At first glance, product information management (PIM) and product experience management (PXM) software solutions may seem like comparable offerings. But a closer look highlights some critical core distinctions.
Those distinctions are crucial for brands that want a solution to power seamless digital commerce experiences.
In his latest whitepaper, Salsify’s CMO and co-founder Rob Gonzalez explains how PIM is a good solution — for now — but that PXM can build even better product experiences. “PIM vs. PXM: Which Will Power the Future of Digital Commerce?” offers a call to action for brands that want to drive digital commerce’s future: Get a PXM solution to stay adaptable, flexible, and at the forefront of digital commerce.
PXM powers digital commerce in ways that PIM will never achieve. Here’s a quick breakdown of these ecommerce solutions, with insights into the benefits and limitations of each.
A classic PIM solution provides a single source of truth — aka a “golden record” — for product information.
Organizations can use this product information to power their business-to-business (B2B) or direct-to-consumer (D2C) sites or connect to other internal systems that need it.
To achieve this, PIM solutions provide “data integration, data cleansing, data governance, and workflows that ensure product data is accurate and consistent across the organization,” Gonzalez says.
PIM Benefits: Classic PIMs do a great job of centralizing, storing, and organizing data while sticking to internal data standards and connecting that data to other back-office data systems or environments with one single downstream info consumer.
PIM Limitations: “Classic PIM solutions’ architecture isn’t designed for digital commerce. Classic PIM solutions are designed to support internal data needs (i.e., the golden record the company can rely on to be correct),” Gonzalez says.
“PXM is a new and distinct category of technology specifically created to centralize and connect product information at scale to any channel on the digital shelf,” Gonzalez says.
A PXM solution provides the same value as a classic PIM — hierarchy, taxonomy, and governance — with additional feature areas “designed to efficiently publish content to various downstream destinations like Amazon, Walmart, D2C sites, and more,” Gonzalez says.
PXM Benefits: Like with a PIM, brands primarily use PXM to create a golden record. Unlike PIM, PXM allows for more than one golden record.
A PXM solution provides dynamic data handling, flexible multichannel data management, and simplified asset integration. Brands can validate product info against external data schema before submitting, preventing major headaches.
PXM boasts adaptability and flexibility that isn’t possible for PIM.
PXM Limitations: “Currently, no true PXM solution can scale to the more than 10 million SKUs that the largest retailers or third-party marketplaces may require to operate for their ‘PIM use case,’” Gonzalez says.
Don’t hold out hope that the classic PIM solution will evolve to meet PXM’s capabilities. PIM’s foundational architecture can’t achieve the same level of flexible data management that today’s commerce requires.
“Of course, you’ll continue to see the term PIM used for the next several years in the market, analyst research — and even on the Salsify website. The industry is in transition, and transition takes time,” Gonzalez writes. “But in the end, anyone buying a classic PIM solution for commerce will have to either replace it or add a PXM solution sooner rather than later. Eventually, PIM for commerce will cease to exist.”
PXM ecommerce solutions are advancing at an exciting rate, and it will continue to revolutionize the shopper experience, so keep an eye on this space.