Top 6 Problems the Next-Gen PIM Software Solves
Success in digital commerce requires more than a desirable product. Innovative products do leave lasting impressions once consumers get them, but those consumers first need to be aware of the product and convinced to buy it.
Digital commerce is often described as fast-moving. While this is certainly true, it isn’t the only exceptional quality about the massive shift we’ve seen in how we buy and sell. Digital commerce is also noisy. It’s filled with the whoops and blares and battle cries of hundreds of thousands of brands.
To cut through that noise and get heard by your target audience, your success depends on rich and accurate product data. It’s your product listings and product-rich content across cyberspace that get you seen. That same product data feeds your SEO. That same product data then convinces consumers to buy.
If you’re a manufacturer or brand, you probably know what product information management (PIM) software is. Have you considered implementing one, though? To discover the top 6 problems a next-gen PIM can solve in this “next normal” of digital commerce, keep reading.
Definitions
- PIM software: PIM software was dreamed up in the early 2000s. Those first legacy PIMs were software downloaded directly to a local computer to pool and organize product data. For the growing number of brands selling hundreds or even thousands of products in early e-commerce, this tool was a game-changer.
- Next-Gen PIM: Compared with legacy PIMs or even newer cloud-based PIMs, the next-gen PIM is the newest manifestation of pooling and managing product data in one place. Next-gen PIM software allows for the pooling and management of images and video along with other data; it has robust in-app bulk editing, filtering, search, and logic features to edit and optimize data; and with channel-specific mapping and export, it was built specifically to support multichannel e-commerce.
- Product life cycle: A product life cycle refers to the span of time between when a product is developed and when it’s removed from shelves (albeit virtual shelves). Product life cycles are getting significantly shorter with rising accessibility to new products and greater competition in digital commerce.
- Field mapping: When it relates to exporting catalog data (or importing data), field mapping is how a next-gen PIM enables quick export and import options that support multiple data sources and marketplace formats.
- Time to market: For the purposes of this article, time to market refers to the time it takes a brand to prep product data for a new sales channel. The average time to market for brands or manufacturers launching on new e-commerce channels today is several months to a year.
Check more PIM and e-commerce definitions in this article.
Continue to the top 6 problems the next-gen PIM solves…
1.Time to market
The average time to market to get from intention to sell online to real sales is a complete paradox today. No brand has six months to a year to respond to today’s impetuous demand to join online channels. Nor does a brand have much time at all to respond to market shifts, adjustments from the competition, or other outside pressures.
E-commerce moves several times faster than any other manifestation of retail. Ever.
Today’s product life cycle is shortening as a result. Brands who take up to a year to scrub, prepare and optimize their product data for a new channel will miss a huge portion of that product’s viability for sale before demand fades out.
The next-gen PIM injects more efficient product data management into your business with built-in workflows. These workflows are anchored to a product data score that points users to exactly what data needs to be corrected, completed, or improved.
When it comes to making product data optimizations, the same next-gen PIM has bulk editing features based on formulas and dynamic and static lists to make the process not only faster, but safe from error and monotony-free.
2.Impossibility to scale
The same manual labor that makes product data management monotonous without a PIM is also what disables a brand from scaling.
Scaling in e-commerce is akin to sprinting. Compared with scaling in the 1990s, brands of the past barely broke a sweat. The growth e-commerce saw in just the first three months of the pandemic in 2020 marked a decade’s worth of growth the years before that. Subsequently, scaling has sped way up in digital commerce.
The next-gen PIM makes scaling in today’s digital commerce possible. In fact, it makes it easier, more streamlined, and downright empowering. The cloud-based PIM software enables easy user management so multiple departments can collaborate, all while protecting data with permission-based settings for who can view or change what.
This next-gen PIM software features dynamic and static lists, too, which help brands create new collections and optimize data far faster.
3.Multiple spreadsheets
“The nature of the beast,” they once said of e-commerce, “is the product data spreadsheet.”
Open that Excel file of catalog data and you scroll through thousands of SKUs and click through countless tabs.
Or maybe you have a different Excel file for each collection or sub-category of your products.
Or maybe you, the department next door, and the department after that all have your own spreadsheets to manage product data for your own purposes.
No matter your system, when it comes time to edit or update, the work is unending. Manual fixes with equations, line-by-line edits, and manual search require months of manual work.
The most frustrating part is, even after all that work, your catalog data will still be riddled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and incomplete data.
To add insult to injury, there’s still the need to share certain product data with suppliers, partners, and vendors. Every time you need to do that, it requires saving another version of your spreadsheet (or spreadsheets) to organize the data how other parties need it.
The next-gen PIM completely eradicates that system of manual spreadsheets. Data is imported from every source right at the start into the cloud-based, single source of truth PIM software. Inside the PIM, that data is optimized, cleaned up, segmented—however you need to organize or reorganize, just save special queries as lists when you’re done.
4.Noticing wrong product data… after you publish it
You know that terrible feeling…
You prepare and publish product data for a whole product category, but then you notice an error—only after you publish it.
Next-gen PIM software has built-in data scoring as part of a bigger data governance system. Data scores immediately highlight inconsistencies and inaccurate data so you can fix it without having to comb your whole catalog looking for possible errors.
5.Inefficient customizations of data by channel
If there’s any “dirty word” in digital commerce today, it’s inefficiency. Adding new sales channels spurred more of this nastiness, however, because manual spreadsheet management was not friendly to prep the same data for multiple sales channels.
A multi-channel digital commerce strategy is not only the norm today, it’s a requirement. Saving yet another version of catalog data spreadsheets, however, just to optimize the fields for Amazon’s requirements versus HomeDepot.com, leads to more error, inconsistency, and manual work.
These three things are the origin of today’s most glaring inefficiency in digital commerce.
The next-gen PIM enables brands to quickly map fields from their catalog data to a file formatted automatically then exported for each sales channel in a click. This kind of efficiency makes lives easier every day and protects brands’ ROI.
6.Costly data management
Speaking of ROI, the cost of data management is climbing fast. Very fast.
Since product data now includes product imagery, videos, and even AR shopping experiences, organizing that data effectively and then keeping multiple spreadsheets clean, accurate, and optimized is a big to-do.
Those same problems that lead to an extended time to market also lead to a bigger pull from your pocketbook. Time costs money, and that costly time is one of the top costs of not using a PIM.
The cost of product data management comes to a fraction of what it once was with a next-gen PIM. The PIM software itself is an investment, but the time saved, the friction-free path to scale, the consolidation and pooling of data, and the ability to collaborate in new ways bring instant value to brands who implement it.
We just launched the Next-Gen PIM to solve these problems and more. To see it in action for yourself, schedule a demo with us today.https://www.amberengine.com/pim-software