The Future Of PIM Solutions: More PXM Capabilities
The global market of PIM product information management solutions is projected to grow by 9% per year and exceed $15 billion in total shares in 2028. And the implementation of PIM business applications in eCommerce turns into more of a necessity than a commodity with the powerful boost in operational efficiency it brings to the table.
Today, it is all more about HOW you sell stuff than what stuff you sell in the first place. Brands are trying to provide the most attractive, convenient shopping experience. This is why PIM solution providers are looking at Product Experience Management (PXM) as the next evolutionary step. In this article, we unravel this evolution in more detail.
What Is The Major Trend For PIM Solutions?
Types Of Main PIM Market Players
The market is divided between marketing/commerce-oriented solutions (such as Akeneo) and systems similar to Master Data Management (MDM), such as Pimcore or Scallium. But all sorts of PIM systems are slowly but surely gaining momentum, modernizing in key areas. This includes a redesign of the user interface, the use of more flexible data models, more robust digital asset management, product data syndication capabilities, and advanced analytics.
Marketing-Oriented PIM Solutions
A standard PIM system serves as a single source of truth, standardized product information. The functionality of the best PIM tools available on the market allows you to automatically adapt any data to the requirements of various platforms. This is why PIM providers see the need to acquire and distribute more content, make it richer, and contextualize it so that it becomes more relevant to the consumer.
Product Data Management, Data Governance, And Process Oriented PIM Platform
In today’s realities, product data management systems adapt to the needs of customers. The set of processes for identifying the most important assets to use, granting access and control rights for a smooth business process, and protecting information from external influences will continue to improve to more effectively and purposefully counter existing and emerging threats.
PIM product solutions were originally intended to store and manage product data and make it easily shareable with various endpoints. Simplifying the search for the offers buyers need is now among the priority tasks. Yes, the easier the path to purchase, the more likely this purchase is to take place.
PIM Solutions Future: Market Trends For 2023+
In the context of total digitalization, inefficient traditional methods of work are replacing new, more advanced ones. Investments in the PIM market are growing year by year at a frantic pace. Leading market players are persistently paving the way for a flexible, creative, and sustainable tomorrow of product information management.
Companies are looking to make supply chains more resilient without compromising competitive advantage and accelerate innovation. And tech leaders are shifting from digital to human-centered technology transformation.
Providers, also adapting to the situation at hand, focus on offering a technology stack that enables real-time risk assessment and analytics, supply chain mapping, and business continuity management.
#1. PIM Solution As A Part Of The Business Ecosystem
PIM software should be easily integrated into the existing software ecosystem. For global brands, the challenge is adjusting product information to suit local sellers.
They have to manage data in multiple languages and formats through a centralized product directory. There are special software solutions for the automated collection, clarification, editing, and saving of product information.
For these reasons, in the nearest future, brands will focus on investing more in:
- Building blocks of architecture;
- Orders, payments, and inventory control;
- Immersive product experiences;
- Subscription billing.
#2. PIM Continues To Evolve Into The PXM
With the customer at the forefront today, brands need to optimize content and digital assets to create seamless product purchase user journeys. This is addressed by combining systems with product content management (PCM) and capabilities such as contextualization, personalization, automation, and optimization through machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
The main purpose of this is to create a better product experience by focusing the consumer’s attention on context. That is, the ultimate convergence can be achieved with PXM.
Read more about PXM best practices:
Explore the best PXM practices from business experts and get practical advice on product experience management.
PXM Best Practices: Top 5 Advice
#3. PIM Solution Covers Most Essential Business Needs
Brands are taking bold action to achieve ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) goals. And B2B marketing executives are gradually starting to instill customer-centricity in planning and execution processes to achieve personalization goals. At the same time, the role of flexible PIM in these processes will expand.
Product Content Syndication
Proper distribution of product data across multiple platforms helps automate manual entry, complex product information up to date, and maintain its accuracy. In other words, the synchronization of product data across different portals and sales channels through a common API is improved.
Product Customer Experience
As customers now shop more online, businesses are slowly but surely choosing PIM to make it easier to collect and distribute accurate omnichannel product information.
The product catalogs management feature creates a consolidated list of products that is available to all sales channels. An omnichannel strategy is maximized because accurate and relevant data is the key to customer satisfaction.
Content Enrichment
Modern content processing techniques such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and language processing improve the accuracy, quality, and value of product information. For instance, content can be automatically structured into a well-comprehensible format for people or computers, it can be contextualized via AI for more relevance, and equipped with SEO-boosting metadata.
Ultimately, you can improve the customer experience of the product, as well as use the information received to make better-informed business decisions if you decide to enrich product content.
Product Data Management
Another way to improve customer experience is through the precise organization, aggregation, classification, and implementation of data management. Automated data transformation for the needs of various sales channels should include:
- Single entry;
- Consistency;
- Compatibility;
- Correct standardization.
Data Governance
Creating comprehensive product information is impossible without managing product data processes — who is involved, who can verify assets, who can decide if the information is complete, and so on. Businesses use the benefits of a PIM to manage, control and track the process of creating product information.
