Digital commerce is thriving with no signs of slowing down. Customers’ demands are evolving. More people today are dependent on e-commerce sites for their day to day purchases. There are hundreds and thousands of items available in every industry, category and geographic region.
As a result, customer expectations are growing tremendously as they spend more time researching products online. Hence, digital commerce players must adapt their strategies in order to meet those demands.
One of the crucial things that can make or break your customer shopping experience is the product information. Product information plays a pivotal role when the seller and customer are connected through digital commerce platforms.
If the product detail displayed on your website helps shoppers understand how your product will improve their lives, they are more likely to add it to their cart and check out. If not, they will move to your competitors.
Product Information Management (PIM) tool emerged as a life-savior for e-commerce owners when it comes to providing compelling, correct and consistent product information across all sales and marketing channels.
What is a PIM System?
A PIM system enables business owners and enterprises to store, organize and manage product information and digital assets through a single, trusted, consolidated platform. A PIM tool eliminates manual data entry errors, improves data quality and delivers complete, accurate and consistent data across all customer touchpoints.
Let’s dig deeper into why every e-commerce business should be implementing a PIM solution as a part of their digital commerce strategy.
#1 Produce and distribute high quality product data
In the highly competitive e-commerce world, making your business stand out often comes down to simply providing more accurate and updated product information. Using a PIM system, this is possible.
A PIM system offers a central repository to gather, manage and distribute rich data, allowing you to add more value to your users and outpace your competitors. This further helps in growing your business and makes easier to acquire customers across multiple platforms.
#2 Shorter product lead times
Reducing product lead times is critical for companies. Every company aims to launch the product before the competition does, in order to acquire targeted customers and seize growth opportunities.
Another big advantage of having a PIM incorporated in your e-commerce business is that it significantly reduces product launch times by allowing your team to manage product information all at once and bring products faster in the market. Being the first to launch products will allow your business to establish itself as the reference in the market for current and future customers.
#3 Expand and optimize product catalog
Product catalogs are an integral part of any e-commerce business. A high-quality and rich product catalog can mimic in-store shopping experience and influence customers’ buying decisions. When your business expands over time, you may wish to add new products to your catalog.
You will need a robust PIM system in place that can easily accommodate new product data in your existing catalog. Regardless of how many product attributes and categories you need to manage, a PIM system will simplify creating, managing and updating product data, and automatically distribute it to channels as your product line expands.
#4 Reduce product returns
Product returns are the worst nightmare for every business. Product returns affect business in many ways, such as affecting business revenue and ruining customers’ trust. Inaccurate and incomplete product data is one of the biggest reasons for rising product returns.
When it comes to optimizing product information, no other tool can deliver better results than a PIM solution. A PIM system enables distributing comprehensive product descriptions, so the customers know what they are buying before making a purchase. This will reduce the chances of product returns.
#5 Less errors and higher productivity
We all know manual work is not only prone to mistakes, but it can also hamper productivity. Manually gathering data, creating spreadsheets and updating them regularly is a time-consuming task. Even the smallest mistake can lead to severe consequences.
Using a PIM, you can benefit from tons of automation features, which can lead to up to 80% reduction in manual tasks related to product information management. This significantly increases your teams’ productivity, allowing them to devote time to more critical tasks.
#6 Enhance personalization
Providing personalized recommendations that match their preferences are what every customer looks for. It creates a euphoria of comfort and reduce their shopping time. A PIM can help in delivering personalized experiences.
A PIM will collect, analyze and report data about each customer, which can be used for cross-selling and upselling strategy, content personalization and marketing automation. You don’t have to spend time creating personalized campaigns manually as the PIM can automate repetitive tasks and ensure continuous flow of information.
#7 Enable omnichannel selling
Shoppers today explore things on social media, research products on websites and place orders through a mobile app. To ensure seamless buying experience, you must make sure that the consistent and accurate product information is displayed on all channels. PIM systems centralize product information and simultaneously distribute updated product information to all channels and customer touchpoints.
#8 Expand offerings in more regions
Translation and localization are important to consider when you are planning to expand into new markets. Making sure that your product descriptions are translated and localized correctly is crucial for your e-commerce success. Using a PIM, localization and translation can be simplified.
You can easily change currencies, measurements, payments, etc. as well as translate the product descriptions into native language that reflects the market. This makes easy for your e-commerce store to continue expanding to new locations and channels, while keeping the product information accurate and updated at all locations, all the time.
#9 Improve SEO ranking
SEO is still one of the best ways to rank higher on search engine giants, such as Google and receive organic traffic. Having a solid SEO strategy in place can dramatically boost your ranking.
A PIM can be a useful tool in creating keyword-rich content throughout all pages on your e-commerce site. It helps in optimizing keywords, creating unique content and maintaining brand consistency, which will eventually raise your search engine rankings and increase your potential sales.
Conclusion
Whether you are refreshing your existing product catalog, or launching new product lines, you need a strong PIM solution in place to ensure the success of your e-commerce store.
For e-commerce businesses looking to manage millions of product attributes, implementing a PIM is a must to streamline product data management processes, improve customer satisfaction, boost ROI and achieve business goals.
