One of the most significant challenges brands face is managing inconsistent and inaccurate product data across various solutions within their tech stack. Ensuring that eCommerce platforms remain reliable and up-to-date is crucial for maintaining brand integrity and meeting customer expectations.
However, many eCommerce platforms fall short, particularly when it comes to native multilingual functionality, which is essential for showcasing consistent and accurate product data across different regions. This is where a modern Product Information Management (PIM) solution becomes invaluable, offering built-in multilingual syndication that simplifies selling in any language. This whitepaper aims to educate retailers on the transformative benefits of a modern PIM system, including improved product discovery, enhanced SEO optimization, personalized customer experiences, and data-driven decision-making.
We delve into how brands have successfully leveraged a modern PIM system to enhance their data management processes, ultimately strengthening their eCommerce platforms. By automating product data and utilizing workflows, brands can create targeted campaigns tailored to any audience, season, or occasion, ensuring their eCommerce operations are both efficient and effective.
This is a comprehensive 8,000-word guide, so sit back and get ready to learn everything you need to know about buying your first PIM!
Pimberly is a world leader in Product Information Management (PIM) & Digital Asset Management (DAM) software for complex technical products, delivering market leading AI and automation.
In this whitepaper, we delve into how you can bolster your eCommerce platform by integrating a modern, composable PIM solution to centralize and automate product data across your online stores.
At Pimberly, we work with top brands to automate their product data sheets (or spec & sell sheets), no matter how complex or detailed.
Our goal for readers of this whitepaper is for you to walk away with a firm understanding of the benefits of utilizing a PIM alongside your eCommerce platform to get the best from both solutions.
To learn more about Pimberly, head to the end of the whitepaper for more about us and some other relevant reads.
Thanks, and we hope you enjoy the read.
Executive Summary
Executive Summary
The ever-increasing complexity of eCommerce demands a robust Product Information Management (PIM) system for success. This white paper explores the challenges of managing product data across multiple platforms and showcases how Pimberly, a powerful PIM system, empowers businesses to overcome these hurdles.
Throughout this whitepaper, you will get a deep dive into the most common challenges that businesses face in the world of eCommerce. These challenges stem from inconsistent and inaccurate product data across platforms. Additionally, many eCommerce platforms lack native multilingual functionality, making it difficult to showcase reliable product data across different geographies. A modern PIM makes selling in any language a breeze with built-in multilingual syndication.
The whitepaper further goes on to educate eCommerce businesses on how a modern PIM system can help with improved product discovery, SEO optimization, personalized customer experiences, and data-driven decision-making.
It also explores why choosing the right PIM system is crucial for eCommerce success and explores Pimberly’s functionalities. It goes on to showcase how businesses have leveraged Pimberly’s PIM system to improve their data management and how it has translated into business success in the eCommerce sector. Brands can automate their product data with workflows to create custom campaigns for any audience, any season, and any occasion.
Lastly, this whitepaper explores how Pimberly’s PIM system is positioned to future-proof businesses as the eCommerce ecosystem continues to evolve.
Introduction
Introduction
The eCommerce ecosystem has been fueled by a lot of factors. Innovativeness by major eCommerce players and the pandemic are two recent factors in its development. Today, a combination of these and other factors has led eCommerce sales to touch the 7$ billion mark. In fact, in the first fiscal quarter of 2024, eCommerce accounted for 15.9% of sales in the United States – and the surge is expected to continue.
During this surge, innovativeness has pushed all boundaries. Today, drone deliveries and AI-driven personalized shopping experiences have propelled eCommerce customers to make more purchases than ever.
While Amazon and other online retailers continue to strengthen the eCommerce ecosystem, it isn’t only good news for customers. For businesses, this strengthened eCommerce ecosystem means more opportunities to capture new markets and expand their business. However, at the same time, a strengthened ecosystem means more competition. Businesses now need to have robust, agile, and API-first eCommerce systems to keep up with the growing demands of the eCommerce industry. Their data needs to be real-time, with campaigns that speak to the moment.
Amidst this, businesses also need to expand their product lines and online presence across multiple platforms. However, expanding online presence is easier said than done. Although the barriers to entry in the eCommerce industry are practically non-existent, a lot of work goes into keeping a company afloat in this sector.
Challenges in the eCommerce Sector
Challenges in the eCommerce Sector
Product Data Needs to be Updated Manually
One of the major challenges that eCommerce companies face is managing the bulk of product data. If the company has its products listed over multiple marketplaces, a small change in the product’s information must be updated over several platforms.
Often, small companies have teams to do this manually. Not only does this require hiring a huge team, but also raises the chances of human error. The task is also quite time-consuming and every minute of delay in the world of eCommerce translates to hundreds or even thousands of dollars lost in profit.
Platforms Have Different Data Requirements
As the competition stiffens and new eCommerce platforms pop up, eCommerce businesses have no choice but to expand their presence. However, registering the company onto a new online platform and uploading products according to the spec sheet requirements of the new platform is a hassle.
In many cases, where spec sheets are not automatically updated, data must be collected and verified through several departments before being modeled into a new spec sheet. Many online companies store their product data in PDF documents that are scattered across hard drives, leading to inefficiencies in data retrieval and utilization that eventually stunt growth.
Product information management is a huge challenge for small, mid, and large-sized eCommerce businesses. Here are some of the challenges that eCommerce companies face while managing product information:
Disparate Data Sources
Managing product data is not easy, especially when you have a high volume of data that is stored on multiple spreadsheets across different departments. At times, new marketplaces might have specific formatting requirements which makes it impossible to manage using spreadsheets and PDFs. Even if departments have access to all these files, the disparity in the data sources leads to wasted time, errors and inconsistencies that chase away customers because of lack of reliability.
Managing Sales / Campaigns
Imagine it’s early November and Black Friday is right around the corner. In an ideal scenario, you’d like to be fully prepared well ahead of time for the most hectic eCommerce day of the year. Without the right tools, Black Friday prep is incredibly manual. Some team members might even have to stay up through the night to hit the midnight deadline to monitor the campaign. It can prove to be a painful, stressful period your employees don’t look forward to. Manual oversight also impacts the quality in a massive way due to a limited amount of hours/manpower to work with.
Product Launches
When brands launch a new product or product variant, that product is embargoed until a set date to ensure everything is correct internally before the product goes live. If you launch ahead of a deadline, there can be serious consequences not just for your brand, but for any vendors that sell through you as well. An accidental launch also can create a notable disadvantage when it comes to dealing with competitors. Without the right tools in place, there’s typically a lack of governance around who has the permissions to make products live on the site. This becomes even more complex when you want to add these new taxonomy/categories on launch which likely requires multiples parties to have varying levels of access. While most eCommerce platforms have the notion of “on sale” (or not), they don’t have any bulk method of launching unique categories (i.e. ‘season’ or ‘fit).
SKU-Level Variants
Most eCommerce platforms hold all the product data at the product level – not the SKU level. It is becoming increasingly important for brands to demonstrate transparency about all aspects of their products. This requires sophistication in terms of how you’re able to sort very similar products. For example, ‘Country of Origin’ is a classification that places these similar products into different SKUs. If you have SKUs from different suppliers – all with different ‘Countries of Origin’, an eCommerce platform does not have the capacity to hold this specific data at SKU level. Even further, a brand can’t surface this relevant data on the PDP at the right time when they’re limited to product-level visibility as opposed to SKU-level.
Manual Oversight
Manually entering product specifications in files and across different platforms leaves room for human error, even if you have the most astute team members.
Unfortunately, the more people and departments handle the data, the more the risk multiples. Even the error of a digit or a point could be disastrous for the company’s sales and brand image. And when the product data is complex, the smallest mistakes could cause health concerns, fines, and legal penalties.
Technical Products
Technical products usually have a lot of technical specifications that are important to both B2B and B2C customers. Even the slightest error in these specifications could lead to order returns, cancellations, and hurt the company’s brand image and financial position. Issues in technical specifications could also lead to an increased time-to-market which hurts the company’s competitiveness in an ecosystem where battling with competition is already a challenge.
Legacy PIM Systems
Many companies have Product Information Management (PIM) systems that are quite outdated. These systems are often homegrown, and a great deal of them were built prior to the boom of eCommerce. While these systems have basic functionalities, they do not offer automation options for the modern eCommerce business. Many of these systems include templates on which the employees manually enter data. This practice does not only result in a high manual labor cost, but also leaves room for errors.
How Does a Modern PIM System Help with These Challenges?