The most notable data management initiatives today include:
- Editing, including batch data editing;
- User management;
- Assets validation based on rule sets.
Read more about data governance in eCommerce:
Data governance is a vital process of setting up guidelines that deal with data management and ultimately lead to a path of business scalability.
Product Data Governance Framework For B2B eCommerce
Digital Shelf Analytics
A continuous process of evaluating digital data is the key to successful eCommerce. Analytics today covers the entire online shopping process, focusing on performance metrics. Moreover, this process is increasingly automated. Its accuracy, speed, and efficiency are growing in general. The results obtained help to make difficult decisions, find opportunities that competitors do not see, save resources, gain a competitive advantage, and increase brand awareness.
Process Support
Integration with the software ecosystem facilitates processes all around. This is why we should also see more focus on more powerful validation functions to control the quality data, as well as a multi-user architecture to control the level of access for each user.
#4. Supporting Flexible Data Models
Digitization has led to an increase in new communication channels and customer touchpoints. On the other hand, it has increased the opportunity to improve the quality of service and has created more flexible models for managing key demand info to ensure consistency, sharing, accuracy, and unification of product content.
Flexible data modeling based on attributes, relationships, and constraints provides a generic, user-defined view of information without having to reconfigure the system to optimize performance.
The main advantages of this approach include uniform asset management and standard classification.
#5. Employing AI Capabilities
When manufacturers or suppliers do not provide complete product information, retailers must use costly manual labor. Creative AI and machine learning (ML) technology will be actively involved in the product content enrichment process.
SaaS PIM should have a curatorial library that allows you to get complete information about the technical data of products. An ML-based evaluation methodology will be more commonly implemented that decides whether Internet sources are trustworthy or not.
#6. Engaging More Digital Asset Management Features
On top of traditional features (organization, search, download, version control, and access control), new digital asset management opportunities will be widely implemented. Accessibility is becoming a top business priority. So companies are to focus on centralizing and boosting the availability of all important assets via cloud and blockchain tech. At the same time, more cybersecurity features are to be implemented to grant fitting means of protecting such assets.
#7. Advancing Digital Shelf Analytics
PIM will have more data analytics to help users understand how to properly present each product and make recommendations so that products are easier to find and shoppers have a better eCommerce site experience. PIM will have more predictive digital shelf analytics in its arsenal.
Best Practices For Implementing PXM Solutions
- Define your goals and KPIs. Before implementing a PXM solution, it’s important to define your goals and KPIs to ensure that the solution aligns with your business objectives.
- Prioritize data quality. You should remember that product experience management relies on high-quality product data, so it’s important to prioritize data quality from the outset. This includes ensuring that product data is complete, accurate, and up-to-date.
- Optimize product content. This solution allows for the creation of rich product experiences, so it’s important to optimize product content for each channel. This includes tailoring product descriptions, images, and videos to meet the specific requirements of each channel.
- Choose the right channels. PXM software enables the creation of product experiences across multiple channels, but it’s important to choose the right channels based on your target audience and business goals.
- Use automation to streamline processes. Often PXM involves a lot of manual work, so it’s important to use automation wherever possible to streamline processes and improve efficiency.
- Continuously measure and optimize. PXM solutions are not a one-time project, but an ongoing process. It’s important to continuously measure performance and optimize product experiences based on user feedback and data analysis.
How Gepard Evolves To Match The Future Of PIM
Gepard PIM, a flexible and simple product information management system, offers a mix of features for brands and retailers who want to walk hand in hand with PIM trends.
Apart from data standardization and validation modules, Gepard offers a unique feature of data syndication, which makes the system even more versatile and matching with the future of PIM. It means that the solution is suitable not only for storing, enriching, and managing product information but also for seamless data delivery to multiple sales channels. With this feature, there’s no need to employ any additional solutions to distribute the content – constantly updated product content will be sent to numerous points of sales, being adapted to the requirements of marketplaces.
Along with the management features, Gepard progressed into a platform with an extensive connections hub. Any-to-any integration with eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, content providers, retailers, business partners, and other sales channels matches the idea of businesses about a brand new PIM where one can find any feature that simplifies the work with product content.
On top of that, there’s a digital shelf analytics module to centralize product information and ensure that the product information across multiple sales channels is accurate, complete, and of the highest quality.
Yet, the most important thing about Gepard is its full flexibility. With the multitenancy, configurable dashboards, custom fields, restrictions, and multiple taxonomy management, Gepard gives businesses more control over their product data than they could get with a solution with a default set of important PIM features. The holistic approach Gepard is taking is offering customers one simple environment to completely govern all content processes.
PIM’s Promising Prospects – Bottom Line
We can safely conclude that most eCommerce businesses need flexible PIM solutions to meet basic business needs. Namely, they need a simple product information management workflow, the ability to effectively tailor content to modern requirements, and access accurate, automatically collected, structured data in one place.
Gepard is constantly evolving to best suit today’s PIM challenges, so we can offer this and more. Request a customized demo to see how Gepard can help grow your business and get the best product information management tool.
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