Without a central source of truth for product information, such as SKUs, titles, universal product codes (UPCs), and technical specifications, you risk sharing out-of-date information across your core channels.
A product information management (PIM) solution standardizes, centralizes, and controls your data, while giving teams autonomy to enrich and optimize product experiences.
The problem: There’s a wealth of solutions on the market, all with their unique features and integrations, which makes it challenging to know what makes the best PIM software.
As you continue your journey of adding a PIM solution to your ecommerce tech stack, here are the questions you need to ask to choose the best product information management solution for your needs.
There’s a lot of product content to manage if you want to win on the digital shelf — marketing content, channel-specific product content, rich media like enhanced product content, engaging product experiences, and more.
If a PIM solution is too rigid, your internal teams will continue to lean on siloed spreadsheets or systems outside of the PIM. This means you can’t govern the data and you lose all the benefits of a PIM solution.
Look for a PIM solution that:
Online marketplaces, social selling platforms, and your ecommerce website all demand different types of product content.
If you’re currently keeping each channel-specific version in a separate spreadsheet or other disparate, non-governed places, a PIM solution can fix this problem by bringing everything together in one place.
Look for a PIM solution that:
Collaboration is crucial on the digital shelf. The best PIM software empowers users to collaborate and coordinate content updates in one central place, while still ensuring a robust approvals process is in play.
Integrated workflows and powerful collaboration tools help you and your team gain real-time visibility over the entire content enrichment process. They can also cut manual task time by automatically creating tasks and following up.
Look for a PIM solution that:
Your tech stack is likely made up of multiple tools — maybe you have an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool and digital asset management (DAM) software, as well as your ecommerce platform, content management systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
There’s a lot to juggle, so it’s important to choose a PIM solution that seamlessly connects your tech stack and can pass data efficiently from one to another.
Look for a PIM solution that:
To compete on the digital shelf, you have to adapt to industry and platform changes quickly and efficiently.
The digital landscape is constantly in flux, and many legacy PIM solutions are rigidly built around a single data model. This makes it difficult to implement changes without disrupting the rest of the data.
A PIM solution with operational agility lets you make quick, easy changes like adding new attributes to the data model, adding new validation rules, and importing new types of content.
You don’t want to fall foul of compliance regulations. Keeping your customer and product data safe and secure is incredibly important for building trust and remaining on the right side of the law. The best PIM software provides robust built-in security measures and helps you stay compliant on every platform.
Look for a PIM solution that:
Approved users can access cloud-based solutions anywhere and anytime. This eliminates the high costs of maintaining location-dependent hardware and manually updating systems, while simultaneously reducing the amount of downtime.
Look for a PIM solution that:
Implementing a new companywide solution takes a lot of work. You need to get stakeholders on board and provide each team with the resources they need to succeed.
Choosing a PIM solution that focuses on fast time to value is crucial for seeing results quickly and inspiring teams to continue using the tool. But it’s also important that the solution is easy to use in multiple scenarios.
Look for a PIM solution that’s flexible in terms of features and customization and that provides ample instructions for getting started.
The solution will become an integral part of your business, so it needs to have a short learning curve and an ability to adapt to multiple use cases.
It can be a struggle to convince an entire company to start using a new tool — especially if the old ways of doing things are deeply entrenched in day-to-day activities.
The best PIM solutions will eliminate the need for clunky spreadsheets and multiple file versions saved across individual devices. But encouraging your team to successfully replace what they know with something new is crucial for solution adoption rates.
That’s why it’s critical to choose a PIM solution with a detailed but seamless onboarding experience — particularly for those who have never used a similar solution before or who aren’t as open to digital transformation.
Look for solutions that come with a dedicated onboarding pro or have a library of documentation, resources, and training you can explore.
The chances of companywide adoption diminish if there’s little to no customer support once you’re set up. To succeed, teams need to be able to quickly troubleshoot problems and remove friction from their processes.
The best PIM solutions have built-in customer support channels and easy-to-access services. Even better, they might provide you with a dedicated customer success agent who’s on hand to answer your questions and help you create the best PIM ecosystem for your company.
It’s easy to fall into a research wormhole when looking for the best PIM software. It helps to go into it with a clear understanding of what you need from a solution and to filter your options by core features and capabilities.
Ideally, you want your PIM solution to provide end-to-end control over all your product content — regardless of channel — and to enable integrated workflows and analytics that bring your team and their tasks together in one central source of truth.