A modern, composable Product Information System can help resolve all these challenges. Not only does it help centralize all the product information, but also make sures that the company and relevant departments have complete control and oversight of the data.
A modern PIM system is also a core contributor to any company’s new product development, especially the product’s time to market. By minimizing the time to market, the PIM system enables the company to stay ahead of the competition in the ecosystem where timing is quite crucial to business success.
While there is a huge range of PIM systems out there, Pimberly is one of the leading PIM solutions in the world. Plus, its relevance to platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce allows customers to become API-first and agile in this competitive business environment.
This whitepaper focuses on how a PIM system, specifically Pimberly is resourceful for any business in the eCommerce industry. It will cover how a PIM system can contribute to an eCommerce business of any scale, how Pimberly integrates with eCommerce platforms, and case studies that show how Pimberly is one of the best choices for a PIM system for businesses in eCommerce.
The Role of a Product Information Management (PIM) System
The Role of a Product Information Management (PIM) System
Handling huge amounts of data is not simple. Although cloud services have allowed companies to store and manage data from centralized locations, the issue of control, oversight, and security still remain. For instance, if a product’s data is stored on the cloud with editing access to everyone, a change in product data, even mistakenly, could cost the company in terms of time and money.
With a modern PIM system that allows departments to only access relevant layers of product information, data security and bombardment with irrelevant information is no longer an issue.
A modern PIM system also allows companies to improve control and oversight, create a single source of truth, bolster customer loyalty, and enjoy a decreased time-to-market:
● Control and Oversight
Amazon and eBay are not the only eCommerce platforms in the world. Although these platforms enjoy the highest market share in the industry, there is a range of local and specialized marketplaces that eCommerce companies must consider if they wish to increase visibility and sales. For instance, a marketplace that only sells optical products like sunglasses, glasses, and lenses would be more beneficial than Amazon for an optics business.
To increase audience visibility and thus remain profitable, eCommerce companies and companies that are leveraging eCommerce have no choice but to list their products over a range of relevant online platforms. Listing these products becomes much more efficient when accurate data is available at a single point.
If data is inaccurate, there are chances of errors and disparity that can lead to lost customers and even customer distrust.
When data is available at a single point of control, the chance of human errors is greatly eliminated. A single source of data used by multiple departments ensures that product data is correct and uniform across all platforms. It also fosters a positive relationship with the customers because they are aware that they will not be deceived by errors in product information.
● Establish a Single Source of Truth
A product’s picture is just one source of truth about the product in the world of eCommerce. Spec sheets include much more than just the product’s images. Rich media, like videos about the product and information, data involving materials the product uses, its dimensions, weight, and other technical details are also essential for enlisting products on online platforms. These details provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of the product.
Even if one aspect of the product information is incorrect, it can give rise to a lot of problems where customer distrust is only the beginning. When a customer does not get the product as described, it leads to a bad word-of-mouth which eventually hurts the brand image – impacting the customer’s lifetime value and the ability to acquire new customers.
● Customer Loyalty
Accuracy about the product is a major part of its promotion in online shopping. It is a promise that the customer expects you to deliver in the form of a product at a given price. The more precise your attribution is, the more conversions you will see on your online store. It all comes down to the accuracy of the depiction of your product and the fulfillment of your promise.
Reliability has become an extremely important factor for online shoppers which is why companies that deliver as expected see an increase in the customer loyalty, thus an increase in the customer lifetime value which is the total revenue an eCommerce business earns from a customer over time.
● Decreased Time-to-Market
Imagine a room full of files and papers. This was how product information, or in fact, any information was stored in companies before computers took over. While computers have made our lives easier, files scattered across different hard drives make information retrieval and processing akin to the file room days.
So, when a product idea is generated and input is gathered from different departments, different versions of the product specs float in the company. To systematize the product specs, communicate with the suppliers, and give a go ahead to manufacturers, employees need to sort through the information on these ‘virtual file rooms.’
Sorting through the information to provide the correct product specs to the suppliers and manufacturers greatly reduces the time-to-market for new products.
Because eCommerce companies need to grow quickly to keep up with the competition, companies need to drastically decrease their time-to-market. When the attribution process is smooth new products can be brought to the shelves much quicker. Rolling out new products onto multiple marketplaces and websites can be swift rather than gradual, enabling eCommerce businesses to reach its audience much quicker.
Efficient data retrieval allows sharing information easily with supply chains, internal teams, and customers. So, an eCommerce platform operates at its highest capacity when working in conjunction with a modern PIM solution where information silos are broken, the time-to-market is decreased, and companies can outperform the competition.
● Better Human Resource Allocation
When your team does not have to handle the tedious task of information management or avoiding human error, they can focus on strategies for growth. They can better understand the analytics of each platform, improve SEO strategies, even leverage AI to help improve copies across different platforms to meet the target audience’s expectations.
All of this leads to an enhanced customer experience and handling all the issues that come up with running a multi-channel eCommerce business model.
The Top eCommerce Platforms That Empower Brands
The Top eCommerce Platforms That Empower Brands
To start with eCommerce and PIM, the first thing to explore is the top eCommerce platforms in the world. These eCommerce platforms lay the foundation for the eCommerce ecosystem that has more than 24 million eCommerce websites. Here are how these eCommerce platforms empower brands and allow the eCommerce ecosystem to thrive better than ever before:
1. BigCommerce
BigCommerce powers thousands of eCommerce companies through its eCommerce platform, assisting them in enabling omnichannel commerce. Omnichannel presence means that companies can sell goods across several platforms. BigCommerce allows them to control inventory and income from a single dashboard. It also enables integration with numerous online sales channels, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, eBay, and Google Shopping.
Depending on the plan you select, monthly costs can vary from $29 to $299. There are no charges for transactions and limitless items with any plan. It also offers a respectable mobile e-commerce experience. Because of these factors, BigCommerce has the upper hand over many other eCommerce platforms.
The lowest plan that is suitable for small businesses has a maximum yearly sales volume of $50,000 where you get three storefronts. BigCommerce also lets you integrate with three of the biggest marketplaces in the world (Amazon, eBay, and Walmart) and with social media sites like Facebook Shop and Instagram checkout.
Even with these basic integrations, data management becomes a hassle. Let’s compare Amazon with eBay. While both platforms are important to businesses, their method of product listings varies considerably. eBay is quicker and less complicated. Amazon, on the other hand, requires more information about the product such as the return policy, shipping options, and product conditions.
Even if BigCommerce allows eCommerce businesses to manage both platforms from a single dashboard, it does not offer product information management capabilities to operate both effectively, simultaneously.
While you can easily manage both Amazon and eBay together with a small range of products, when you decide to expand your product range, managing different data requirements for both platforms will become complicated. Plus, if you have multiple storefronts for different brands or catering to different locations, managing disparate data sources for all the different product listings is quite hard, even with BigCommerce’s capabilities. This is exactly where a modern PIM like Pimberly comes into play.
2. Shopify
Shopify ranks as one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for small companies because of the simplicity of setting up a primary store. Also, Shopify is a specialized eCommerce platform, loads quickly, and offers additional features like web hosting and other technical support. At $39 per month, you’ll also receive a free domain along with limitless bandwidth.
With integrations available for Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Etsy, Shopify enables eCommerce businesses to improve their presence through an omnichannel strategy. A contrast to the omnichannel strategy is multichannel management which allows businesses to run on multiple, specialized storefronts. It also allows eCommerce and retail businesses to expand their offerings to a global audience and list their products on local eCommerce channels.
While multichannel management allows for greater visibility, the issue is effective data management. The separate channels mean fragmented data, including fragmented product and consumer data. And a mismanagement of data translates to an inconsistent customer experience.
Even though Shopify promotes an omnichannel strategy with its integrations with several channels and its ability to operate several storefronts including a POS system, its data management capabilities are still limited to small businesses. Apart from Amazon, Walmart (only for the US), eBay, and Etsy, expanding to other channels would require you to do a ton of manual work, especially if your company is not utilizing a modern PIM system for data management.
Integration with a PIM system allows eCommerce businesses to manage product data and customer experiences over several channels. As your business expands and you want to increase your brand’s visibility across different eCommerce stores and cater to a global audience, data management requires a sophisticated PIM system. You can store translated product information, photos, and videos that enrich your global audience’s experience. So, rather than being limited to one country or location, with Shopify and PIM, you can go above and beyond in growing your business’ reach.
