PIM for retail

As eCommerce beds into our everyday experiences, the product and how you showcase it is taking centre stage in the retail and manufacturing sphere. If you aren’t using accurate and trustworthy retail product data management, it will be difficult to deliver your desired impact on your customer experience (CX).

The benefits of PIM mean you can streamline product data management workflows, automate information syndication across multiple channels and touchpoints, minimise the need for manual processing, and adapt seamlessly to complex use cases – there is no template applicable to the retail customer journey nowadays. It is an increasingly random and non-linear journey, unbound by time or location. The customer wants, indeed expects, to pick up where they left off on an unfinished purchasing process and they demand no less than a seamless, omnichannel experience with themselves firmly at the centre.

That’s why the benefits of PIM stand out in product management in retail business, to compete for eyeballs and cash in a crowded market. The rest of this insights article highlights at four areas where PIM creates and adds value for retailers and manufacturers.

1. Product Master Data: trusted, accurate, reliable, and up to date

Hundreds and thousands of new SKUs with a multitude of attributes reach retail shelves each year. Aggregating all that product data would take forever and needlessly occupy the valuable time of multiple teams. Moreover, inaccurate product data, wasted time verifying data, and having to use long training hours, are reasons for using a PIM solution for retail product data management. Its automated functionalities make it easy to eradicate errors or make rapid changes and updates on the fly, leaving teams to leverage their full creative potential in marketing and eCommerce campaigns, rather than being glorified data inputters.

Product management in retail business requires unified experience and depends on offering tailored, customer-centric experiences across multiple devices and channels. For such enriched experiences, Information about the product must come from an integrated and centralised source, not a departmental silo.

The business impact of high-quality retail product data management (from one source) is faster personalisation and highly automated shopping experiences. The business outcome is greater consistency, fundamental reliability, and a launchpad for creating value by applying what powers modern PIM solutions to make you competitive – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and other technologies.

2. Effective retail product data management using a PIM solution enriches and powers excellent customer experiences

As product launch deadlines approach, retailers often face the challenge of receiving mediocre quality data from suppliers. If these retailers are simply taking it as read that this data is suitable, they are constantly running the risk of losing revenue through lost sales, a high rate of returns and a simple failure to convert due to inconsistent and substandard information.

As product launch deadlines approach, retailers often face the challenge of receiving mediocre quality data from suppliers. If these retailers are simply taking it as read that this data is suitable, they are constantly running the risk of losing revenue through lost sales, a high rate of returns and a simple failure to convert due to inconsistent and substandard information.

PIM solutions offer a n escape route from the inconsistencies which damage brands. They are highly accurate in configuring enriched content, which in turn is instrumental not only in gaining customers’ trust, but also providing compelling reasons to click on ’buy.’

Rich content is more and more a core reason customers complete a purchase. When it comes to product management in retail business, merchants are in the business of creating desire, unleashing the total value of a product, and crafting a supremely satisfying and convenient omnichannel experience. At a content level, all this depends on accurate and comprehensive marketing descriptions – features, design, uses, advantages, benefits…in a word, the story. Make that compelling and upsell, cross-sell and conversion opportunities proliferate.

Creating high-performing product experiences manually is obsolete. Product-rich content creation using a powerful retail product data management solution like PIM for retail offers a wide-ranging and powerful toolset to manage data integration, standardisation, content-tailoring, optimisation, and finally, syndication in a fully suitable and compliant form to whatever channels required.

Furthermore, the scalability offered by a PIM for retail makes it easy to grow the business – expansion to new markets, alongside introduction and launch of new products guarantees the confidence that time to market is minimised, giving a key competitive edge. Of course, that is ultimately determined by how effective you deploy product management in retail business.

3. Leveraging the power of content to fire creativity

Product data extracted from a PIM software system is guaranteed to be the ‘golden record’ and alongside digital assets, they are ripe for creating product-rich content which product, marketing, sales, and eCommerce teams can use to create the ‘content-commerce’ narrative shoppers are looking for. With strategic retail product data management, businesses can deploy engaging storytelling (in the form of documentation, product guides, video tutorials, social media stories, online or offline events, or even user-generated content like reviews and shared experience), to transform their commerce channels into potential revenue-generating machines.

The last decade has seen a convergence between content-driven experiences and traditional, ‘stripped down’ e-commerce platforms. That’s why a PIM solution is key in centralising data in a flexible way. Those businesses on the road to digital transformation need a strong retail product data management structure to give them a sturdy foundation upon which they can build an omnichannel product dissemination, displays, and optimised search elements.

Of course, content must be relevant to the product, be it specifications and features, or enriched content such as buyer guides, product reviews, image galleries or 3-D viewing. A PIM lets you establish rules based on product attributes, allowing business users to fine-tune content for the particular product on show.

4. Automated Processes - more efficient working and highly effective results

A consistent omnichannel product story requires systematic integration, administration, and exploitation of rich digital assets such as images, text, videos, multimedia content, and other web content.

Retailers want to manage these assets, automate their processing and, as a happy by-product, enhance workflows to engender a culture of collaboration among departments and teams. Product management in retail business requires ingesting increasing volumes of data on a daily basis, so a PIM system is a no-brainer in terms of the cumulative gains it offers – increased operational efficiency, reduced costs, and measurable effectiveness.

PIM is the go-to tool in order to implement a retail product data management solution so that the business can thrive (rather than survive) in a fast-developing operating ecosystem.
  • a PIM improves access (and hence collaboration) to critical assets by streamlining management of product data.
  • it is the workflow management system. Through its features, a PIM lets retailers define, manage, and execute workflows via its automated engine.

    PIM redefines retail product data management. Be it expanding product catalogs in no time, tailoring and localising data processes for targeted marketing or achieving greater productivity by using automation to eliminate manual processing. So, when we plan our product management in retail business, successful implementation of the right PIM solution provides the ultimate systematic approach to a series of actions leading to the customer, and optimisation of the insights value chain which supports sustained customer engagement.
  • Please contact us to book a demo of any of the PIM solutions we cover in our reviews and comparisons. Naturally, if you’re interested in a more detailed conversation about your product information management needs, or how we can help and guide you in your selection of a PIM solution, please get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to help.

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