Finding an effective approach to managing product information is vital in today's digital landscape, with retailers expanding their offerings to eCommerce. This allows eCommerce businesses to communicate accurate information and consistent branding across their products and meet the increasing demand for seamless omnichannel experiences.
A Forbes report shows that 65% of customers perform comprehensive product research before purchase while another 68% leave an online retail store due to bad experiences.
Perhaps the most effective way to ensure that online consumers keep coming back and ensure continuous profitability is by implementing a product information management (PIM) solution. A PIM for eCommerce allows retailers to monitor product information in a centralized location so businesses can perform quick updates and prevent shopping cart abandonment and bad customer experiences.
Scroll and find out how businesses are implementing the PIM system to enhance their operations.
1. Create a Strong Implementation Plan
Establishing a comprehensive plan is an integral component of a PIM implementation journey because it helps gauge potential risks and threats. Therefore, business leaders must examine their current setup to determine product data's complexity and end-to-end product life cycle. A common issue during implementation is getting information from multiple data sources and subsequently matching and integrating them to a single set of definitions from several categories.
One way to resolve this issue is to monitor processes and evaluate merchandise activities like product recommendations and categorizations to eliminate confusion in data identification. By creating a strong implementation plan, businesses can prepare a workflow across all platforms and identify the metrics to measure their success. It also empowers them to define the scope of their work and map out how their systems will work in the real world to personalize it to fit business and data needs.
2. Get the Right Team in From the Start
Picking a dedicated team to take charge of processes is one of PIM best practices for implementation. These individuals should have in-depth knowledge of your eCommerce channel needs, desired catalog format, and products. This allows you to determine excellent enrichment practices and understand how your team can fit in the process seamlessly.
Getting the right team upfront also makes it easier to train them effectively so you can reap all the benefits from your PIM projects. It also minimizes employee resistance which is relatively common when rapid changes to processes occur. Guiding employees across the change management journey empowers them to embrace the solution and handle performance tuning effectively as customer behaviours evolve.
3. Choose the Right Software
Choosing the right PIM software is critical in managing complex product content and relationships and keeping up with growing demands. Ensure that your chosen PIM system can simplify product information management so your team can concentrate on impressing customers with superb data quality and enhance their productivity. A rule of thumb in navigating through several PIM system options is to create a list of requirements and features your desired solution needs to support your processes.
Ask for a comprehensive product demonstration of all PIM systems on your shortlist to unlock more insights into the system and its ability to streamline your processes. A user-friendly PIM software solution should integrate seamlessly with other systems and act as a repository where you can quickly send stakeholders to find updated product information. You can check examples of product information management software in this article to find a solution that can support all your key features.
4. Test out Your Implementation Plan
Testing your PIM implementation plan both internally and externally is essential in reducing risks and ensuring smooth transitions. Modern PIM systems are updated continuously to meet increasing demands, and with simultaneous updates, new requirements and features are added to the solution. Evaluating your plan allows you to prevent incompatibility issues and ensure consistency across all data points as data quality usually impacts consumer behavior.
Take a small data set and test whether the products are organized in the right categories and labeled appropriately. You can also assess how smoothly the data works from the PIM to your online channels to pinpoint and resolve outbound information issues. This lets you make small yet important tweaks to make processes work more efficiently for everyone involved in the product and data workflow.
5. Initiate the Migration Process
Now that you have tested out your implementation plan for effectiveness, the next step is to initiate the data migration process. There are several ways you can transfer product information into a system, but the process may depend on your team's size and the amount of data you are handling. Incremental migration will work best if you want to test out the PIM system before abandoning other systems initially. In contrast, parallel migration is the way to go if you want to use other systems with PIM continuously.
You may also have to identify how product information enters the PIM solution. Businesses can opt for either manual or automated data import, but opting for the latter is recommended for increased accuracy and fewer errors. This way, you can deliver your product data into every touchpoint to increase sales and remain consistent in the long run.
Winning the eCommerce Competition with a PIM System
The eCommerce competition is intense, and winning can feel like a losing battle, especially if you do not have the right armor to adapt to changes. Therefore, eCommerce businesses need to use dynamic tools like PIM systems to streamline and sanitize data, monitor product progress, and completion, and remain competitive in the ever-changing industry. One of the leading tools in this sector is Pimics.
Pimics is a Microsoft-certified PIM solution built to help eCommerce businesses manage product data in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms. It is rife with dynamic plugins that let you connect with electronic shops, automate catalog creation, and integrate with multiple eCommerce platforms. Pimics offers an in-depth product demonstration for interested users on top of its quote-based pricing plans.