3. Adobe Commerce Cloud (Magento)
Magento is an open-source platform for creating eCommerce websites. While Adobe Commerce Cloud (Magento) is promoted as one of the most professional platforms for creating websites, it requires the users to hire efficient programmers to create websites. Adobe Commerce Cloud also allows businesses to integrate third-party apps like eBay, MailChimp, and PayPal to enhance eCommerce operations. Plus, Adobe can handle more than 500,000 products, making it highly scalable for businesses that are hoping to make it big in the eCommerce world. The content management system is also quite user-friendly at Adobe.
They even offer a POS system and advanced inventory management that allows businesses to sell in-store as well as online and manage multiple inventory streams.
With Adobe Commerce Cloud built on open-source technology, many businesses looking to save money on eCommerce platforms opt for this solution.
However, to leverage Adobe’s product handling capabilities, a modern PIM system is a must-have. With Adobe having the ability to handle more than 500,000 products, a PIM system that has the ability to organize and centralize product data including spec sheets of hundreds of thousands of products is the key to success.
4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based eCommerce solution designed to help businesses create seamless, personalized shopping experiences across all channels, including web, mobile, social, and in-store. As part of the broader Salesforce Customer 360 platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud integrates seamlessly with other Salesforce products. In turn, the solution offers a comprehensive suite of tools for managing customer relationships, marketing, sales, and service.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a centralized platform that supports both B2C and B2B commerce. This means businesses can manage all aspects of their digital commerce from a single, integrated solution — streamlining operations and providing a cohesive customer experience.
One of the standout features of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is Einstein AI. This technology enables businesses to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences by analyzing customer behavior and preferences to make relevant product recommendations and content suggestions in real-time.
Built on a robust cloud infrastructure, Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers scalability and flexibility to accommodate businesses of all sizes. Whether a company is a small retailer or a global brand, Commerce Cloud can scale to meet its needs. The platform can handle large volumes of traffic and transactions without compromising performance. When used alongside Pimberly’s equally flexible PIM solution, scaling and expanding the product range becomes much easier. A single source-of-truth allows new products, or product variants, to be easily added to your Commerce Cloud when growing the business.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud also supports the omnichannel commerce, enabling businesses to unify online and offline customer experiences. Features such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), and endless aisle allow customers to interact with brands seamlessly across various touchpoints.
5. WooCommerce
For WordPress websites, WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce platform. It functions as a WordPress plugin and enhances any WordPress website with shopping capabilities, including shipping, payments, and order management. WooCommerce remained one of the top platforms that eCommerce businesses migrated to in 2020. With 31.14% migrations, it came just second to Spotify and largely surpassed Magento’s migrations.
From there, you can utilize extensions to give your store other features like rotating 360-degree product images, numerous currencies, and subscriptions. For extra assistance with setting up and deploying your website, you may also collaborate with a qualified partner known as a WooExpert. WooCommerce B2B is a plugin that gives you the extra capabilities to sell to B2B organizations, specifically for B2B sales.
WooCommerce also integrates with different hosts. So, if you choose a platform like Hostinger for your web hosting, you can get a WooCommerce plugin to help you add eCommerce capabilities to your website.
However, WooCommerce is only limited to your own website management. For handling data and orders over eCommerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, and other global marketplaces, you will need advanced data management capabilities which again come from integrating your company’s data with a modern PIM system.
Even if you limit your eCommerce business to just one website, you will have to establish your presence through email and social media marketing, which again requires a modern PIM system. Pimberly’s PIM system is advanced, but when it combines with Pimberly AI, it elevates the game. With Pimberly AI and Digital Asset Management (DAWM), you can manage product descriptions for different target audiences, design interactive media, create smart, categorized photo libraries, and improve tagging and labeling across different marketing and sales channels.
6. Squarespace
Squarespace is one of the most popular eCommerce website builders out there. With a focus towards design and modernism, Squarespare is quite popular amongst small businesses. It even offers AI functionality to help write compelling product descriptions that appeal to your audience.
Squarespace also promotes itself as being an all-in-one platform for launching an eCommerce business. It provides email marketing capabilities and social media connectivity to launch any small brand to the world.
Squarespace also allows eCommerce businesses to integrate their website with shipping extensions to streamline shipping. It even helps provide a personalized experience to shoppers by managing their profiles and sending them notifications via email.
With Squarespace, you can set up your eCommerce website within minutes. Its powerful templates and drag-and-drop functionality is perfect for starters. However, with Squarespace, you can only set up your own store. Listing your products on just your own website means just one channel and one avenue for your customers to access you. In the world of eCommerce, success means setting up multiple storefronts and listing your products over multiple sales channels to get the bulk volume of sales.
When you decide to expand to other marketplaces and expand your product line, listings over Amazon and eBay would require you to model your product’s information as per their requirements. Amazon requires a small feature snapshot of your product to be displayed at the top and a detailed product description and images that are displayed down below.
When you start expanding your product range, you might have to hire more people to help you with Amazon listings. Further down the road, as you expand to more marketplaces, you need more manual processing. A bigger team means disparity in product and marketing data. While Squarespace can help you set up a basic small-scale eCommerce website, your growth depends on how well you manage your orders – but primarily how well your team can manage data, marketing, and everything else that comes with an eCommerce business’s expansion.
7. Shopware
Shopware, like Magento, is an open-source solution for eCommerce businesses. It promises a comprehensive eCommerce solution for any business’s B2B and B2C needs.
Shopware also offers synchronized stock, product and customer data for all channels to enable businesses to achieve an omnichannel presence. It also allows eCommerce businesses to track and measure marketing efforts across different channels.
Its pricing starts from $600 a month for its basic plan. All other plans are customized based on the business’s requirements. If you wish to list your products on three marketplaces, the pricing will vary accordingly. Based on your business’ needs, Shopware will offer you capabilities like content management and design, workflow automation, inventory management, and order management.
While Shopware does offer synchronized stock, product, and consumer data, it still lacks a PIM system. When the number of channels increases and your product line expands, Shopware needs to be integrated with a PIM system to help manage vast amounts of data. Plus, with Shopware’s capabilities only as an eCommerce management platform, you cannot manage how your data is created, accessed, and shared across teams.
Shopware can be integrated with Pimberly’s PIM system to bring efficiencies to data management. This integration enables businesses to efficiently manage and update product data, images, and descriptions across multiple channels. The powerful integration helps improve data accuracy, enabling eCommerce businesses to provide a consistent and personalized shopping experience to customers.
How the Modern PIM Enhances eCommerce Platforms
How the modern PIM Enhances eCommerce Platforms
A model PIM system like Pimberly does not only help you to reduce human effort and minimize human errors. There are a lot of benefits that quick data retrieval and efficient data management bring to the table for eCommerce businesses. While we’ve discussed how improved data management helps to reduce the time-to-market for new products, this leads to more business benefits:
1.Increased Average Order Value
Because Pimberly allows businesses to improve their data management, it leads to leveraging benefits like upsells and cross-sells. When product relationships are well-defined, it encourages customers to add to their purchases. So, data management could help your eCommerce platform to design a bundle that gives them a saving or a complimentary product that improves your customer’s lifetime value and order return rate.
Well-structured product relationships are a breeze to set up in Pimberly, which is a huge business benefit of PIM.
2.Reach New Markets
With Pimberly, you’re not just restricted to the big eCommerce platforms. Sure, Amazon could be one of the eCommerce platforms that gives you the most customers, but have you thought how much you’d expand if you were to sell to other countries by getting listed on their local marketplaces?
Each new marketplace means access to more customers. Many shoppers also explore products over multiple platforms before making the final purchase. So, getting listed on more marketplaces means getting more visibility, increasing the chances of capturing a sale. Plus, one of the many benefits of PIM is being able to easily do this with powerful automation. In other words, you can set up new channels in Pimberly in a matter of minutes.
3.Improve Business Responsiveness
In the world of business, responsiveness is everything to sales. Even though planning ahead helps businesses succeed, so does quick responsiveness. For instance, a sudden change in weather could mean that the business benefits from a sales promotion on snow boots or leather jackets.
If your product data is in Pimberly, ready to be transformed and published, this is not a problem. Essentially, you can have a new category populated and ready for marketing in a few clicks.
4.Harness the Power of AI
With Pimberly, you can leverage AI with utmost efficiency. With Pimberly, AI is not just limited to language-based models, but also for tasks that otherwise require tedious manual work. Pimberly’s AI is a patented technology that helps businesses like no other AI technology.
