Should you be automating your product information?

To answer this, just ask yourself one simple question: Do I repetitively cut and paste into documents or upload spreadsheets on a regular basis when updating or enriching product information? If your answer is “yes,” then you could save time by automating at least some parts of your product information process.

How to automate product information:

Step 1: Ditch your spreadsheets. Use a Product Information Manager instead.

Spreadsheets are wonderful general-purpose tools that are good for a great many things. However, keeping your product catalogs up to date with the latest product information is not one of them. Still attached to Excel? Check out this blog post on why spreadsheets suck for e-commerce catalog management. So, please, ditch your collection of spreadsheets for a purpose-built tool: a product information management (PIM) solution. Excel just wasn’t built for managing product information in an efficient manner. There’s also no good way to automate your processes and stop cutting and pasting if you can’t let go of spreadsheets as your primary tool.

Step 2: Connect your data sources

A key feature of any good PIM is its ability to connect to: your ERP, suppliers’ data sources, media servers, custom internal data sources, and, yes, even to import the various spreadsheets that get sent your way. Work with your IT team to integrate each of these sources with your PIM. Depending on what you’re integrating, and the PIM solution you’ve chosen, this may be plug-and-play, or it may be more challenging. If your IT department doesn’t have the resources available, consider working with a specialized integrator. For instance, Akeneo integrators can quickly get virtually any configuration of inputs and outputs working with Akeneo.

Does reading the words “work with your IT team” give you a headache? Consider working with a PIM implementation team.

Once the basic plumbing is done, figure out how often each of these sources needs to be updated and work with your IT team to have your PIM suck the updated information in, on a regular basis. This integration effort represents a not-inconsequential investment in resources, but the payoff is tremendous. You’ll never cut and paste again. And your time spent with Excel and CSV files will be limited to uploading them into your PIM (and this can generally be automated as well).

Step 3: Enrich and update your product information

As a catalog, product, or ecommerce manager, this is what your team should be focused on. And, now, thanks to magic of automation, you can:

• Keep products’ information up to date.
• Show colors, sizes, and specs.
• Enrich product file with photos, videos, and other media.
• Customize the information of your products per channel or country

And this can all be done without cutting and pasting. Automation will make your work here more productive as well.

Step 4: Automate quality control

One of the great things about a good PIM is that it can automatically detect if every required field in every product record has been filled out, which prevents incomplete records from being published. No more uploading incomplete product information!

Step 5: Automatically publish different versions for different channels, platforms, and locations

Of course, the whole point of managing your product information is to give your prospective customers the most complete, accurate, and compelling product information possible – no matter where they are looking. That means pushing slightly different product information for different channels, platforms, and geographies. Without automation, every new outlet, platform, or location becomes a huge pain point and often results in wasted time, versioning problems, and huge headaches. However, with a little work, you can set up your PIM to automatically export different versions for the various consumers of your products’ information that automatically take into consideration differences in:

• • Languages
  • Measurements
  • Formats, descriptions and media for different channels like ecommerce, print, and point of sale

Akeneo has easy-to-use connectors for Magento, Prestashop, Mirakl, Shopware, print catalogs, and more.

In addition to exporting to different store fronts and ecommerce platforms through connectors and plug-ins, Akeneo includes an export builder that allows you to create reports showing the status of all of your product information. Create tailored reports for suppliers, translators, and purchase teams. Much like setting up your import integration, you may need some help from your IT or an outside consultant in setting up a complex export configuration.

Step 6: Focus on your real job

The best part of automation is that it allows you and your team to focus on your real job: effective merchandizing to increase sales.

Convinced that you need a PIM?

Take a tour of the Akeneo PIM to get a visceral sense of some of the possibilities of automation for your organization. Remember, Akeneo is open source, so it’s free to get started.

Good for you! But what are the first steps? Setting up a PIM system can be intimidating; luckily we’ve set up thousands so we can help you tackle it in the right manner. The most important thing to keep in mind is to integrate PIM into your current or ideal workflow. In our experience, if you try to adapt your workflow to match the requirements of your PIM, rather than the other way around, you will fail due to user adoption problems. PIM should serve your people, not the other way around!

Build out your PIM to match your ideal workflow… don’t try to bend your workflow to match your PIM or stick to antiquated workflows imposed by the constraints of spreadsheets.

Our customers are often surprised at how many improvements in workflow that they can achieve with the additional flexibility that PIM enables. PIM can be a catalyst for revolutionary changes in efficiency that pave the way for additional product lines, geographic regions, and marketing channels.

