As an owner or manager of an e-commerce business, it’s no secret that you and your team have to manage hundreds and thousands of products in your catalog. As your business grows and scales, adding, editing, and managing those products and product information can start to become tedious, if not downright impossible. This problem is compounded when you consider that you will have to manage these products across different sales and marketing channels. That’s because all of your customers rarely shop on one single platform. 

All of this means that you need software that can help you add, manage, and update product information quickly, reliably, and at scale. That’s where PIM, or Product Information Management software comes into the picture. In this article, we’ll cover what PIM is, who PIM is useful for, and why it matters to your business.

What is Product Information Management? 

Product information management software lets you and your team add, edit, manage, update, and delete product information across different channels from a single point of access. This is useful not just for e-commerce website operators, but also for companies who produce different products and sell and market them across different marketplaces. 

PIM allows you to sync your product data across all of these different platforms, ensuring that you can improve product information accuracy to such an extent that all of your customers can go to any channel where your product information is available and get reliable, consistent, and uniform information about the product before they make their purchase decision. 

Additionally, PIM platforms also let you manage and organize that information such that you have an easy method to manage and update the information at any given time, even across different SKUs of the same product. 

Here are some of the major product attributes and information that you can expect to manage with a PIM software on your hand.

• Product data such as Product Name, Description
• Attributes such as cost, SKU number. 
• Product Dimensions
• Product Marketing copy
• Product Images
• Supplier information
• Localized product copy for different languages
• Store-specific information for retail stores
• Channel-specific information for different e-commerce platforms. 

PIM platforms can assist in acting as a hub of product information and allow you to push updates for all data fields to different sales and marketing channels with ease.

Who Should Use PIM Platforms? 

PIM platforms are designed to be used primarily by sales and marketing teams in a product or e-commerce company. But they will use the platform for different purposes. Additionally, you can also see PIM platforms being useful for product management teams inside companies where there are multiple product lines. 

PIM for Sales Teams

For sales teams, PIM platforms are a useful tool to ensure that product data is managed across different retail and online channels accurately and on-time. Additionally, sales teams can also use PIM platforms to get the latest and updated data for when they are talking to potential clients and partners. This allows them to use the latest information on the product to try and convert potential customers into paying customers. 

PIM for Marketing Teams

For marketing teams, PIM platforms are useful to disseminate latest product information to multiple marketing channels. Most companies have multiple avenues for marketing their products, whether it’s through social media or paid banner ads, a PIM platform can assist in ensuring that any information that’s updated about multiple products can be shared across multiple marketing channels in one go without having to worry about which channels have been missed out and which still need to be updated. 

PIM for Product Management Teams

For Product Management teams, PIM platforms are useful to manage different product variants across different channels, as well as manage product information for all those variants without having to manually change them from channel to channel. 

This makes managing multiple product lines with different SKU variants much easier than having to do them manually. 

Why PIM Matters To Your Business

Whether you have a product company or an e-commerce outlet, a PIM platform can drastically change the way you do business. Here are some ways that PIM platforms can improve how your business runs. 

Operate at Scale

PIM platforms allow your business to start scaling up your product management, marketing,and sales efforts without having to manually scale up your teams. Using PIM, you can update and disseminate information to all of your marketing and sales channels without needing to equally increase the size and complexity of your workforce. 

Manage Multiple Products and their Variants Easily

One major advantage that PIM platforms have is the ability to separate and organize product information about different variants of the same product, plus different product lines, easily so that managing, editing, and updating information about all of them can be done quickly, easily, and at scale. 

In addition to allowing editing of product attributes and marketing information, this information can also be shared across different sales and marketing channels easily with just a few steps, as opposed to sharing them manually. 

What Cloud-based PIM Platforms Offer

So far, we’ve discussed what PIM platforms are capable of, but legacy PIM systems are localized and stored in your network. The major disadvantage is that scaling these operations across different physical offices can be difficult, and almost certainly impossible without robust vendor support. 

That’s where cloud-based PIM platforms such as Supplysail come into the picture. These PIM platforms are run and updated in the cloud, so they pose a number of advantages to legacy solutions

#1. Ease of Scaling

Cloud-based PIM solutions can be scaled up easily across different locations, since all you need is a computer or smartphone. Access is done through a regular email ID and password, making it a lot easier to scale across different offices in different countries. 

If you need to add more users than what your current plan allows, then it’s a simple addition to your subscription plan as well, instead of having to scale up your server infrastructure, which can often be expensive. 

#2. No Need for Expensive Hardware

Cloud-based PIM platforms are all entirely run on cloud infrastructure, so even if the software is heavy, all you need is a basic laptop or smartphone, and a stable internet connection. This ensures nobody needs top-of-the-line hardware to use the solution. Additionally, since cloud-based PIM solutions always run on a browser, your IT team doesn’t have to worry about compatibility between Windows, Mac, or even Linux operating systems. 

What SupplySail Offers

As a cloud-based PIM solution, SupplySail offers a number of benefits and advantages to your teams, whether they’re all working in one office or distributed across different offices in different geographical locations

#1. Unified Platform 

SupplySail offers a singular experience where all of your product information can be found, edited, and maintained across all of your various marketing and sales channels. If you are new to SupplySail or are importing your product data from another platform, or even Excel, SupplySail offers features to import that data from sources such as Excel, JSON files, and more. 

#2. Distributed Workforce Under One Platform

SupplySail’s cloud-based approach to PIM allows your teams from different offices to have access to the same data in real time without having to worry about whether it’s updated properly. So whether your team is working from one office or across continents, SupplySail ensures that your teams always have real-time access to accurate product information to do their job. 

#3. Scale Up Operations Seamlessly

If you find that your workforce is growing beyond the limits of your subscription to SupplySail or that you are growing your e-commerce operations and need more scalability to your operations instantly, SupplySail allows for quick and seamless scaling options at the touch of a button. 

If you have any questions about scaling up or down, SupplySail also offers a painless customer service experience who will be happy to answer any questions or clarifications that you have. 

#4. Easy Onboarding Features

SupplySail’s easy-to-use setup features ensure your team can be onboarded quickly and easily.. If you have products on other databases, you can easily migrate all of your products from other databases and even Excel sheets without migration delays and issues. 

#5. Ensuring Customer Success Across All Channels

With SupplySail, you can cater to your customers across every channel they shop in. An omnichannel approach ensures your customers always have accurate product information and marketing copy, which encourages them to become loyal customers to your brand. 

Conclusion

Whether you’re a newcomer to the world of PIM platforms or have some experience in product management or e-commerce, PIM platforms are designed not only to be robust in featureset and usability, but also easy to use for anyone. This article should give you a basic idea of what to expect with PIMs and what you can do to get the most out of them, whether you’re in sales, marketing, or product management. 

If you have any questions or comments about SupplySail or PIMs in general, leave us a comment! We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

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