When eCommerce Store Needs PIM: Frequent Usage Scenarios

Thousands of entrepreneurs are starting to reap the benefits of creating an eСommerce store for their new or existing products. Nasdaq predicts that 95% of all purchases will be made online by the year 2040. As the digital business world slowly turns into the norm rather than the exception, online entrepreneurs need to stay up to date with all the latest systems, programs, and software to make their operations smoother.

As online stores grow and their offerings get deeper, managing an eCommerce site can turn into a sizable challenge. That’s where a product information management system can come in handy. But when does a PIM tool cease to become a luxury and more of a need for an eCommerce business? Here are a few use scenarios, and the potential benefits of a PIM system might come in handy.

1. Your Shop Has a Huge Number of SKUs

A successful online shop will almost always watch its product offerings grow by the year. In the beginning, managing an online shop might not eat up much time. But as the number of products increases, the harder it will get to manage everything. One of the most important goals in any business is to save time when handling product sheets, managing stocks, and monitoring SKUs.

Most eCommerce entrepreneurs will have stock-keep units (SKUs) to track their products and their corresponding inventories. But once product lists reach up to the hundreds, the use of a proper eCommerce PIM software will add value. This kind of tool helps save time and energy from having to keep track of spreadsheets manually. When choosing a PIM system provider, eCommerce shop owners would benefit from checking first if the system can take care of importing SKUs in bulk.

2. You Have Multiple Products With Similar Features

When products have identical features and information, the tendency of missing out on specific details or mistaking one product for another when updating products become more common. A product information management system helps avoid these errors in data updating, which leads to several hours and dollars saved from having to fix those costly mistakes when a client adds a product to a cart with the wrong information.

These sorts of PIM use cases become more valuable when a team takes care of a particular website. Most PIM systems keep track of change histories and allow for better tracking of updates. Thus, it can help keep a team in better sync and even opens up the possibility of automation and machine learning in the future.

3. You’re Selling Across Various Channels

The rise of omnichannel marketing is bringing about a new revolution in eCommerce. As consumers get more used to shopping across various platforms, online sellers need to keep up and sell across multiple channels as well. A study by Harvard Business Review revealed that up to 73% of customers now jump around multiple channels when shopping. So a company might sell on sites like Amazon and maintain their own Shopify or Magento store to reach as many customers as possible.

As an online company diversifies its selling platforms, however, the challenge once again falls on the dilemma of keeping all information in sync. Many eCommerce PIM software put multiple channels into one backend to ensure that product information, stocks, and details stay updated at all times.

4. You Want to Provide a Better Customer Experience

It’s no secret that customer experience plays a vital role in online success. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged on, eCommerce has become more popular, and more companies shifted to online selling to stay afloat as the economy collapsed. And as competition rose amidst the paradigm shift, online stores tried to find ways to stand out.

A PIM system helps an online seller improve their store’s experience by keeping a single record for every product, removing any inconsistencies that might cause fulfillment problems, and better integrate sites to other marketing channels. A PIM software also allows teams to quickly roll out changes to the store, making the business more agile — an essential trait in today’s volatile and uncertain business world.

5. You Want to Improve Your Site’s SEO

Search engine optimization remains one of the most sustainable and effective ways to gain traffic to an online store. Content is the name of the game when running SEO strategies for a website. So it makes sense how a product information management system might affect that strategy.

A PIM system allows an eCommerce business owner or team to manage an unlimited number of cross-sells and upsells to increase. PIM tools can bootstrap or even help automate the title tag, image alt tag, and meta tag creation process with the right systems in place. Often, sites that make use of a PIM system also rarely have empty alt and text fields, giving the site a better impression when Google bots crawl on your site’s pages.

Retail Is Changing and So Should You

As more companies add eCommerce channels to their business models, quality management software for product management and manufacturing moves eCommerce websites into a new and better future, by making online shop maintenance more efficient and less erroneous.

The evolution of retail and business is turning PIM into an important aspect of growing online stores. And if that’s the direction you want your site to be going towards, it’s best to start looking into such tools today.