How To Use PIM To Scale Your Ecommerce Business

Not having the right product information management system in place may be holding your business back.

If you are still managing your product information with spreadsheets, you are costing yourself, and the companies you do business with, time and money. Using individual spreadsheets to manage and share critical product information creates a labor-intensive—not to mention error-ridden—process for vendors, wholesalers, and retailers. Automating this process with a PIM system will increase efficiency, reduce errors, and, ultimately, increase the ability to scale your business.

The new reality of retail is omnichannel, and your products need to reach customers through a variety of channels — traditional brick-and-mortar stores, ecommerce, mobile shopping, and more. Customers want a consistent experience across all of these sales channels, so being able to deliver clean and uniform product information across multiple channels is now a must in the retail world.

A PIM system will, simply put, centrally manage information about a vendor’s products and all the necessary data (SKUs, product descriptions, images, etc.) required to sell those products across multiple sales channels. Automation of product information management saves time and money, as you no longer have to manually enter, edit, and update multiple sets of spreadsheets or databases. With a PIM system, product information is centrally managed, and information can be more easily shared across different systems and channels.

As your business grows and you take on both new products and expand to new sales channels and markets, the amount, and complexity, of product information you need to manage grows exponentially. Not only is there an increase in the number of products you offer, but the number of attributes per product increases as you will need specific information for the different markets and sales channels you are using. You simply cannot manually manage, edit, and update all of this information in a timely manner — not to mention the number of mistakes in product information that will inevitably happen through human error. Centralizing and automating the process with a PIM system enables the efficient and cost-effective scaling of your product as you are able to deliver consistent product information across multiple channels, and your team is no longer constantly struggling to keep on top of a growing mound of disparate product information.

Using a PIM system doesn’t just save the time (and money) that your team was wasting on doing data entry, instead of focusing on their real jobs, like product development and marketing. Not having a PIM system in place is slowing down how fast you can get your products to market. For many businesses costs aren’t just measured in dollars and cents, but in weeks and months. Getting retail products to market in a timely manner can make or break your success, especially in fast-paced industries like apparel, toys, and electronics. Manufacturers, vendors, and wholesalers report that by implementing a PIM solution, they can reduce their time to market by up to 400%! Faster product launches mean a leg up on your competition and more money in your pocket.

When executed well, PIM will improve efficiency and increase revenues, and ultimately foster growth by opening the door to scalability. Automating business functions is essential for businesses to scale and grow — finding these efficiencies is what makes a good company great.

Improving the way your business handles product information will set your business apart and help you scale.

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