PIM Best Practice for eCommerce Success

What you need to know before starting your PIM journey

When starting your PIM journey, it’s crucial to think about what the PIM implementation will look like. There are different options for PIM, be it a SaaS PIM or open-source. The two are very different and will affect your internal teams differently.

Open-source PIM often requires quite a hands-on approach, and you’ll need to make sure you have a strong IT team that can maintain it with the resources available to support it.

You also have the option of on-premise or cloud PIM. Again, the two are very different and will require different resource allocations.

The Pimberly platform is a cloud-based SaaS PIM. This comes with loads of advantages and is easier to manage regarding maintenance and hardware.

Because we’re a SaaS business, we’re with you every step of the way. From planning to implementation and delivery – we’ll take care of everything. We also have a dedicated team of in-house PIM experts who are always on hand to ensure you’re making the most of PIM’s best practices to get the best results from the platform.

You can access everything on a cloud-based PIM system from anywhere, anytime, provided you have an internet connection. It also means you benefit from unlimited storage and scalable, elastic resourcing. So, if you want to expand your product range and reach new markets – cloud-based PIM is ideal.

The golden record & source of truth

Maintaining a golden record of product data can feel like a challenging task. With PIM in practice, this doesn’t have to be the case. Whether you’re importing data from 10 data sources or 1000, you can ensure that your product data and digital assets will follow standardized formats.

With Pimberly’s lifecycle stages and workflows, you always have complete visibility of the completeness and accuracy of your product data. Housing all product information in PIM creates a holistic approach to tracking and understanding what is required to get products to market.

This added visibility gives you an understanding of what products are for sale in a certain market. In addition, it also gives you insight into which products haven’t been pushed to market, with reasons why. Furthermore, Pimberly’s Lifecycles also ensures you’ll never release a product live with missing information ever again.

Different sales channels will have additional requirements for the format of your product content and digital assets. PIM best practice involves setting different criteria with scoping capabilities. Scoping lets you optimize your product content for a specific audience or market.

Create confident shoppers with your unified product data. When they see consistency across your channels, they’ll know what they’re seeing is what they’ll get. You can also make it easier for your customers to find your products by adding as many product attributes as you like.

What about SEO?

Unified product data ensures you’re consistently distributing the best possible quality across all your online outlets. Furthermore, this will help to differentiate content from your competitors and provide SEO benefits as a result.

Making improvements to product structure and providing rich attribution will go a long way in boosting your SEO rankings. Search engines love well-structured sites, and so do your customers!

Creating a collaborative way of working

Different departments, such as product managers and design and marketing teams, often need to work in tandem and require access to shared product data and digital assets. To make sure your eCommerce marketing strategy runs smoothly, collaboration is key.

Effective eCommerce marketing strategies rely on incoming information from manufacturers, suppliers, designers, and other internal and external sources. Again, you must ensure your team can get their hands on what they need. Accuracy and quality will also be key here – if you’re running a campaign, your product data and digital must be on point!

We’re fully aware of this. That’s why we’ve designed Pimberly with a simple, intuitive UI that gives you full access and permission controls for different users. Ensure PIM best practices by determining the requirements for each department. Ensure they have the correct access and permissions; you can control what they view, edit, or publish.

Creating a collaborative way of working will save you time and means your teams can drive the eCommerce marketing strategy forward. You’ll be assured that only the relevant people are accessing product data and digital assets throughout the product lifecycle

Minimizing the risk of human error and time spent duplicating content will have you well on the way to PIM best practice!

Deliver amazing customer experiences

eCommerce is getting increasingly competitive. So, setting yourself apart from the competition is non-negotiable. A good starting point is looking at improving the customer experience, and high-quality, consistent product data will form the foundations.

Really getting to know your customers, their interests, and their previous browsing history opens up cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Make your customers feel unique with personalized product recommendations you know they’ll love.

With PIM, you can gather and store unlimited amounts of data, which can be used to craft tailored online experiences. In doing so, you’ll be a step ahead in terms of creating state-of-the-art product detail pages, too.

The best PIM systems allow you to create complex product relationships, offering logical kits and bundles of related products. Consequently. you’ll see improved conversion rates and increased AOV in doing so. It’s important to remember the role of digital assets in the buyer journey, particularly when selling kits or bundles to help customers envisage the product.

You can’t physically interact with products online, so it’s important to have rich assets like images and videos. This gives your customers the confidence they need to make an informed purchasing decision that won’t get returned. On average, online customers have an attention span of about 8 seconds. That means you’ve got 8 seconds to captivate their attention. For PIM best practice, always include various high-quality images and videos.

Easily manage all media files with an integrated digital asset management (DAM) solution. Any powerful DAM will offer unlimited storage, and you can even auto-link digital assets to your products in Pimberly. This will save you vast amounts of time and will massively improve the customer experience.

Say goodbye to manual processes

The more products you have, the more data you’ll have. When operating across multiple channels and geographies, the data needed for each product is multiplied. Having one centralized hub where you can store everything will massively boost your productivity. With PIM, import data from anywhere, in any format, and standardize it to create your single source of truth.

Make the most of unlimited storage. Everything from translated product data, prices in different currencies, different sizing guidelines, and unlimited digital assets. Say goodbye to the days of spending hours dealing with loads of different spreadsheets. PIM offers impressive capabilities, including powerful automation, meaning you can reduce manual tasks by up to 80%.

Because everything is stored in your PIM, you have clear visibility of all your products and their lifecycle stages. You can control how and when your product information is distributed. Use lifecycle stages and workflows within your PIM to move your products from enrichment to distribution. This way, you can ensure product information meets defined criteria before it’s published live.

In addition, Pimberly’s artificial intelligence-generated product descriptions mean your eCommerce team spends less time getting products to market. Create product descriptions in line with your brand’s tone of voice and keyword requirements in minutes, saving your business valuable time.

Key Points

• A powerful PIM is integral to a successful eCommerce marketing strategy. With PIM for eCommerce success, you have time to concentrate on other business areas without worrying about product data.
• By managing and maintaining a central source of truth with the PIM platform, you’ll see improved online conversions and reduced cart abandonment in no time.
• Manual processes are a thing of the past. With PIM, you can seamlessly onboard products across multiple sales channels, ensuring improved data consistency.
• Ecommerce is more competitive than ever. With the help of PIM and enriched product data, you will create out-of-this-world customer experiences to attract online shoppers.
• There are different types of PIM systems. Open-source, on-premise, or cloud-based PIMs are the common types. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
• With a SaaS cloud-based PIM like Pimberly, our in-house implementation team manages the maintenance and delivery of the PIM solution. This means you have time to concentrate on other key business areas.

Harness your product data to produce better eCommerce results and show your customers some love! Product information management best practices will get you and your eCommerce team on track to success.