How PIM Systems can Help Ecommerce Companies Scale Their Businesses

Are you running an ecommerce business and trying to find ways to manage your product data more efficiently while growing your business? Look no further than Product Information Management (PIM) systems. These software solutions help you keep all your product data in one place, making it easier to keep everything accurate and up-to-date across all your sales channels.

With a PIM system, you can automate a lot of manual processes like data entry and product categorization, saving time, and reducing the likelihood of errors. PIM systems also have tools to check and standardize your product data, which means better quality data, happier customers, and fewer returns due to incorrect or incomplete information. In this post, we'll explore the benefits of PIM systems and show you how they can help your ecommerce business grow and succeed in today's competitive marketplace.

Centralized management of product data 

Managing product data can be a monumental task for any ecommerce business. With a multitude of sales channels and product categories to keep track of, it's easy to get lost in the details. Fortunately, PIM systems offer a centralized solution to this issue. A PIM system is an essential tool that allows ecommerce companies to unify all their product data from different sources and store it in one place. This centralization of product data is vital for maintaining consistency and accuracy across various sales channels. When a company has a unified view of its products, it's easier to manage product information, reduce the possibility of errors, and synchronize data across multiple channels.

Imagine a company that sells apparel on its website, like Amazon or eBay. Without a PIM system, they would have to enter product information separately for each channel, leading to discrepancies, inaccuracies, and a lot of extra work. However, with a PIM system, the company can easily manage its product data in one place, reducing the time spent on updating and managing it and ensuring consistent and accurate information across all channels. Moreover, a centralized PIM system provides easy access to data, helping teams collaborate more effectively. Product managers, marketers, and sales teams can quickly access product data from a central location, making it easier to collaborate and make informed decisions.

Increased efficiency

A Product Information Management (PIM) system can significantly enhance the efficiency of an ecommerce team. The manual input and management of product data can be tedious and time-consuming, diverting valuable resources from other crucial business activities. Such manual processes can also result in errors, leading to lost revenue and decreased customer satisfaction.

However, a PIM system automates many of these procedures, equipping users with tools to swiftly import, categorize, enrich, and update product data. The system eliminates manual data entry, reduces the possibility of errors, and automates product information management tasks. For example, a PIM system can automatically categorize products and generate product descriptions and titles, freeing up marketing and sales teams' time. Furthermore, a PIM system provides your team with easy access to data, enabling them to collaborate efficiently and make informed decisions. 

Better product data quality 

When it comes to running a successful ecommerce business, having accurate and consistent product information is crucial. However, managing product data can be a challenging task, especially for companies with large and diverse product catalogs. This is where PIM systems come into play. PIM systems help companies maintain better product data quality by providing a central repository for storing and managing product data. With a PIM system, companies can ensure that their product information is accurate, complete, and consistent.

PIM systems provide a range of tools to manage product data, including automated data validation, product data enrichment, and data governance. These features help companies maintain data accuracy and consistency across all channels. Additionally, PIM systems can enrich product data by automatically generating missing product attributes or product descriptions based on predefined templates. This saves time for marketing and sales teams while ensuring that no stone is left unturned. To expand upon the usage of product data quality assurance, PIM systems provide data governance features, such as version control and audit trails, to track changes to product data over time, which is particularly useful for compliance purposes.

Faster time-to-market 

Did you know that PIM systems can help ecommerce companies speed up their time-to-market for new products? By centralizing and automating their product information management processes, companies can introduce new products more quickly and ensure consistency across all sales channels.

With automated product information management tasks, such as data validation, product data enrichment, and data governance, the time required to manage product data is heavily reduced, ensuring a quicker time to market. 

PIM systems can also help companies streamline workflows and collaboration processes, providing workflows for product approvals and enabling stakeholders to be involved in the decision-making process. Additionally, companies can quickly adapt to market changes and new trends by providing real-time access to product data.

Finally, PIM systems can help ecommerce companies launch new products across multiple sales channels simultaneously, such as online marketplaces, social media platforms, and their own websites, enabling them to reach a broader customer base faster.

Improved customer experience 

In the highly competitive ecommerce industry, companies that provide a positive customer experience are the ones that bring home the bacon. Customers expect accurate and complete product information, seamless shopping experiences, and timely delivery of their purchases, and PIM systems are essential to ensuring that. By providing consistent and complete product information across all sales channels, companies can build trust with customers and increase the likelihood of making a purchase.

In addition, PIM systems enable companies to provide more personalized customer experiences by storing customer data, such as purchase history and preferences, and using this data to personalize the shopping experience. PIM systems also help companies improve their delivery times and accuracy by providing accurate and complete product data, which is critical for a positive customer experience. But that’s not all - PIM systems can help companies manage customer feedback and reviews across all sales channels, enabling them to quickly identify and address customer concerns. This helps companies improve their products and services to go in tandem with the changing needs of their current and future customer bases. 

Scalability 

Scalability is a key consideration for ecommerce companies looking to grow their businesses. As companies expand their product offerings and customer base, they must ensure that their product information management processes can keep up. This is precisely where PIM systems can help ecommerce companies scale their businesses.

With a PIM system, ecommerce companies can centralize and automate their product information management processes, making it easier to manage large volumes of product data. This is achieved by providing a single source of truth for product data, which enables companies to scale their product offerings and sales channels. When a company adds new products to its portfolio, it can use a PIM system to ensure that the new products are consistent with existing products in terms of formatting, attributes, and other key data points.

To go a step further, PIM systems also enable ecommerce companies to easily expand into new sales channels and markets. With a PIM system, companies can manage product data across multiple sales channels, such as online marketplaces, social media platforms, and their own ecommerce sites. This enables companies to reach a broader customer base and expand into new markets quickly and efficiently as needs arise. PIM systems also provide scalability in terms of collaboration and workflow management. 

With a PIM system, companies can manage product data workflows, approvals, and governance processes across multiple teams and departments. This enables companies to scale their operations and manage product data more efficiently as they grow, minus the growing pains that are commonly associated with such a task.

A perfect example of seeing scalability in action can be taken from a recent case study by Plytix, where their client Otter was having difficulty getting as many as 2200 SKUs (stock-keeping units) in preparation for Black Friday back in 2019. After taking advantage of Plytix’s vast wealth of product management capabilities, where other competitors failed, suddenly Otter was able to manage and upload more than 4500 unique SKUs with ease for 2020’s Black Friday sale. Talk about scaling up! They more than doubled their capability of bringing products to market.

Finally, ecommerce companies can scale their businesses with PIM systems that provide real-time access to product data. This is critical for companies that operate in fast-changing industries where market demands can change rapidly. With a PIM system, companies can quickly adapt to market changes and new trends, enabling them to introduce new products and sales channels faster.