The e-commerce sector has shown significant and stable growth worldwide in recent years. Sales are predicted to reach approximately 7.4 trillion dollars in 2025, which is more than a 60% percent increase since 2021. It seems that the e-commerce market is not going to slow down its pace.
Running a business in this fast-growing field requires your company to be proactive and consider custom e-commerce solutions development to keep up with the market changes. One of the essentials that may bring your business to the next level is PIM software.
PIM is Product Information Management software that centralizes your product data in one place. It collects and enriches the information, moreover, making it easy to distribute to all the stakeholders and sales channels.
In short, the PIM solution helps you to enhance your product data management, thereby improving the customer experience and increasing revenue.
How Does PIM Work?
Such software may sound like a miracle cure for your business, but how does PIM work in practice?
The PIM software collects product information in one centralized storage within the system. It usually supports importing your existing product data from different sources. It allows users to add and edit product data in real-time, enrich product sheets, and automatically distribute the information to all the required channels. PIM can also be connected with various sales and marketing platforms.
PIM solutions accumulate every piece of product data you may imagine, including basics such as SKUs, models, product images, specifications, and warnings, as well as advanced information — i.e., marketing descriptions and texts, product stories, and manuals. The list may be tailored to your company-specific needs.
PIM tools can be set to notify marketing and sales teams, for example, that some changes have been made, so teams may update their materials and actions or update their field of responsibility within a product sheet. It works as a product-centered communication tool that keeps everyone involved updated in a timely manner.
PIM software helps marketing teams with data analysis, as the data structure allows them to set up product placement based, for instance, on a specific region. You can group products within the platform, apply specific metrics, track them, and make adjustments to the whole group with one click of the mouse.
Best Practices of Product Information Management
We have summed up the essential practices to help you succeed with your product information management.
Centralized Storage
For successful data management, you need all the information to be gathered in one place, easily accessible for the team, and formatted to a standard. This way, you’ll minimize errors and improve your control over the project.
Seamless Workflow
PIM software helps create a smooth internal workflow and speeds up the processes. It reduces micromanagement and frees up more time to spend on product quality and bringing products to the market. PIM software is easily adjustable to any business size so that you can level up the work speed of a company at every stage.
With external use, the PIM software should be comparable with your sales channels, so there is no need to pay extra attention to data distribution. We also recommend choosing the PIM solution supporting a localization tool for the fastest worldwide sales launching if needed.
Product Knowledge
In the end, you want your products to be successful with the conversions they bring and the revenue you get. Product information management is a key element in optimizing the performance of your products. We suggest you explore products from all angles by doing the following:
- Creating unique product information that is clear to customers;
- Adding a high-quality image that attracts attention;
- Making the data SEO-friendly;
- Performing A/B tests to find out the best product information match;
- Exploring sales channels and adapting your product sheets to fit in each channel;
- Analyzing metrics and constantly optimizing your data for conversion growth.
With the fast-changing e-commerce market, you should not expect those steps to be done only once. It is a long-lasting game requiring you to make changes to stay on track and increase revenue constantly.
Finding the right PIM solution for your business makes this endless process much smoother and less stressful than doing it the old-fashioned way.
How to Use a Product Information Management System
Knowing how PIM works is important, but you should be ready to use one. There are lots of PIM software solutions on the market to choose from. In general, all of them work as a centralized and structured database. Before selecting one, you should analyze your business requirements. How big is your product catalog? What are your sales channels? Which markets are you aiming for? All of that will help you narrow the best-fit solutions field.
Then, analyze your team and interface requirements. We suggest that the interface of the software you choose must be extremely user-friendly, as spending much time figuring out the workflow is not what your team wants.
You can always try the option that seems to be the most suitable for your business as a product information management example.
Finally, it is always a good decision to explore current product information management trends to keep an eye on the best practices and solutions that may become the best option for your business as well.
Conclusion
While being relatively easy to implement, the right product information management solution may be incredibly beneficial for your business. It will help to manage data successfully, react quickly to the fast-moving market, stay on track with the progress, and, most importantly, make your team work with data smoothly and almost effortlessly. There is no doubt that such benefits lead to increased conversion and revenue growth.
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