Automating sources of information

Start off by evaluating your sources of product information. Are they coming from an ERP? Customer databases? Emailed spreadsheets? Next, take the time to automate this flow of information directly into your PIM. A good PIM solution should have open connectors to hook into any source of information. For instance, Akeneo has a marketplace of pre-existing connectors for many ERPs, databases, and CSV and Excel spreadsheets. What’s more, with Akeneo’s open APIs, our thriving ecosystem of integrators is able to create custom connectors to virtually any product information source. Don’t waste your team’s time with manually exporting information from product data sources to spreadsheets and then importing them again into your PIM. This creates a huge pain point of human error and outdated data.

Kill your spreadsheets and improve efficiency. Don’t take half-measures. Automate ALL your product data sources.

Group SKUs into models

Every SKU in your catalog is unique but oftentimes they also have many commonalities. For instance, some SKUs may have largely similar product names, descriptions, specifications, and other commonalities but with different variations such as color, size, etc. If you group such SKUs into models then you can then enrich the common attributes at the upper level instead of managing each SKU, and take other bulk actions like enabling/disabling, deleting, etc. at this level too. Think about an organization that allows for a logical and efficient product enrichment flow across the variations. Optimize this organization around your product information enrichment process.

Localization is much more efficient with PIM

A product or SKU will have many elements that don’t vary across every, or any, localization. So, for instance, the product description may need to be translated but the product specs might not. Likewise, product images may not need to change from region to region. Specify which fields need to be updated for each product and for each localization. This allows you to maximize automation by carrying over common attributes and details while still ensuring Quality Control by tracking which fields have been localized and which remain to be modified.

Marketing channels should be separate as well

Just like localization, some fields will need to be updated for different channels (for instance 300 DPI photos for print versus 72 DPI for web) but many elements may remain the same across channels.

Enable team collaboration

Build out your PIM workflow with the team in mind. For instance, many teams have some team members that are responsible for data enrichment and others for approval and publication. Example of tasks that might be assigned to specialized workers include:

• translations
• product descriptions
• uploading of photos or videos

Sometimes these tasks are done by separate companies, freelance workers, or just down the hall. Regardless of where they are located, you should setup your PIM so that these teams can make their changes in a staging environment and automatically notify management when the updates are ready for approval. Approvals or requests for changes can be made within the PIM and then published to the various marketing channels. There’s never a reason to leave the PIM. This maximizes efficiency and reduces the chances for publishing incomplete or erroneous product information. In fact, if your team feels the need for a separate task manager or emailed communication about the status of catalog completion, then you’re doing it wrong.

Resist the siren song of setting up a task manager!

Automate your exports

Just like you don’t want to be emailing and messing around with spreadsheets to import your information, you shouldn’t be exporting your data with spreadsheet either. Luckily, there’s no need. Akeneo has numerous off-the-shelf integrations with eCommerce platforms like Magento, Mirakl, Shopware, and PrestaShop– not to mention an InDesign plugin for the automatic creation of print catalogs. Plus, the deep ecosystem of integrators can easily setup an automated export process for custom systems.

Consider hiring an expert

The best PIM implementations are ones with a deep level of configuration. A consultant can help you setup your PIM quickly and efficiently. Consider hiring one of Akeneo’s many local partners (along with an Akeneo Consultant) to help you set up the most efficient PIM possible. Our experience in configuring all kind of PIM projects for product enrichment means that we can quickly optimize your PIM for maximum efficiency, quality, and revenue. We’ve also seen virtually very data source or output system you can imagine, so we can quickly integrate your ERP or publishing platform no matter what brand or level of customization.

How will you know that you have a good system?

Here’s how you know you’ve done a good job integrating your PIM into your workflow:

• You never have to resort to cutting and pasting in spreadsheets
• Your team relies upon the workflow and completeness meters within the PIM—not external checklists or task managers

If you take these steps, we guarantee that efficiency and quality will go up and that you won’t miss your spreadsheets at all. Want to know more? Take a test drive.

Spreadsheets suck at many critical tasks

Here are just a few of the critical tasks that spreadsheets are bad at:

• Dealing with multiple sources of information
• Differentiating between mobile and desktop versions of media and product descriptions
• Handling multiple languages and translations
• Accommodating multiple contributors
• Enforcing separate edit/approval/publish rights
• Version control and content rollbacks
• Staging new products and catalogs
• Quality control

So why do so many people use spreadsheets for a job for which they are inherently badly designed?

It seemed easy.

Until you get started. Then most merchants quickly find themselves struggling with dozens of files, 20+ columns in every spreadsheet, and multiple tabs. Version control quickly becomes a problem and suddenly you’re dealing with outdated, incomplete, and incorrect product data being pushed to prospective customers.