5. Quicker product attribution
The more complicated your spec sheets and product attributes, the more time it takes to create user-friendly product descriptions. However, with advancements in Pimberly’s patented AI (artificial intelligence), product attribution becomes much easier and quicker.
Pimberly AI identifies and extracts product attributes from various sources using a brilliant combination of image recognition and product lookup. Using AI, the team can automate the spec and sell sheets in a matter of minutes, no matter how complex the product data.
6. Auto-generating product descriptions
Pimberly AI serves as a valuable tool for auto generating product descriptions as well as attribution for all products across various catalogs. It also streamlines the process of manually attributing spec and sell sheets, as well as creating marketing and product copy – ultimately saving valuable time and resources.
Furthermore, Pimberly AI also creates three product descriptions based on brand tone, enabling businesses to seamlessly leverage A/B testing to determine what copy works best for different customer profiles. Through A/B testing, businesses can discover customer preferences and use the most appealing product description for each channel. As businesses roll out across different marketplaces, automation along with AI enables them to enjoy success with less effort required in target research. So again; automation and AI allows you to reduce the time needed to reach new audiences.
7. Upselling and cross-selling
Pimberly’s AI also gathers data regarding a customer’s desired product attributes and preferences and recommends related products – making upselling and cross-selling across multiple platforms much easier. This feature is particularly useful if you sell across different marketplaces where each customer base has different needs and expectations.
Our Integration with eCommerce Platforms
Our Integration with eCommerce Platforms
Pimberly seamlessly integrates with eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento. However, integration with these eCommerce platforms does not mean just clicking a button or following a few steps. Here are some of the features that allow Pimberly to integrate with other platforms without any need for manual systems:
Pimberly Feeds
Pimberly supports unlimited Feeds and Channels. These feeds allow external systems to push information to the PIM, enabling Pimberly to import relevant files that contain up-to-date product information without the need to adapt and manipulate spreadsheets or raw files, creating a single source of truth – without considerable human effort. Plus, the system’s simple drag-and-drop functionality enables users to map different data attributes into Pimberly.
Additionally, feeds can be configured to run on a predetermined schedule (i.e. monthly, weekly, daily or every x minutes). Automation ensures you are consistently using the latest version of product information, reducing the risk of error and time spent manipulating data.
This feature is most useful to drop shippers who use platforms like Alibaba to source products and sell to consumers all over the world. The feed system constantly gathers product information and updated inventory levels to make sure that the website or the eCommerce platform continues to run in an automated manner.
Feeds also allow Pimberly users to receive product information from suppliers, data aggregators (eg. CNET) as well as from any existing internal systems to make sure that the eCommerce listings are completely accurate.
Pimberly Channels
Channels automate the publication of product data to multiple platforms, including eCommerce websites, marketplaces and resellers. Any updates made to a product in Pimberly can be published immediately or on a predetermined schedule. This enables you to easily reach new markets and respond faster to change.
Each channel can be configured for a specific language or tone of voice using Pimberly’s AI functionality. Pimberly also uses scoping and localization to store multiple versions of a product record. This streamlined approach enables you to quickly expand into new international markets providing customers with relevant product information. Any eCommerce business can scale considerably using Pimberly Feeds and Channels functionality.
Workflow Feature
Workflow rules are used to enhance and automate manual operations wherever possible. Typically, this can include data transformation, communication amongst user groups and automate product publishing.
The workflow feature allows you to perform any logic-based decision-making against your data. This translates to ensuring you have the relevant users working on products at the right time. The individual workflows can trigger email alerts, notifications and approval requests. This helps to give clarity of the work ahead as notifications can effectively generate a task list for users to complete.
A case study that used Pimberly’s feeds, channels, and workflow feature to scale is Cotton Traders. By leveraging Pimberly’s feed and channels functionality, loading data from suppliers and uploading it across all those third-party marketplaces became more efficient and streamlined.
With their product data already centralized within the Pimberly platform, the process of extracting the right layer of product information for every distinct need became easy. Plus, automation allowed Cotton Traders to reduce the need for additional resources to manage complex, time-intensive, and risky manual data entry.
Right now, with Pimberly, Cotton Traders manages 3 websites, 63 workflows, over 92,000 assets and 140,000 products!
Lifecycle Feature
Pimberly’s life cycle feature ensures that all aspects of product information meet defined criteria for completeness, validation and accuracy. This means that only completed and optimized content can be released to specific channels, avoiding the possibility of missing or incomplete data being published. This is a feature that greatly reduces the possibility of human error in any part of data completion and management. The lifecycle feature allows setting up rules for data governance that help identify incomplete information at each stage of the product, be it development or publishing.
An additional benefit is product volume tracking. The Pimberly dashboard also tracks the volume of the product at each stage, highlighting where the efforts need to be directed in order to get the product live for sale. This means that Pimberly is designed to reduce time-to-market.
The dashboard in Pimberly will track the volume of products in each stage and highlight where to prioritize efforts, in order to get products enriched and live for sale.
Pimberly-eCommerce API Connector
Pimberly’s eCommerce connector is an example of how seamlessly Pimberly integrates with major eCommerce platforms to enable eCommerce businesses to grow and scale to new heights.
This connector bridges the gap between Pimberly and eCommerce platforms, seamlessly integrating the software without leaving any gaps. Any updates to your product data within Pimberly prompt the Pimberly-eCommerce connector to create and update your full product catalogue within the eCommerce platform in near real-time. This includes the management of Categorization, Variant Options, Imagery & Custom Fields – on top of the standard eComm platform product data fields.
If you have multiple eCommerce stores to accommodate different localizations or brands, Pimberly allows you to have one central hub for managing all of your product data. You can utilize the connector to synchronize your data to each of your disparate eCommerce stores, avoiding duplication of effort for your team.
In summary, here are the benefits of integrating Pimberly with each major eCommerce platform.
Data synchronization and workflow management
Customization and scalability options
Single source-of-truth
Pimberly’s Integration with ERP Solutions
How Pimberly integrates with eCommerce platforms shows how it can contribute to your business’s existing tech stack. But to make things clearer about how Pimberly can help elevate your business to the next level, let’s talk ERP.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are one of the most integral components of an eCommerce tech stack. They help keep sales and all organizational processes well-managed. Your tech stack, particularly back-end processes like those in ERP solutions, helps keep your business afloat. Even though these back-end processes are not visible to the customer, they have a significant impact on your consumer’s experiences.
With a modern PIM solution, you can rest assured all these processes and data that accompany them are accurate. Reliable product data is equally important internally for a brand as any customer-facing data to ensure everyone is working off the same information.
Leveraging Pimberly for eCommerce Success
Leveraging Pimberly for eCommerce Success
Having explored the powerful functionalities of Pimberly, let’s delve into how these features have been harnessed by businesses to achieve significant eCommerce success. We’ll explore how Pimberly empowers improvements in product discovery, SEO, personalized customer experiences, and advanced analytics and reporting.
Automation of Product Data Management
One of the most significant advantages of Pimberly is its ability to automate the management of product data, which is typically a manual and time-consuming process on eCommerce platforms. By handling data from various sources and formats, Pimberly ensures that product information is consistent and accurate. This automation extends to updating product descriptions, optimizing images, handling multiple languages, and syndicating data to customers and vendor portals.
Streamlined Data Integration
Pimberly simplifies the integration of product data from manufacturers and suppliers, who often provide data in different formats. Instead of manually manipulating this data, Pimberly can ingest it regardless of its layout or naming conventions, transform it through workflows, and categorize it for seamless integration into eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce Cloud.
Campaign Management
eCommerce platforms often struggle with storing and managing multiple versions of product descriptions for various campaigns. Pimberly allows businesses to store different marketing descriptions for the same product, enabling easy switching between campaign-specific descriptions.
For instance, a product description for a summer shirt can be seamlessly switched to a campaign description for holidays like Independence Day, enhancing marketing flexibility and reactivity speed.
With the right PIM in place, your eCommerce team can seamlessly swap out description, prices, images, for a set time (i.e. Black Friday). After the dust has settled, your PIM will automatically swap the products back to their normal state.
Image Optimization
Pimberly also optimizes images automatically, addressing issues like high-resolution images that can slow down website load times. It can convert image formats, resize images, and rename them to improve website performance and search engine optimization. This ensures that all product images are optimized for quick loading and better user experience.
