Do you spend too much time managing the products you offer on your site? Whether you have your own e-commerce business, sell exclusively in marketplaces or display products without offering sales on your site, it may be time for a Product Information Management system (PIM). It will simplify and streamline your product management system, freeing you up so you can focus on what is really important — building sales.
What is PIM all about?
PIM simplifies and streamlines your digital product management tasks by organizing and presenting your products in an intuitive, user-friendly way. A PIM system can be a good choice for your online store as well as your other channels on the web, for example, any external marketplaces or social media channels you may be using. Well-structured information is a benefit for both you as a seller and for your customers. If the customer is able to find the information they expect to find, the opportunities for conversions and sales increase.
And you can use a PIM system even if you do not have an e-commerce engine and simply want to use it to present goods or services on the web — the real benefit is the simplification of product management. Instead of scrambling around gathering information from different sources every time you update a product on the site, PIM offers a way to structure and standardize the information for the products you offer.
Simple media management with smooth workflows
A modern PIM system eliminates a lot of the manual work needed to keep your products up-to-date in different marketplaces. Automated flows and smart processes make digital product management easier and smoother. If you have an ERP system (business system), prices can be adjusted in your ERP and then automatically transferred to the PIM system. But if you do not have an ERP system, you can take care of everything in the PIM system. Having all your product information gathered in one place makes your work processes far more efficient. The internal work you do to present and enrich the products becomes simpler and the risk of duplicate effort is reduced.
Whatever the size of your organization, there are always advantages in having a PIM manager. This is an individual who is responsible for ensuring that everything looks the same wherever it appears so that material is added to the PIM system in a standardized way. This can be the same person who is responsible for e-commerce, because he or she will need a place to collect and structure sales texts and images, which is often something you cannot do in an ERP.
If your products require information retrieval from various sources for what is displayed on your website, performance issues may arise. Slow loading pages can result in a lost customer. But PIM integration allows all information to be retrieved from one and the same source, which reduces the risk that your site will slow down.
Smart publishing across all channels
A prerequisite for digital marketing and sales is the ability to effectively enrich your products with images, videos, manuals, instructions, certificates, etc. Inspiration is the be all and end all for your customers, and it is often what determines whether the purchase is completed. PIM can help you get information to all the places you want to present your products and determine how the information is presented there. It also serves as a product hub from which you can bundle campaign offerings, set up connections so you can recommend related products, manage language varieties and effectively adapt the range to different markets. All this makes PIM an invaluable tool for anyone who sells on multiple digital channels and marketplaces.
Are you interested to know more about PIM? Download our PIM-guide. Here you find it for B2B and B2C. Or contant us directly on curious@litium.com.