Pimberly Success Story: JT Atkinson & Sons

“Like many businesses we already had a website, but most of our existing product data wasn’t well-structured. To add to that, it often contained many errors and omissions. Like many eCommerce platforms, the business user interface of our system wasn’t designed to facilitate large-scale interrogation of product data. Pimberly’s ability to slice and dice data in many different ways has been invaluable to our data clean-up efforts. Being able to compare and contrast different sets of information has enabled us to address those errors quickly and efficiently.”

eCommerce Director — JT Atkinson

5 Feeds

13 Channels

22 Workflows

21,793

Assets

A family business since 1860…

For 160 years, JT Atkinson has been supplying a wide range of building materials to companies across the UK. As a family-owned, independent building merchant, its aim is to provide customers with outstanding service, along with unparalleled knowledge about its products and the building trade.

A centralized repository for all product information and digital assets

With around 25,000 products across 31 branches and 2 online stores, JT Atkinson was growing considerably in the building supplies sector. Consequently, JT Atkinson needed to upgrade its current processes for managing product data to accommodate this growth. Before Pimberly, all product data was held either within its ERP system or directly in the eCommerce platform. The process of enriching product data for online listings was extremely time-consuming and prone to error. This lengthy listing process meant JT Atkinson struggled to collate the necessary product information to create compelling customer experiences. With customer expectations constantly on the rise, this was no longer a sustainable way of working.

Now, all product data and digital assets are stored in a single location. As a result, JT Atkinson can use Pimberly as a central hub for cleansing and optimization. In other words, it can now deliver online experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations. Overall, Pimberly’s powerful automation has significantly reduced the merchandisers’ workload, so they can focus more time on other business objectives.

“Pimberly has enabled us to free up our resources and spend more time on other areas of the business. Without Pimberly, we just wouldn’t have been able to do this.”

Software Development Manager – JT Atkinson

Managing the product journey with Pimberly’s Lifecycles and Workflows

“Pimberly has given us complete structure around the way we monitor products at each stage of their lifecycle. We can now easily track when information is missing and fix it before its published to our sales channels.”

eCommerce Manager – JT Atkinson

JT Atkinson utilized Pimberly’s Lifecycle feature, creating 4 stages to keep track of where a product is in its journey. Products automatically move through stages based on lifecycle rules that JT Atkinson set up. A product won’t move to the next stage of its lifecycle unless specified rules have been met. Once it’s been through all the required stages, it’s released to the various sales channels. JT Atkinson also set up test environments to visualize the products and ensure they are 100% accurate before being published. Therefore, the JT Atkinson team can rest easy knowing a product won’t be released to the next stage until the relevant data is in place.

In addition to Pimberly’s Lifecycle feature, JT Atkinson has utilized Workflows to keep track of where a product is in its lifecycle. The products move seamlessly through the lifecycle and stop at the appropriate stage of the product’s status. This way the team can quickly and easily determine which products to prioritize for enrichment.

Creating solid foundations for the future…

In the near future, JT Atkinson will be using Pimberly to feed its enriched products to an increasing number of channels. This will include its trade supplies sales channels as well as marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. Additionally, JT Atkinson will start to use the platform across different teams to increase overall productivity across the business.