Automated Product Data Sheets, Size Charts, and Catalogs
Spec & Sell Sheets are automatically generated by Pimberly and are updated as-and-when required. In other words, a new spec sheet is generated and saved to the Pimberly DAM when product attributes are updated, keeping your systems and users up to date on the latest information. A Spec & Sell Sheet can be updated based on customer preferences, giving control over the presentation of data. Furthermore, the platform enables brands to comfortably overwrite previous versions of items like new size charts or create an archive.
Many businesses have their own designs for spec sheets and size charts. Fortunately, brands can work with the Pimbery to create or build out an existing template library. Each category typically has its own template, all of which are stored within Pimberly.
Examples:
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Additionally, tools like Adobe InDesign enable your team to create engaging layouts combining intriguing imagery and copy easily. However, what many brands fail to realize is that they can streamline creative production using a modern PIM.
Pimberly serves as a centralized product data hub to handle and distribute product data across various channels seamlessly. Better yet, when integrated with Adobe InDesign, the capabilities of both tools are enhanced significantly, streamlining workflows and elevating creative potential. Your PIM enables marketers to publish content across multiple channels effortlessly. A modern PIM with Adobe InDesign organizes product data according to various attributes. This way, designers can easily create content tailored to specific target audiences or marketing channels. Also, it enables ads to be saved as a digital asset that is ready to use for multiple purposes.
Data Syndication
When we refer to syndication, we’re referring to the data’s adaptability when shared with a downstream customer. For example, say a brand has a list of attributes in Pimberly under the category ‘product title.’ The supplier for this brand, however, refers to it as ‘web copy.’ The brand doesn’t want it called ‘web copy’. Instead, they want it as a ‘product title.’ With the Pimberly platform, brands are able to syndicate the process of correctly adjusting the label or name the data falls under. Pimberly is able to automatically rename endpoints as data moves downstream, with column headers/categories or whatever needs to be adjusted.
Multi-Language Support
Managing multiple language versions of product data can be challenging for eCommerce platforms. Pimberly centralizes this process, allowing a single product to have multiple language versions without the need for separate websites. This centralized approach simplifies data management and ensures consistency across different language versions.
Data Validation and Lifecycle Management
eCommerce assumes you always have the correct data in the correct format for all your products—there is no true verification process built in to ensure reliability. Pimberly implements validation rules to ensure that all product data meets the required standards before it is pushed to the eCommerce platform. This reduces the risk of data errors and rejections, ensuring that only complete and accurate data is published. Additionally, Pimberly provides detailed feedback on why a product might fail to go live, helping users quickly address any issues.
Granular User Access Control
User access control is another area where Pimberly excels. It allows businesses to set granular permissions, ensuring that different teams and roles have appropriate access to product data. This security measure ensures that only authorized personnel can edit or view specific data, reducing the risk of unauthorized changes.
Dashboards and Reporting
Pimberly offers our comprehensive Dashboard, as well as reporting tools, that provide insights into product data completenes—something that many eCommerce platforms might not have natively. These tools help businesses monitor the status of their product data, track progress, and identify areas that need attention, facilitating better decision-making and strategic planning. In fact, many eComm platforms do not keep an audit trail of changes made to product data over time. Such visibility is incredibly important for eCommerce brands, especially those looking to be transparent with customers regarding sustainability.
Advanced product analytics and reporting tell you how customers engage with your products. This is important because when you understand engagement you can see where the product information you share succeeds and fails.
Improve product descriptions: With these insights, you can not only improve product descriptions and images but also improve your product offerings based on your most popular products and product types.
Reduce cart abandonment: Pimberly’s reporting also allows you to assess how your potential customers interact with product information. With a rich tech stack that includes Pimberly and other software, you can improve your product information to help increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment.
Vendor Portals
Pimberly’s Vendor Portal enables suppliers to manage the way they ingest their product data, streamlining the process of getting products online.
This self-service approach ensures that data is validated according to the business’s requirements, reducing the back-and-forth typically associated with data submissions and accelerating time-to-market.
Bulk Data Updates
Managing bulk updates is another challenge for eCommerce platforms. Pimberly allows for both manual and automated bulk data updates through workflows that reflect any changes or updates directly in your eCommerce platform. This is particularly useful for businesses that need to update product attributes across multiple items simultaneously, such as adding a new ingredient across a range of food products.
Product Discovery
Pimberly tackles the challenge of scattered product information, centralizing it all. This enriched product data feeds into various channels, ensuring customers can easily find what they’re looking for. Here’s how Pimberly facilitates product discovery:
Rich product information: Pimberly allows you to create comprehensive product descriptions with detailed attributes, high-quality images, and engaging videos. This empowers customers to make informed decisions and navigate your product range with ease.
Improved categorization: With Pimberly’s data management system and Pimberly AI,, you can establish a clear and consistent product categorization across all platforms. This intuitive navigation structure helps customers and marketplace algorithms to find the products they need quickly and efficiently.
Multi-channel visibility: Pimberly streamlines product uploads to various marketplaces and online stores. This ensures your products are discoverable by a wider audience, maximizing your reach and sales potential.
Improve SEO
Pimberly’s data management and analytics allow you to improve your SEO. AI helps formulate copies which are detailed and relevant to the product. You can also use the generated content for A/B testing and figure out the content that works.
Optimized product content: Pimberly AI lets you create product descriptions rich in relevant keywords. This enhanced content improves your website’s ranking in search engine algorithms, attracting organic traffic.
Accurate product data: Accurate information like product names, descriptions, and structured data for product information makes your product more intriguing to Google and other search engines. Pimberly’s data management and creation of a single source of truth ensures consistency, accuracy, and structure across all platforms, boosting your website’s credibility and search ranking.
Personalize Customer Experiences
Pimberly’s AI also helps with upselling and cross-selling techniques based on consumer preferences. When the customer gets relevant recommendations while shopping, it helps maximize cart value, increasing sales.
Future-proofing your eCommerce business with Pimberly
Pimberly’s data management capabilities and use of AI are two factors that can help future-proof any business. Pimberly’s very own patented AI technology is proof of how Pimberly is a partner that you would like to have for continued business success.
Not only does Pimberly AI auto-generate product descriptions and attributions, but it also streamlines the process of manually attributing spec and sell sheets. Pimberly’s feed and channel functionality is proof that the system can retrieve and publish information that is reliable. Pimberly’s workflows minimize the need for human intervention, thereby, reducing the chance of human error.
Pimberly’s advanced AI at present and AI capabilities in the pipeline will be enough to keep any eCommerce business ahead of the curve, taking advantage of the eCommerce boom along the way.
At present when data analytics is the core of every business decision, Pimberly’s AI also gathers data regarding a customer’s desired product attributes and preferences and recommends related products – making upselling and cross-selling across multiple platforms much easier.
Since AI is a trend that will not lose pace in the future. Pimberly AI is your secret weapon, helping you automate and streamline processes while building your brand and growing your consumer base.
Business Growth
With Pimberly, adapting to market changes, expanding product lines, and entering new markets is no big deal. Pimberly provides a centralized hub to store all the product data. Primberly’s AI allows to set rules for data regulation. Meaning, complex information about the product’s manufacturing won’t be available to the marketing team. Similarly, marketing copies, images, and other rich media related to the products will only be accessible to marketing teams who have a use for this information.
By layering product information, Pimberly’s PIM system empowers businesses to grow without hindrances.
Q&A with Systems Integrators
Q&A with Systems Integrators
Luminos Labs
Leveraging PIM in conjunction with an eCommerce platform presents numerous opportunities for brands deciding how to structure their tech stacks.
With Pimberly, brands have the ability to get more out of their eComm platforms than they ever were before with the automation the platform provides.
The world’s leading companies trust Luminos Labs to drive growth and bring commerce transformations to life.
We had the amazing opportunity to speak with Jacobi Zakrzewski, VP of Technology Strategy & Solutions at Luminos Labs. In this conversation, we aim to cover how brands can get the most out of an eCommerce platform when used alongside a PIM.
To start off, can you introduce yourself and provide a little bit of background on what you do at Luminos Labs?
I’m Jacobi Zakrzewski and I lead our Technology Strategy & Solutions function here at Luminos Labs. In short, the team and I advise our clients in making the right technology and process decisions based strategic aspirations they’re looking to achieve. With that also comes ongoing consultative support and enablement as needed, whether that’s a sounding board for the CIO or providing recommendations for new technologies to help the digital merchandising team, etc. As far as Luminos Labs holistically, we’re a systems integrator that partners with platforms like Pimberly to engineer a digital commerce technology stack for our clients that works as intended, fast, easy to use, reliable, and flexible. All in all, we help organizations accelerate initiatives in digital commerce their transformation.
