Unsurprisingly, Product Information Management (PIM) is often one of the first technologies deployed in a company’s digital transformation. Why wouldn’t it be? Data is the lifeblood of your organization, after all. And PIM software offers an easy way to create a single source of truth for all your product data across multiple channels in one unified tool.
Better yet, it enhances your customer experience by enriching product information your customers see, while enabling the scalability and agility today’s businesses can’t operate without.
Are you currently building your business case for the procurement of a PIM system? Here are five use cases where PIM tools deliver a premium product experience for the highest return on your investment:
Product Information Management Use Case #1: Large or Complex Product Catalog
If they aren’t buying online, most of today’s consumers are at least researching online before making a purchase decision. Because of this, no matter if your business is e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, or both, it’s critical that the product information you display on your website and in other digital channels be robust, accurate, and consistent.
But for mid-market to enterprise organizations with large or complex product catalogs, creating and maintaining product information can quickly become a challenge. PIM platforms ease the burden of manual data entry by allowing you to store, organize and update product data in one place and automatically share the data with the other systems in your e-commerce tech stack. Streamlining your product data management improves data quality, increases productivity, and reduces the complexity of creating account-specific catalogs and pricing, catalog syndication, and product bundling.
Product Information Management Use Case #2: Multichannel Commerce
When modern consumers interact with your brand or company, they’re often switching between different channels. Because of this, it is critical for you to have a presence in every channel your target audience shops. But maintaining consistent and up-to-date product information across a variety of channels is easier said than done.
A PIM solution allows you to easily update product information in one place and dynamically push the changes to all of your channels in real-time. This ensures your customers always see accurate product information regardless of where they engage and increases the likelihood that they’ll have the information they need to make a fast and confident purchase decision.
Product Information Management Use Case #3: Business Growth
When your business grows rapidly via mergers or acquisitions, product information often becomes disorganized. As you navigate how to best merge processes, systems, and data, it’s inevitable that things will get buried, siloed, and duplicated along the way. But a product information management system can help you minimize the mess.
As you expand your business, a PIM solution can help you effectively manage product information, including new and existing item numbers, SKUs, images, videos, documentation, etc., and keep workflows on track. Using your PIM to facilitate collaboration across internal and external departments can help you keep process efficiency and customer satisfaction up and errors and costs down as you continue to scale your business.
Product Information Management Use Case #4: Global Expansion
Maintaining consistent and accurate product descriptions and information across multiple stores and channels is tricky. But maintaining consistent and accurate product information across multiple stores, channels, and geographies? That can seem downright impossible.
When you take your business global, the amount of product information you need to keep track of grows immensely. On top of price lists, SKUs, documentation, videos, images, catalogs, references, item numbers, and custom attributes, you’re now also managing localizations including languages, currencies, and promotions.
Adopting a PIM with localization features allows you to:
- Centralize product information management across multiple stores, channels, and geographies
- Ensure product content is accurate in any language
- Easily localize currency, digital asset tags, etc.
- Speed time to market
- Collaborate for quality translations and ease of global scalability
Product Information Management Use Case #5: Rapidly Changing Consumer Demand
This PIM use case may feel particularly relevant as rapidly changing consumer demands and expectations have left many organizations struggling to keep up. In the last year, have you:
- Had trouble launching new products or services in a timely fashion?
- Struggled to supply your customers with accurate inventory information?
- Had to deal with an influx of returns from online purchases?
A PIM solution can solve each of these challenges. Using a PIM, you can streamline product development and release workflows and ensure collaboration is possible in a remote work setting for faster time to market.
Because a PIM solution speaks to the other systems in your e-commerce tech stack including your ERP, you can rest assured your customers are ordering products they know are in stock and ready to ship. And as more consumers opt to shop online, you can use your product information management solution to ensure shoppers are always seeing up-to-date, high-quality product information. When your customers understand exactly what product they’re going to receive, it increases customer satisfaction and decreases the odds that they’ll request a refund.
Are you currently evaluating product information management solutions? Read our Top Four Considerations for Selecting a Product Information Management Software.