time you took writing enticing descriptions won’t be lost and product specs won’t be mangled.

You can even generate print catalogs with the push of a button using Akeneo’s InDesign plug-in.

Customized for Your Platform

Every ecommerce platform has different formatting requirements. Between your company website, your partner websites, and Amazon, Alibaba, and other online marketplaces, you might have to deal with quite a few different platforms. Akeneo allows you to change only the information that needs to change and automatically export the right formats for each platform, making it much easier to handle all of your product information. Akeneo offers off-the-shelf integrations for the major ecommerce platforms including Magento, Mirakl, Shopware, PrestaShop, and many more. Plus, our open-source model and thriving ecosystem of partners and integrators means that you can easily support custom systems. Akeneo’s open architecture provides much more flexibility in building out new and custom platforms compared to proprietary software that really only address three or four specific platforms.

Akeneo offers many off-the-shelf integrations for major ecommerce platforms.

Localization made scalable

A global multi-channel strategy includes multiple channels in multiple countries. Akeneo streamlines the process of localization with powerful workflows for distributed localization teams, off the shelf connectors to translation services like TextMaster or Translations.com, and easy to customize quality measurements for localized content. With Akeneo, the effective cost of creating and maintaining multi-channel localizations drops by over 50%! This radically improves the economics of creating localizations for markets large and small. Ready to take the plunge and see if multi-channel ecommerce software is right for you? Get a demo and stop the spreadsheet madness once and for all or read our white papers Kill your spreadsheets before your spreadsheets kill you | From Overwhelming to Organized: Scaling Global Product Management