Spreadsheets don’t scale well.

Hopefully, good things are happening for your company. Your team and product lines are growing. Distribution platforms and sales channels are proliferating. Products are constantly being updated. Those are all great things… Unless you’re trying to manage your e-commerce catalog management with spreadsheets. Then your life becomes a nightmare as you struggle to maintain compelling, complete, and up-to-date product information. This steals focus from your real job of merchandizing and marketing strategy.

There is a solution

The product category for e-commerce catalog management is generally referred to as product information management or PIM for short. PIM solves all the problems that spreadsheets don’t because they are custom-built for managing product information across websites, e-commerce platforms, print catalogs, e-commerce, points of sale, mobile applications, and more.

Want to know more? Take a tour with our online demo.

Discover how to increase:

• Productivity by 50%
• Data Quality by 30%
• Revenue by 10%

Convert your collection of spreadsheets into a single definitive source of product information across every sales channel and in every language. Simplify your current chaotic workflow into one of simplicity and power: 1. Import your data Automatically import your data from any third party system including ERPS, spreadsheets, and your supplier’s systems. 2. Organize and classify Organize and classify your products however you want. Stop trying to organize your workflow around SKUs and use more logical product groupings instead. An easy GUI eliminates hundreds of useless columns. 3. Enrich, edit and translate Complete your product information, add rich media in any format, and translate just the descriptions that are needed. 4. Utilize built in workflow and quality checks Enable multiple contributors with edit/publish workflows and automated checks to ensure that all mandatory fields are always completed. 5. Publish your data Export all product data to any e-commerce platform, mobile application, print catalogs, or point of sale interface.

Take a tour with our online demo.

Managing product information is seamless and easy when you have a solution built for this purpose. Why settle for spreadsheets? Take a tour with our online demo or contact us to learn more.

This new extension will allow Akeneo users of the Enterprise Edition to authenticate against this LDAP directory instead of the internal PIM system. It is designed to work with both Windows Active Directory or Open LDAP.

User management modifications

The use of this module will imply some modifications in the users workflow. Here are the new conditions:

• The user must exists in Akeneo PIM. It can be a user created before the installation of this extension, or users can be created with this extension already installed.
• The username must exist in the LDAP directory, because the authentication is made with this username.
• After this extension is installed, the “forgot your password” feature will not be available anymore because the password management is out of the PIM scope and will now be the responsibility of the LDAP system.
• When an admin creates a new user with this extension enabled, he will not have to provide a password for the user, because this password is not in the PIM scope anymore.

This extension activation is totally transparent for the users and the login screen is the same than a plain vanilla Akeneo. The only difference is the disappearance of the “forgot your password” link.

Rescue user

A special rescue user can be used, usually the “admin” user of Akeneo. This user will not be authenticated against the LDAP but just with its PIM credentials. This way, you can always log in Akeneo even if the LDAP is down or not functional.

Uninstall

Users created prior to this module installation will get their original passwords back if this module is uninstalled. But all users created while it was active will need a password reset (the “forgot your password” link will re-appear), they will still be useable once they’ll have correct credentials.

If you are using an LDAP in your company, and you have Akeneo Enterprise Edition, don’t wait and have a look at this new extension now to ease your life. Our marketplace team is here to help you and answer your questions!

You can contact us at: [email protected]

Enjoy!

Since 1953, Natalys has provided happiness for future and young parents from pregnancy to the third year of the child. The brand joined the Sergent Major group and launched its e-commerce website, Natalys.com, in 2009. The brand now embodies the example of a successful cross-channel strategy. From launching its marketplace to optimizing its product catalogue, Mathieu Jourdain, Head of e-commerce at Natalys, shows us the keys that made this long-standing retailer a shining example of successful cross-channel retailer. Natalys sells its products both in store and on the Natalys.com website. The entire catalog is available on the website and in store. The brand is even planning to launch a community website in the near future, dedicated to selling Natalys branded articles secondhand. This is innovation in action and a powerful driving force for fulfilling the needs of its customers, who are continually seeking more choice at the right price with a good quality of service, which the brand has been providing for almost 60 years now. How important is product information management to you? MJ: The quality of our product data is one of our primary concerns. It is crucial to have a standardized and centralized product database. We needed to have a collaborative and user-friendly system, that could be used and connected to every department: Purchasing, Logistics, photo shoots and web-merchandising. In other words, we needed a PIM (Product Information Management). It has even become an essential tool of our cross-channel strategy. What’s more, it did not take long for us to choose Akeneo, the leading open-source solution on the market. In addition to being easy to integrate and user-friendly, the solution was already being used by other brands of the group. The Akeneo PIM made it easily for us to standardize and control the quality of our product information.  