What are the primary characteristics, in your opinion, of a well-structured tech stack?
We work predominantly with upper-mid market or enterprise organizations, most often non-digitally born, but not exclusively. That typically comes with engrained back-office systems and an accompanying level of complexity due to acquisitions, mergers, house of brands vs. branded house, etc. Whether we’re working with a digitally native company or not, those core systems of record that the current business revolves around is an ingredient we’re accustomed to adapting with.
If I focus on the digital tech stack side, then the keyword I’m going to use is resilient. A well-structured tech stack is one that is flexible to change based on customer needs and adaptable to your organization’s business model shifting. Your team can operationalize it without significant friction and it works as intended. Non-functionally speaking, it needs to be fast, secure, and scalable. All of those things I’m going to put under the umbrella of resiliency, which is what our organization really focuses on from an engineering perspective. We also want to ensure that we’re not throwing so many technology platforms at the problem that we end up in a vendor management nightmare; a careful balance of specialization and consolidation is required.
In an integrated tech stack, what role can a product information management solution, or PIM, play in enabling a brand to succeed?
We like to refer to the PIM as the product system of record for digital and merchandising use, the role it plays is one of being a product data sherpa as well as custodian. It’s going to be the primary hub of enriched product data for use in a multi-channel approach. This is important because we don’t want to be building multiple primary hubs, but rather a single primary hub with small spokes coming off. This means the platform must be flexible enough so that it can remain as the primary hub for all stakeholder groups’ needs so that the right product information can hit the right channel at the right place and right time. Half the battle in enabling a brand to succeed is simply being consistent.
What are the signs that a customer needs a PIM?
Practically speaking, I think we get hung up on the definitions too much. Whether it’s a PIM, an ERP, or a CRM, can all be done within Excel or Google Sheets if you really try hard enough. That’s how these things start. It’s when you start growing out of the rudimentary purposes and need to get into people and process scalability that really manifests itself as a need. If you’re one person managing 1,000 products, you could get by with Google Sheets and clever hacks. But as soon as you want to add more complex workflows, business processes, and team members, things start to get shaky. At the same time, you start scaling up the product count and it gets untenable.
This becomes more apparent when organizations have multiple branded websites with an overlapping product mix and not a straight 1:1 back-office system to match; the PIM can act as a unifying mediator for the different product catalogs to then push to the various downstream channels like an eCommerce site(s). This doesn’t mean you need to have those levels of complexity to require a PIM, it’s a solid indicator though. Think about if you have three ERP systems with defined product SKUs with overlap between them and fed into eight different websites.
We’ve seen plenty of organizations implement a PIM with less than 1,000 products and the quality of life of the product data team to use a business application with a pointed core purpose was enough to justify the investment. There isn’t exactly a science that switches the “Need PIM?” from “No” to “Yes”. However, if you find that the product data in your ERP isn’t enriched enough AND you’re tired of working solely out of spreadsheet boogaloo…you probably ought to check somebody like Pimberly out.
In your opinion what areas should you not use a PIM for?
One primary thing comes to mind: Transactional Data. Due to shortcomings or issues with working with another back-office system being a pain in the butt sometimes, we see organizations trying to use the PIM to store real time pricing or inventory data, even transactional point of sale info. Just because a platform can, doesn’t mean it should. A secondary thing would be defining business logic that spans the whole organization outside of digital or eCommerce into the PIM, I think that’s dangerous. Digital commerce should generally be cross-functional and making global business-logic decisions in isolation brings up a lot of red flags for me.
What role does an eCommerce platform play?
The role of the eCommerce platform plays, from an integration perspective, is getting input from the PIM as an inbound integration. This can come to directly feed the eCommerce catalog management functionality or simply feed the front-end experience if you’re working in more of a composable architecture model. Sometimes the PIM acts as the DAM and the eCommerce platform reaches out to the PIM (DAM) for content, which may or may not be cached within a CDN.
Ideally, we’re minimizing duplication of data because that can lead you to fracturing your product data model where the left hand isn’t talking to the right hand if your PIM is feeding more channels than just an eCommerce platform. At the end of the day, the PIM in isolation doesn’t do a whole lot, it’s when you’re pairing it with downstream applications and platforms is where the force multiplier really starts happening.
In terms of an eCommerce platform and its purpose, that depends. Some organizations utilize an eCommerce platform for all major data domains along with packaged business capabilities and is the “lifeblood” of the digital footprint. Whereas others may define the eCommerce platform only as the checkout, payment, and order management system. From a business perspective, many organizations will utilize an eCommerce platform with a core intended purpose of allowing users to “shop” 24/7 but then actually “buy” through other channels or in-store. Asking yourself and your organization “What is the purpose of our digital footprint?” is a good way to navigate through what role the eCommerce platform should play in your business.
What advantages can brands capitalize on when they use a PIM alongside their eCommerce platform?
Time savings, clear roles and responsibilities between a merchandising team and an eCommerce operations team, and ensuring data integrity between their eCommerce site and any other channels product data is published to. The flexibility to add more eCommerce sites without reinventing the product data wheel is also very powerful by creating site-specific product catalogs all based on a universal set.
Organizations that don’t have PIM commonly struggle with the concepts of taxonomy, attribute families, and general data model structures – a PIM helps paint a clearer picture on what that canvas could look like. Sometimes it’s a tough look in the mirror, though.
From your perspective, why does Luminos Labs choose to partner with Pimberly?
The Pimberly team is easy to work with. As a former decision maker and client of solutions like an eCommerce platform and a PIM, a big criterion of mine and the team was the vendor not being a jerk to work with. Sometimes that would rate higher in importance compared to the platform’s capabilities. This made the quality of life for our business users much better and that would lead to a positive end customer experience indirectly. Second is that PIM projects are complex because they can expose dirty laundry in organizations – Pimberly does a great job with helping clients with the business process, data model, and governance components and really lets us focus on the technical aspects. We don’t pretend to be product data experts here at Luminos Labs. The net result is expertise, budget, and timelines used appropriately.
What about Pimberly specifically bolsters the way in which a brand leverages their eCommerce platform?
This sounds elementary, but the ability to work inside of Pimberly as if business users are still working in a spreadsheet like Excel really helps with adoption and utilization of the platform. When business users are so used to spreadsheet hell, putting them into something completely different feels awkward at first, but Pimberly allows them to still feel that spreadsheet comfort and grow into it. Despite that being rudimentary, when you see a business user updating enriched product data inside of Pimberly and almost automagically reflected onto the production website, their eyes light up as if the impossible was just done. In short, business user enablement that feels like the technology working with you instead of against you is how Pimberly bolsters the downstream effects on the eCommerce platform. This is something we like to see in every vendor we work with.
Finally, what do you see as the most important benefit of integrating your PIM with an eCommerce platform?
There are plenty of benefits, but one that we consistently see is the ability to reduce the need to create separate sources of truth for product data. If you’ve got multiple web properties plus an ever-changing product mix due to category changes, customer segments, or new/deprecated supplier relationships then the risk of not having the right information in all destinations can be very high. A PIM helps mitigate that risk so long as the technology is flexible to account for the business changes and the organization is willing to adopt a good governance model to feed the eCommerce platform.
Using PIM with an eCommerce platform presents an incredible opportunity for brands deciding how to structure their tech stacks. With Pimberly, brands have the ability to get more out of their eComm platforms than they ever were before with the automation the platform provides.
Orium is North America’s leading composable commerce consultancy and systems integrator. They work with best-in-class technology partners to set strong composable commerce foundations today that can support how brands serve their customers across channels in the future.
We had the amazing opportunity to speak with Stephanie Locke, Manager of eCommerce Consulting at Orium. In this conversation, we aim to cover why brands can get the most out of an eCommerce platform when used alongside a PIM.
To start things off, can you introduce yourself and provide a little bit of background on what you do at Orium?
My name is Stephanie Locke and I’m the Manager of eCommerce Consulting for Orium. I’m part of the Service Methods team and we’re focused on reusability. A lot of what our delivery teams do on a day-to-day basis isn’t one-off work, so the Service Methods team act as internal consultants with a focus on delivery readiness and best-of-breed practices. Alongside the Service Methods work, I leverage my almost 15 years of experience in a variety of PIM projects and vendors to support product data modeling or master data structure with our teams.
