Product Information Management (PIM) is a system that has been in the spotlight among businesses involved in commerce activities for the past few years. And it has been implemented by the commerce business all over the world. The popularity of the PIM system has been growing steadily for the past few years.
Based on the research conducted by Allied Market Research, the global market value of the PIM system is predicted to be around $60 billion by the end of 2027. The PIM system acts as a centralized hub for all data, including product content, and it syncs with your eCommerce platform and various third-party plug-ins and applications through integrations.
This article elaborates in detail on what is PIM and how PIM transforms your business by centralizing the business product data.
What is PIM?
Before getting into the core topic, let’s brush up on some basic information about PIM.
PIM is an acronym for “product information management.” Product information management is a set of processes used to manage and enhance the information or details of the products, which are handled by an organization across the selling platform. The PIM process can handle all types of content—images, digital assets, videos, and so on, to improve the selling performance of an organization in all available channels.
What Does A PIM Do For Your Business?
Having a good PIM for your business will solve all major data-oriented problems that may pull down your business’s performance. Here are the lists of common data-related issues an organization may face and have rectified by the PIM.
Data Inaccuracies
Data Inconsistencies
Poor Data Quality
Data Error Due To Manual Entry
Data Duplications
Data Management Cost
Time Delay of Product Reaching Market
Poor Customer Experience
PIM provides a centralized data storage facility where data which are collected from various systems is stored, managed, optimized according to the market condition. And finally from the centralized data repository of PIM, data sharing across multiple channels is done quickly, accurately and seamlessly.
Apart from that, PIM helps organizations centralize and structure large amounts of data and make them easily accessible to all users and employees. Also, the automated data processes introduced by the PIM help team members access enriched product content easily and consistently. More importantly, PIM helps connect various departments of an organization smoothly and ensures product contents are delivered to all departments according to their requirements.
Regular data updates ensure the data stored in the PIM data repository is of high quality and reduce the risk of data errors. Delivering the highest standard of product content helps brands increase their visibility and reputation in the market.
Key Features and Functions Of PIM
With seamless data management ability, PIM takes the business to the next level and meets the needs of modern consumers. Here are the lists of key features and functions of PIM that every business owner needs to know:
1. Data Collection & Data Importing
Data collection and import are two of the main features of PIM that help business owners gather product content across multiple devices or departments to run their businesses smoothly. PIM assists business owners to import data from one system to another without any glitches or snags. More importantly, the entire collection and importing of data across multiple systems were done quickly and without any technical issues.
Seamless data import operations in PIM help customers access accurate data easily and quickly. This helps businesses achieve a better customer experience.
2. Data Analytics
PIM can analyze the data, which helps business owners optimize all the stored product data and deliver personalized reports. The PIM’s built-in functionality of data analytics assists business stakeholders in quickly improving their business operations.
Moreover, the PIM comes with user-friendly dashboards that allow customers to easily compare product performance and businesses to list out the products based on categories.
3. Bulk Editing
The bulk editing capability of PIM eliminates business owners’ tedious work of editing product content across multiple platforms and product categories simultaneously. In addition, the bulk editing option enables business owners to edit product values and attributes all at once.
This saves a significant amount of precious time and allows business leaders or administrators to focus on other important things for business development.
4. Advanced Filtering Options
When a business starts growing, business products are likely to grow, which leads to product catalog expansion and growth in selling channels. In such a situation, finding the right product based on certain criteria will be difficult. So, filtering options become essential for businesses to provide a better environment for their customers to find the right product they’re seeking.
PIM offers an advanced filtering option that allows end users to find product information or details quickly and seamlessly.
5. Seamless Integrations
PIM supports a good level of integration, which allows businesses to easily integrate their systems with other top systems and shopping platforms. By doing so, businesses involved in commerce activities can cater to all the needs of modern buyers and manage to achieve a better customer experience.
The unified API support provided by PIM helps businesses integrate their system with more than 40 shopping platforms at once. Also, with a centralized data repository for PIM, business leaders can easily update and make changes to their product content across those platforms easily and quickly.
How PIM Transforms Your Business
PIM is the easiest solution for business leaders to scale and transform their businesses. PIM helps businesses expand and adapt to market changes and the needs of modern consumers. Here are the details you need to know about how PIM helps business leaders scale and transform their businesses.
1. PIM Helps Ecommerce:
Businesses involved in E commerce activities can make use of the PIM for managing their product information. Also, the PIM process enables businesses in many ways, including by assisting administrators to upload, edit, and distribute high-quality, accurate product data to different marketplaces via numerous channels. PIM empowers businesses to deliver accurate information to the right marketplace via the right channels. In addition, here are lists of a few attractive things offered by PIM for eCommerce businesses. Take a look.
Provides a 360-degree view of products
Decreases the time taken for new products to reach the market
Improves data quality and strengthens the SEO results
Supports Omnichannel presence
Offers global reach to the brands
Streamlines business operations
Provides a personalized and contextualized experience to customers
2. Easy-to-add new products:
In today’s competitive market, modern consumers expect more from brands to satisfy their needs, and brands are looking to deliver consistent and accurate data. If brands fail to deliver the highest quality content, then they are likely to experience cart abandonment activities from the buyers. So, there is no room for brands to compromise their content quality, especially when adding new products.
PIM eases all the hassles an administrator would face while adding new products to an existing category. In addition, it takes care of the content quality by providing it on a consistent and accurate basis. Here is how PIM manages to scale businesses while adding new products:
Automation: While adding new products, PIM immediately recognizes them and provides the right information and relevant digital assets to all the existing selling channels.
Up-to-date Content: Along with eliminating the risk of data errors and rejections at marketplaces, PIM helps administrators keep their product content up-to-date for all existing products and also for every new product added.
3. Easily Adapts To New Marketplace Conditions:
PIM takes care of all the essentials when you are expanding your business into new marketplaces and adding new sales channels. PIM automatically maps the data requirements and digital assets of the marketplace and delivers accordingly.
The automated workflow provided by PIM assists team members to predict the marketplace condition and start working relevantly. So it takes a few minutes for businesses to sell their products according to the new marketplace conditions. Without taking much time, PIM streamlines everything by creating a collaborative environment across your internal and external departments.
4. Eliminates Communication Difficulties:
While expanding businesses to new locations, brands may experience difficulties communicating due to a language barrier. PIM eliminates such difficulties by translating and optimizing the product content in the native language.
With such a localization process, expanding a business in an unknown language-speaking place would be impossible. PIM automatically communicates with the language translation service and delivers the translation service with perfection. This translation service offered by PIM is pretty useful for brands to translate all their product content according to the new marketplace conditions and to expand their business in different countries.
Conclusion
Transforming businesses according to the new marketplace conditions could be a complex process; however, it doesn’t need to be overly complex. Start utilizing the product information management system and experience the ease it offers to transform and scale your business. The technological power of PIM acts as the central hub for optimizing product data according to market conditions and scaling businesses without any trouble.