Why launch a marketplace now? MJ: The launch of our marketplace forms part of an overarching strategy, the objective of which is to innovate in order to fulfill the needs of our customers and boost our growth. Nowadays, in order to play a leading role in a given sector, one must be in a position to offer a broad choice to our ever more demanding customers. The marketplace provides a solution to the problem of catalog expansion, so that the Natalys teams can react to customer demands much more quickly. In our opinion, it is much less complicated and less risky to bring in a new supplier or a new category of products using the marketplace than listing it on our standard website. This strengthens our position as a specialist with a greater product depth, while also offering a long tail of related products that can appeal to our customers. We chose Mirakl because it is the leading, most comprehensive solution on the market, giving us access to all the functionality needed to operate our marketplace quickly and successfully. Mirakl’s strength lies in the support provided by its teams throughout the project and after its launch.  In order to fulfill the expectations of Natalys’s customers, you decided to launch a marketplace grounded in robust management of product data. What are you expecting to gain from it? MJ: Within 3 years, the Natalys marketplace will represent at least 30 % of our sales and will be completely cross-channel. Natalys’s objective is to have all of the Natalys and Marketplace product data stored in a single database so that each department can modify and add to the data of the partner sellers. As a result, when our customers are browsing our website, there will be no noticeable difference between a product sold and shipped by Natalys, and that of a partner seller. Standardized data also helps to improve the user experience, ensuring a remarkable end-to-end shopping experience. In addition to this, we have many objectives for further development with the aim of improving our growth. For instance, we are seeking to expand the Services and Young Creator aspects as well as the sale of secondhand products through the Natalys community. The international segment will also contribute to our growth, and the marketplace is a very powerful tool for growing a local presence. In your opinion, what are the key factors of success of your cross-channel strategy? MJ: First off, we need to know how to drive change within our business. There will always be some internal resistance when innovative projects are put on the table. In our case, this change was put forward directly by management. The chairman and managing director as well as the brand manager played a significant role in developing the strategy and overall approach, which was instrumental in facilitating its deployment internally.  The Marketplace project also helped breathe new life into our teams, both at headquarters and in stores. In this type of project, the need to tackle many “political” obstacles is always to be expected. The change is significant and operational conventions, which have been established over long periods of time, are being more or less broken. The cross-channel strategy must be supported by all teams at headquarters as well as in stores. To achieve this, all the stakeholders must be involved from the very beginning of the project and at every step, whether it is during the analysis phase regarding the choice of the system, or the integration phase and the decision on whether to favor a gradual deployment of the project or in big-bang mode. Secondly, connectivity is essential within the framework of a cross-channel project. Today, it is better to opt for tried and tested technologies and specialists in their domain, who will help create connections with the entire ecosystem. Mirakl and Akeneo are two leading recognized solutions that have developed a common connector that can be used to integrate them easily. The decision to select these solutions was all the more obvious for us because of that.

Reason #5 – Earlier is cheaper

Of course it’s never too late to implement a PIM system. But the required amount of work will be far more significant, as you will need to do some reverse engineering to adapt the system to what has already be done.

And today, thanks to open source alternatives like Akeneo, integrating a PIM is no longer a complex / expensive / time consuming project. Starting your PIM journey with a first channel like an e-commerce website will help you have a cross channel approach from day one and will save you a lot of concerns related to archaic tools / processes.

Ready to start?

Contact Us Now!

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<<  Reason #4 – Prepare your multichannel future

Reason #4 – Prepare your multichannel future

For now, you are thinking only about your e-commerce channel. But you know that things are going fast and that you will probably need to open some new channels (a mobile app, for instance) or to share the work you’ve done on your product information with existing channels (printed catalogs, point of sales, etc.) It will always be easier to plug new channels into a PIM system rather than trying to adapt / customize your e-commerce system.

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

Contact Us Now!

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

Reason #5 – Earlier is cheaper >>

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

As a modern and well-informed e-merchant, you will probably want – at some point – to personalize the experience of your customers with some dedicated tools like recommendation engines (Avail, RichRelevance, Prediggo, etc.) or searchandizing tools (Endeca, Fredhopper, etc.).

To give relevant results, these tools need high quality product information. And guess what? That’s the purpose of a PIM system!

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

Contact Us Now!

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<<  Reason #2 – Avoid spreadsheet nightmares

Reason #4 – Prepare your multichannel future >>

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 >>