Published: Mar 12, 2024 Updated: Jul 16, 2024
In today’s competitive world, reducing time to market is critical for business success. The quicker a business turns a product concept into reality, the more time it will have to validate the product and achieve a market fit.
However, the timeline of product development, from the concept phase to testing and finally launch, is extensive. However, in a world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making things easier and quicker for humans, product developers need to adopt this strategic imperative.
This guide will explore the concept of time to market, what challenges businesses face when trying to accelerate product development, and how they can use Pimberly AI to overcome these challenges and reduce time to market.
Time to market definition: The time taken to convert a profitable product concept into reality and bring new products to market for the target audience.
Alternatively, the time-to-market concept is slightly different for eCommerce. It is the time taken to make a new product available to buy on new online channels.
Speed to market is one of the critical factors that contribute to a business’s competitive advantage. When a product concept is converted into a product and launched into the market before a competitor, the business gets extra selling days.
If the product is based on an innovative concept, the business can attain the first-mover advantage, which means stronger brand recognition, early market share, and higher margins. The first mover also has a learning curve advantage, meaning that the business gets more time to learn from its mistakes and achieve product validation and a market fit earlier than other competitors.
According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company, if a company enters the market six months late, its earning potential is reduced by 33% compared to the earning potential in a right-time scenario.
However, in the world of eCommerce, even a few days or a couple of months can impact a business’s profitability. Why?When you reduce time to market in eCommerce, it means more selling days. Also, there’s a better word-of-mouth buzz, and thus more sales than late competitors.
If the product concept has been developed according to thorough market research on the audience’s needs, meets their expectations, and is marketed effectively, the audience will generate positive word-of-mouth and even repeat orders. So, a faster speed to market means the business is on the path to success.
Even though most businesses know that speed to market opens tremendous market opportunities, they are still faced with roadblocks that impact this metric. These problems occur in the development stages, logistics, and even marketing.
Here are some common challenges that companies face at each stage of product development that impact product availability:
The first challenge that companies face during product concept development is authenticating product data. Many companies use old data management systems that do not record and update product information on a centralized hub. Many others store information in a non-coherent fashion. This impacts the manufacturing process as the product data then needs to be converted and verified before it is put up for manufacturing.
Here are several questions that come up when manufacturers and logistics partners have to deal with data:
In many cases, a small part of the product off by a few millimeters might cost the company millions of dollars and also impact its delivery timelines.
Powerful automation tools with a PIM platform like Pimberly can help create a single source of truth. It can enable the entire production process to trust the platform and proceed without any need for verification.
During the product’s life cycle, it goes through a lengthy approval process. During this process, the product data is modified, and the product needs to be moved to the next stage. However, this process can be lengthy because, in eCommerce, tracking the approvals for hundreds of products before they are onboarded to the platform is not easy.
With Pimberly AI, product life cycles automatically move the products to the next stage in the approval journey. This proactive approach prevents hold-ups and resolves bottlenecks, bringing efficiency to the process and speeding up the time to market.
Speed to market doesn’t only mean making the product available to the audience. It also includes informing the audience and marketing the product to get enough visibility before the competitor. However, optimizing data for your eCommerce site and other channels can be a lengthy process.
So even if manufacturing and logistics are smooth, delays in marketing can be a hurdle in the product’s time to market.
The optimization process involves gathering all product data (including digital assets like images and videos) and presenting it in a way that is useful to customers browsing your eCommerce site.
AI is a huge help, as it speeds up the following marketing processes:
Product onboarding: AI helps convert technical details (size, weights, dimensions, etc.) to product sheet formats required by different marketplaces.
Marketing optimization: It assists with copywriting for product descriptions, translating for sites in other languages, enriching the copy with SEO keywords for greater visibility, and A/B testing to determine the best copy.
Data quality and standardization: Pimberly AI unlocks intuitive filter and search features to help customers find exactly what they’re looking for.
Category decisions and checks: AI categorizes products in the most relevant categories to offer a better customer experience.
Even with the product information optimized, getting it to the user as soon as possible is key. That means publishing it across multiple sales channels or giving the products and information to actual sales distribution channels for availability in the market. In many cases, the products sit ready in warehouses, but inefficiency in distribution and an ineffective go-to-market strategy impact product deliveries.
