PIM in e-commerce - benefits for your business
In every company that sells a product, there is product information in some form. And regardless of whether you are producing or selling this information should be up-to-date and readily available. Available for use, distribution and further enrichment or updating.
What is PIM?
PIM stands for Product Information Management. A class of systems that enable the management of product information. Management is quite a capacious term. It includes onboarding, creation of meta-data, appropriate information and defines access and work rules. Specifying permissions and workflow, or in other words the work process.
In addition to this, PIM is able to test the correctness of data or even enforce it. This correctness is of great importance, because later on, when sharing, it is important to send exactly what the recipient expects. E.g. if you determine that the EAN code field is a required field then, apart from the fact that the product cannot be saved or published, in subsequent steps, the consumers of this information can be sure that the information coming from the PIM will always have this field.
And while we're on the subject of making this information available, it's worth mentioning that PIM systems are great at making this data public to the extent defined by your organisational policy. This means that only the information that can be shared in the set channel will go there. Nothing else.
You could say that the PIM is a central database of commodity information and the only source of truth.
Is the PIM only for products?
In theory, PIM should store product information, but in practice you can also use the system to hold information about other objects or documents.
If your product contains certificates, product sheets, instructions then PIM is great for storing these documents as well. But that's not all.
Generalising any digital document that will be shared in some way can also become part of the PIM database. All the company's processes for creating, editing and accessing this data can be filed in the PIM. Then you not only have a single source of truth for the product but also for the electronic documents (Electronic Documents).
PIM in an online shop
A special and very interesting use case (use case) of PIM is the distribution of information to an online shop or shops. Research shows that conversion is to some extent dependent on the quality of this data. What else can PIM help with in ecommerce?
Well, if you have multiple shops or provide this data to a marketplace such as Amazon or Allegro it is worth mentioning that certain marketing information should not be the same. Why?
Well, we do this to avoid penalisation for duplicate content. Search engines, prefer unique content, and once something is duplicated we should avoid at all costs being recognised as a site that has a duplicate and not the original.
By having an ecommerce PIM (e.g. PIMCORE), you can enter various pieces of information, which will then be selected accordingly during export to avoid duplication. In addition to this, each update will be automatically published to all recipients. Isn't that liberating?
I have seen organisations starting with 2 channels where PIM sends the information. Because the process of adding a channel is often a one-off, and then the updates go automatically, after just a few months these channels grew like mushrooms after rain. And why?
Because there is no reason not to grow the business, as some of the processes are automatic and going to scale is not scary.
Well, scaling the business is easier with PIM. Of course, it is not the only requirement for ease of scaling, but a significant convenience.