What would you say the primary characteristics, in your opinion, are of a well-structured tech stack?
A well-structured tech stack comes down to composability. I think the flexibility of being able to scale quickly and significantly – to be able to pivot on a dime – is key. What we’ve seen historically is that by the time new improvements are needed or new functionalities are required, getting the development requirements into the backlog and building platform connections takes months. And at that point, you’ve lost a lot of sales as a result.
What composable architecture does is offer you the opportunity to put best-of-breed vendors together in your ecosystem, giving you full flexibility to decide how and when you’re using them. So, I think a stack should not only start out meeting your needs but also grow with you, allowing you to add on as needed – similar to building an addition onto a home.
What role can a product information management solution, or PIM, play in enabling a brand to succeed online?
A PIM solution is critical. I think if you look at a PIM, and where it sits in the ecosystem, it is what feeds everything else downstream, regardless of whether it’s one system or multiple. The ability to pull all product data together into a single system where multiple teams can work to maximize their efficiency and make it easier to syndicate in whatever way makes sense. When you look at the ecosystems of clients that don’t have a well-functioning PIM, or a PIM at all, what you see is labor inefficiencies going through the roof.
I think the effectiveness of a PIM is often underestimated, especially with how impactful a PIM is across the entire org. When you implement a CMS, it has a very limited reach, right? You’re doing your content marketers, your content creators, a huge service when you implement it. The PIM, generally speaking, affects a much larger segment of an organization than that, because there are so many different abilities that it offers. It has a huge impact both on the company and on the downstream platforms, as well, but it’s often overlooked.
What are the signs, from your perspective, that a customer really needs a PIM?
Assuming they don’t have a PIM already? I would say a small-to-midsize company looking to expand in any capacity needs a PIM. If they want to go to market in more than one geographical location, more than one language, and/or other new marketplaces such as Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, etc. – all of those require either a PIM or a small army.
A PIM is highly, highly effective when you get into things like translations, or even different tax codes, and you get into all the complexity that comes with product data. The bar is high in terms of what clients, and in turn their customers, expect on the front end. If you don’t have somewhere to bring all that information to fruition – to enhance it, verify it, and validate it before publishing – you’re not going to be in the e-commerce game for very long.
On the other hand, when should a brand not use a PIM?
Exactly the opposite. If you’re a small, single product supplier, you likely don’t require a PIM. If you don’t have more than a handful of vendors; if you don’t have several manufacturers, and you can control the full product lifecycle; if you have a very small catalog with no variation—no colors, no sizes, doesn’t change very often—in those circumstances you probably don’t need a PIM
Another potential scenario you wouldn’t need a PIM is if you’re only selling to one customer, one place, or one platform, you don’t need a PIM either. For example, if the only thing I do is make burger patties, and the only company I’m selling to is one fast food chain, I’m probably not going to need a PIM. If you have any plans of growing in any capacity, a PIM is absolutely key.
You don’t have to buy a massive monolith of a platform. It’s not like that anymore. We now have the ability to put a very flexible, easy-to-configure PIM in place that not only can grow with you but can also offer you immediate efficiencies.
So, in other words, if there’s not just one singular customer that you’re dealing with and you’re looking to expand your market reach, you’re going to need a PIM.
Exactly. A PIM is needed to expand in any capacity. Really, nobody wants to stop growing. Nobody wants to stop making money. That’s not business, right? And a PIM absolutely critical if you want to grow in any meaningful way.
What role would you say an eCommerce platform plays in a well-structured tech stack?
Well, what you want – ideally – is more of that flexibility. One great example is the ability to A/B test the structure of titles, pages, listings, etc. You can throw in all kinds of different information to see how a customer responds. A brand can never have all the answers. The generations coming behind myself are doing approximately 60% of their shopping online. So, we need to spend just as much time and effort in crafting that into a stellar experience, much like we do in a brick-and-mortar retailer. And making sure we can pivot by adding up the minute information and taking action.
With an eCommerce platform, we can give them as many features, benefits, and reasons to buy, provide incentives not to leave the page, and make purchases as easy as a few clicks. For example, a brand can add a whole section to shop for outfits from the red carpet at the Oscars the next day. That’s the type of experience a retailer needs to be able to do. And customers have come to expect that level of availability.
What advantages can brands capitalize on when they use a PIM alongside their eCommerce platform?
Well, there’s the ability for vendors to provide retailers with information that’s already been created. You can ingest from a variety of places with a PIM. There’s an innate ability to get creative with the styling for product names or the brand voice. You can be very specific about what content goes to certain retailers, for instance. Brands can tell a brand story that suits a specific audience. A PIM offers many opportunities to amalgamate information from a variety of places and then push it out in a way that the retailer decides is best for their brand and their customers. And it’s also very beneficial for their internal processes.
One of my favorite stories is what we’ll call a ‘happy accident’ with a PIM where there was a customer service team for a global organization, covering about 22 different countries. They really struggled with an inability to consistently provide product information that was up-to-date and accurate.
They ended up using a PIM to solve the problem by allowing everyone from brick-and-mortar managers to customer service associates to have read access to the PIM for the most up-to-date and current information. That meant everybody across 22 countries was operating with the same information, and saying the same things to their customers. There were no longer any inconsistencies.
It’s one of the big wins that are very seldom called out. But when you have that experience, regardless of whether you’re in Germany, the US, or China, it is extremely powerful for building trust with customers. They then come to trust what you say to be true.
Why does Orium choose to partner with Pimberly when there are so many PIMs on the market? What about Pimberly stands out?
There were a few things that stood out to me personally with Pimberly. I was blessed with the task of evaluating the platform. We’re at the forefront of composable commerce as a company. MACH is certainly one of the biggest pieces of that puzzle and it’s really important to us to partner with fellow MACH Alliance members. It sets a standard for how we grow and scale together in partnership. We all benefit when we grow.
The second thing that I loved about Pimberly was the user experience. Ingesting, enriching, and publishing product data are the basics of a PIM. Pimberly really offers a differentiator in terms of how the user experiences their day-to-day job within the platform itself. It’s very user-friendly. And It doesn’t require a degree or any coding. It is super simple, easy-to-use, and highly functional without being overly complex.
For example, when you’re spending your entire day, every single day, in a PIM, the experience of drag-and-drop instead of multiple clicks makes all the difference. Having a dashboard that makes sense for a specific user’s needs that can be customized is a huge benefit. The in-platform functionalities are amazing, no one has to do it all in Excel anymore! All of those things are what I absolutely loved about the platform.
What’s something about Pimberly, specifically, that bolsters the way that a brand would leverage their eCommerce platform?
Well, I think it goes back to the flexibility. The ability to have a multi-level structure, to have inheritance rules, to build a variety of workflows— it all greatly enables whoever is using that PIM. The flexibility to use it in different ways is to the client’s benefit without a whole lot of complexity behind it. It’s not going to take a year or 6 months to create some new workflows. It’s not going to take forever to add a whole new category. If we put some rules in place with Pimberly during implementation you can do it in record time. It completely frees up the client to expand their business and their markets without a whole lot of restraints.
Finally, what do you see as the most important benefit of integrating a PIM with an eCommerce platform?
Speed to market. From my experience, speed to market is on average 5 to 10x faster with a PIM than without. I’ve worked at a retailer where it took 23 people and just over 2 years to get a product from creation to available online.
That’s a long time. That’s 2 years of lost potential sales. When we put a PIM in place that was reduced down to 30 days. That’s pretty significant.
I’ve worked in several places where the PIM literally pays for itself in efficiencies – both internally, and externally with getting your product live and on the site in record time. Being able to produce, enrich, and publish a product online the day after some fabulous item is marketed on a TikTok video is such an advantage. In fact, it’s key nowadays to be able to do that in 24 hours, allowing you to capitalize on trends in the moment and put a whole lot more on your bottom line.
For more information on the benefits of composable architecture, visit https://composable.com/
Case Study
Case Study
Advanced data management is a need for businesses in the world of eCommerce. Let’s delve into some of the real-world examples of businesses benefiting from Pimberly’s PIM system:
Love Shopping
Before adopting Pimberly, Love Shopping Direct relied on a very basic, manual Product Information Management (PIM) system to handle their product data. While handling data, the practice of trial and error was common. This was due to a lack of visibility when identifying which products and attributes had been successfully pushed across channels.
However, this solution restricted Love Shopping’s growth as it resulted in a backlog of orders for products that were stocked out, incorrect order deliveries, and poor customer experiences.