Information availability across the various sales channels is therefore crucial to reducing the time to market. Because businesses have different teams and agencies, if they are not updated with launch dates and stock receiving dates in a timely manner, it can cause delays in the whole process.
By now, you must have understood how efficient product information management contributed to reducing your product’s time to market. Pimberly’s AI-powered PIM platform offers powerful automation that helps reduce manual tasks by up to 80%.
The power of Pimberly’s AI-powered PIM is that the system immediately notifies relevant team members in case of missing product information. This means that your product launch will be complete, and missing information will not hinder your product’s performance in the market.
Pimberly’s PIM system also allows team members and other stakeholders to work on different aspects of the product data collaboratively. For example, the marketing team will only have access to the layer of product data that they need for their job, rather than a complete product spec sheet.
The PIM systems’ version control also enables stakeholders to see what changes have been made over time. This ensures that all the product information is correct and that there is a single source of truth that all teams and related members can rely on for their jobs. Powerful AI capabilities mean that you have everything ready well ahead of time and can launch the product on the market at a moment’s notice.
In detail, here are the four ways Pimberly’s AI-powered PIM system helps you streamline your product’s launch and speed up time to market:
Customers need more than just written product information to decide to purchase the product. Enriched product data like pictures, videos, and other relevant information is crucial for the customer to develop their expectations of the product and make an informed decision.
Since data enrichment calls for ongoing changes, you need a platform with centralized product information that serves as a single source of truth.
Pimberly AI enables intelligent data enrichment, which enables businesses to enhance their product information without any delays. AI takes the information already used in your business and determines which product information works for you. It leverages the power of your data and makes your data management smarter.Source
AI enriches your product data with relevant attributes, descriptions, categorizations, and images from trusted marketplaces like Shopify and Amazon. With relevant descriptions and categorizations, your product will be visible to the right audience, increasing your chances of making a sale.
With AI, businesses also eliminate the need for manual data entry, saving time and minimizing the risk of human errors.
Getting a product to the market utilizes certain workflows and processes. In the world of eCommerce, time to market is not calculated for every single product. To remain competitive and consistently be the first to market, you need efficient workflows to speed up your product launches for all products rather than just a few.
With Pimberly AI, businesses can automate specific, monotonous, time-consuming steps in the workflows, such as content creation, approvals, translation, and publishing. AI allows bulk uploads to any platform without the risk of uploading the wrong information or the wrong format of the product spec sheets. Cross-department collaborations are made seamless, and human errors are greatly minimized.
Pimberly AI, thus, frees up time that employees spend on manual processes and empowers them to focus on strategic initiatives that actually grow the organization. A
Better yet, AI uses machine learning when manual interventions are necessary and absorbs those steps and corrections to avoid future interventions. As a result, AI is constantly adapting to your systems and optimizing your processes like never before.
A great strategy to improve your time to market is to launch your existing products to new markets. However, launching to global marketplaces is quite challenging, especially if there is a language barrier.
Pimberly AI enables swift channel syndication by automating the translation and personalization of product descriptions and enabling the efficient distribution of product information across multiple sales channels.
Pimberly PIM system also effortlessly integrates with various eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, and other sales channels to ensure that the product information is ready according to each sales channel’s formatting requirements – enabling businesses to reach their target audience quicker.
Pimberly AI can quickly change and convert product information in the following ways:
As mentioned earlier, enriched product data that includes digital assets is key to driving sales. Pimberly’s PIM/DAM hybrid enables businesses to manage digital assets efficiently to expedite time to market without sacrificing the quality of their product information.
AI also enables automated tagging and categorization that allows you to quickly retrieve data when needed and update edited product descriptions wherever the product is listed.
Pimberly AI has proven to be an invaluable tool for our eCommerce clients suffering from time-to-market lags in their processes. It helps them to streamline processes, centralize information management, and quicken marketing processes to significantly reduce the time to market. With a reduced time to market, the business can achieve a quicker time to market and reap immense benefits.
To learn more about the Pimberly AI-powered PIM/DAM, reach out to our team today for a product demonstration and see for yourself how Pimberly AI can help your business succeed in this competitive world.
A super-quick run through of the key features of Pimberly’s key PIM, DAM and automation functionality.
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