We often hear from brands who struggle to stay organized when managing online content for a huge catalog of products, keeping listings current across multiple channels, and reducing launch times for new product lines. Utilizing a proven product information management (PIM) platform will streamline retail content and prevent delays or data inconsistencies.
An effective PIM platform reduces a company’s vulnerability to issues of data fragmentation. For example, an employee may find themselves relaying information from an outdated source when a customer inquiries about a product. The problem will snowball as departments across your organization may create or maintain different sources of product information or input incorrect product information back into an unregulated system. The result is varied data across multiple platforms and inaccurate information sent out to public sales channels. Data fragmentation can impact a brands workflow significantly when dealing with customer interactions, individual product details, and sales channel data.
Optimizing content creation and data storage
Product information management systems allow brands to store, organize, and access product details so that the relevant data can be quickly pulled from a centralized location and shared with the relevant endpoints. An organized and efficient PIM can simplify and speed up the internal workflow.
Efficient PIM results in streamlined updates to product content while creating a single source of truth (SSOT) for everyone within a company. These solutions allow for the fluid content creation, centralized data storage, detailed content distribution, and simplified content onboarding. With PIM systems, everyone on the team is on the same page when it comes to product content and brands regain control of their product data.
Salsify Readiness Report for Walmart. Once product information is centralized in a single location, brands can send it to an endpoint. This built-in report in Salsify helps brands see what missing information is needed before publishing to Walmart.
The benefits of cloud-based PIM
Cloud-based product information management is becoming increasingly beneficial to brands who utilize a single source for product information. In-house servers are more susceptible to data loss and don’t benefit from guaranteed uptime and loss recovery.
Smaller brands are able to scale their operations as they increase in size without having to worry about outgrowing the storage capacity of their in-house servers. This allows companies to focus on their delivery and reduce the time required for launching new products.
For example, Salsify is a product experience management platform that specializes in making product information flow between retailers seamlessly and is known to completely implement a digital platform in under 12 weeks. Content scoring and product recommendations are supplied using industry-leading algorithms. This additional insight into product performance allows brands to pinpoint inefficiencies and focus on successful strategies and detailed distribution.
Salsify Insight Dashboard. Salsify combines actionable analytics with product information, digital asset management, and syndication workflows to enable brands to make ongoing changes to product content as requirements and consumer demand changes.
Brands have found it increasingly difficult to keep information current across multiple channels. If the details of a product were to change — such as dimensions, price, or ASIN — it’s easier enter the data into a single dashboard and have the changes populate across all channels than to change multiple channels manually. In the past, PIM was squarely focused on content onboarding, content centralization, and governance. The recent 2018 Forrester PIM Wave adds content creation and enrichment as well as content distribution to the list of capabilities that brands should expect from the technology.
As an online retail presence becomes more critical to a brand’s overall retail strategy, brands should consider the benefits of a PIM platform to handle the ever-changing landscape and challenges associated with data management across multiple store-fronts.