Complete Product Information
Integrating Pimberly’s PIM system was a game changer for Love Shopping. Missing information was one of the major concerns that Love Shopping faced while managing data. With Pimberly’s automation functionality, they could guarantee that no product will be released to their sales channels missing any information.
Multi-store Management
Managing multiple storefronts also became easy with Pimberly. Love Shopping operates five Shopify websites, some of which offer identical products. Before integrating Pimberly, Love Shopping encountered challenges in distinguishing content variations across each site. They sought a solution capable of efficiently managing and exporting different iterations of the same data to meet the requirements of each website. With Pimberly, Love Shopping Direct effectively manages data variables, pushing out diverse product descriptions across each of their websites.
Moreover, Love Shopping utilized the Pimberly Shopify Connector, seamlessly integrating the scoped data and enabling updates across their websites. This integration enabled them to distinguish the data between channels in real-time.
As a result, Love Shopping efficiently maintains differentiated content across its platforms, ensuring a tailored shopping experience for its customers.
Conclusion
Conclusion
The world of eCommerce is constantly growing and evolving, presenting more and more challenges to current businesses and erecting invisible barriers to entry for new businesses. Thus, businesses in the world of eCommerce are constantly faced with challenges, especially related to management. Product information management is one of the biggest challenges that businesses face when they expand their product lines or expand to new channels for greater visibility and sales. Inefficient data retrieval and use stunt their growth and competitiveness, eventually hurting their profits.
In this white paper, we’ve explored the ever-growing challenges of managing product information in the dynamic world of eCommerce. Many businesses have legacy PIM systems that require the use of manual processes. Not only does this require a lot of time, but it also raises the risk of human errors including incomplete or inaccurate product information that impacts customer experiences and thus, customer loyalty.
By streamlining business data including inventory data, product descriptions, and marketing data, businesses can unlock significant growth potential. A modern PIM system is the only solution that can help businesses streamline business data and manage it to improve business processes, including marketing processes, supply chain, and partner management.
With its robust functionalities and seamless integration capabilities, Pimberly empowers businesses to achieve remarkable eCommerce success. By centralizing product data, Pimberly ensures consistency, accuracy, and efficiency across all platforms. This translates into improved product discovery, enhanced SEO, personalized customer experiences, and data-driven decision making.
The future of eCommerce is undoubtedly intertwined with the evolution of PIM platforms. As customer expectations for personalized experiences and seamless product discovery continue to rise, PIM systems like Pimberly will play an increasingly critical role.
Plus with AI at the forefront, businesses in the eCommerce sector will have no choice but to evolve and leverage the capabilities that AI offers. Pimberly, with its commitment to innovation and integration, is poised to be at the forefront of this exciting future. Pimberly’s patented AI and its commitment to improvement and technology can help cater to the ever-growing demands of eCommerce businesses. Pimberly’s commitment to leverage AI for data management allows future-proof businesses in a world where technology is at the forefront of success.
Thus, Pimberly is a strategic partner for businesses aiming to thrive in the competitive eCommerce landscape. By implementing Pimberly’s PIM system and other capabilities, businesses can gain a significant advantage.
There have been many cases where Pimberly has helped businesses to streamline business processes, manage their existing product data, and improve systems to resonate with their target audience. Throughout this whitepaper, we have seen how businesses can improve their data management and business processes to bolster their growth in the eCommerce sector. We have also discussed case studies of businesses that are using Pimbrly’s advanced PIM system to boost their customer experiences and help them grow.
So, choosing Pimberly as your PIM system is not just an investment in product information management; it’s an investment in the future of your eCommerce success.
Appendix
Appendix
Glossary
API (Application Programming Interface): A set of instructions that allows software applications to communicate with each other.
B2B (Business-to-Business): A type of transaction between businesses.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer): A type of transaction between a business and an individual consumer.
Cloud Services: On-demand computer services delivered over the internet, that eliminates the need for users to manage physical servers and software.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): The total revenue a business earns from a customer over a period of time.
DAM (Digital Asset Management): A systematic approach to storing, organizing, retrieving, and distributing digital files within an organization.
Data Management: The process of collecting, storing, organizing, and analyzing data.
Disparate Data Sources: Data that is stored in different locations and formats.
eCommerce (Electronic Commerce): The buying and selling of goods and services over the internet.
eCommerce Ecosystem: The network of businesses and organizations that facilitate online commerce.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): A software system that integrates and automates many of an organization’s business processes.
Inconsistent Data: Data that is not accurate or reliable.
Inventory Management: The process of tracking and controlling the stock of goods in a business.
Magento: An open-source platform for creating eCommerce websites.
Marketplace: An online platform that allows businesses to sell their products to consumers.
Multi-Channel: A marketing strategy that uses multiple channels to reach customers, such as online stores, brick-and-mortar stores, and social media.
Omnichannel: A retail strategy that provides a seamless customer experience across all channels, online and offline.
Open-Source: Software that is freely available for anyone to use, modify, and distribute.
Order Management: The process of fulfilling customer orders, from the time they are placed to the time they are delivered.
PIM (Product Information Management): A system for managing product information throughout a product’s lifecycle.
POS (Point of Sale): The place where a customer makes a payment for goods or services.
Product Attributes: The characteristics of a product, such as its color, size, and material.
Product Data Sheet (PDS): A document that contains all of the information about a product, such as its specifications, features, and benefits.
Rich Media: Multimedia content that includes audio, video, and animation.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of optimizing a website to improve its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Single Source of Truth (SSOT): A data management concept that ensures that there is only one source of accurate and up-to-date information about a product or customer.
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit): A unique identifier for a product.
Spec Sheet (Specifications Sheet): A document that contains the technical specifications of a product.
Time-to-Market: The amount of time it takes to bring a new product to market.
Upselling: A sales technique that encourages customers to purchase a more expensive product or service.
WooCommerce: An open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress websites.
Comparative Analysis of Pimberly Against other PIM solutions
There is a wide range of PIM solutions in the market because of the ever-growing needs of eCommerce businesses for data management. While many of these solutions are quite impressive, Pimberly stands out from the competition because of its superior, patented AI, its advanced feeds and channels functionality, and its workflow automation. Plus, its dedicated onboarding staff makes sure that you get a PIM solution that is tailored to your needs, without unnecessarily increasing your business expenses.
Here are a few of Pimberly’s competitors that offer good PIM solutions to eCommerce businesses:
Plytix PIM
Plytix PIM is a very popular Product Information Management software due to its user-friendly interface and low price point. Because it offers PIM capabilities to businesses at a low price, it is suitable for small and mid-sized businesses. However, with a limit on SKUs and the absence of AI, Plytix doesn’t surpass Pimberly’s advanced PIM system.
Sales Layer PIM
Sales Layer’s PIM system has been known to automate complex B2B processes and streamline entire supply chains. To help with onboarding, Sales Layer offers companies a spreadsheet mode where they can edit product information like they have previously. Activity feed allows managers to monitor changes. But even though Sales Layer is a great PIM system, designed for businesses to transition from old systems to a modern PIM solution, it does not match PIM’s advanced feed, channel, and workflow automation capabilities.
Akeneo PIM
Akeneo’s PIM system empowers eCommerce businesses to elevate their omnichannel commerce initiatives. Its intelligent Product Cloud and AI-powered product data enrichment helps companies to manage data and create marketing content more efficiently. But even with AI capabilities, Akeneo is focused on product data enrichment. Product data management still relies on methods like uploading product information via CSVs rather than having an AI-powered feed to extract and manage product data.
Bynder’s DAM
Bynder’s DAM system sets itself apart with its AI-optimization. With the power of AI, you can manage duplicates in your data, make sure there is no incomplete information, and find the assets you need in mere milliseconds.
Bynder’s AI capabilities also allow you to use image search and text in image search using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to better manage your digital assets. Access and usage rights are controlled by admin, and assets can move quickly through review and approval rounds.
All in all, Byndr’s DAM functionality is quite advanced. But despite having a great DAM system, Bynder doesn’t have an advanced PIM system like Pimberly. It leverages AI, but just for digital asset management, not content creation or information management like Pimberly’s PIM.
Integrating Pimberly with Various eCommerce platforms
Pimberly’s team has effectively developed specialized connectors to integrate with various eCommerce, CRM, accounting, project management, and ERP solutions. This connector helps you to develop a holistic tech stack that can completely revolutionize your eCommerce business from handling manual work to automation. Your team can focus on what matters to your business’s growth – strategy and excellence.
