Whether you are selling to businesses or customers, digital commerce comes with the challenge of ensuring that your product information and marketing efforts are coordinated and aligned with the information they provide about the product. The best product information management software can help you manage and coordinate product information across various channels and different teams so as to provide a singular and unified product experience to your customers.

A PIM solution is a data fueled application that’s useful for collaborating on product content. Whether your end customer is B2B or B2C, delivering rich product experiences that are unified with your sales and marketing strategies across different teams and locations is imperative to the success of your business. Your customers demand relevant and trusted information whichever channels they choose to interact with your products and teams.

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But product information can often be incomplete and fragmented, varying across different applications and systems. Marketing teams, product management teams, even eCommerce teams almost always have issues with compiling accurate product information across their own channels.

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But what are the functionalities that you should look for in a PIM solution?

What to look for in a top PIM solution?

PIM DAM solutions are typically chosen best according to your particular organization. Although there are a plethora of PIM solutions on the market, not all of them will suit your requirements. You will need to assess which features are a priority for you and what kind of customizations you will need for your organization.

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Although they can be used as off-the-shelf products, it’s always best to find a product that can allow customizations according to your particular organization. Here’s what you should be looking for.

1. Identifying the Users

Before you start window shopping, you want to find out which users in your organization will be using the PIM solution. Typically, you want to ensure that your sales and marketing team will have access to the tool to manage and create product information across different channels.

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If you have an eCommerce team working to share the product on eCommerce websites, then they will likely need to use the tool as well. Once you understand who the users are, you will need to find out how many users are going to be on the system and allocate users accordingly. It’s a waste of resources to buy a tool to support 500 users and then learn that you only need 100 accounts. Ideally, you should be able to scale up and down the user count according to what your requirements are.

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2. Understanding Data Management Requirements

When looking for the best PIM solutions, you should be able to elaborate on what data management functionalities you require. Data onboarding, Digital asset management, Integrations, Data quality control, rollback functionalities, support for multiple languages across different regions, automatic distribution functions, support for print media, are all things that you should consider when trying to figure out which PIM solutions are right for you.

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3. Considering Scalability and Maintenance

Even the best systems need maintenance, and ensuring that maintenance won’t affect your company’s operations and efficiency is of paramount importance when considering the best PIM solutions. If the PIM provider is conducting maintenance, then it should either be done after working hours for your team, or they should be able to periodically maintain different aspects of your system without needing any major downtime.

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Another thing to consider is scalability. Your sales and marketing team may have 50 people now. But what happens when the team grows to 100? What happens if you add an eCommerce team for each of your different markets and the teams grow to hundreds of employees? Your PIM solution will need to be able to handle that extra user load dynamically. Here, ensuring that your PIM solution can scale up and down according to your needs is important to catering to your particular organization.

The Best PIM Software in 2022

1. Agility Multichannel

Agility Multichannel is a PIM solution companies can use to improve their eCommerce operations. From support for eCommerce to data feeds from different marketplaces, Agility Multichannel offers a plethora of features to ensure that companies are able to customize the platform to their requirements. Agility PIM provides omnichannel support through a SaaS business model. They can also provide on-premises or private cloud hosting if your organization’s IT infrastructure requires on-site or private hosting.

2. inRiver

inRiver is a PIM solution designed for B2B and B2C companies providing product information across multiple channels, including eCommerce. Using inRiver, professionals can use the platform to create multichannel content to improve sales and provide a better customer experience. professionals can create relevant omnichannel content to increase sales, build better customer experiences, and reduce product returns. inRiver also provides options for data control to meet regulations around the world, making it a great tool for those looking to operate in multiple marketplaces.

3. Supply Sail

Supply Sail is a PIM solution to help companies and vendors increase sales and improve operational efficiency. By enabling a digital transformation of product life cycle management, SupplySail ensures that traditionally non-digital companies are able to make the jump to the digital space with minimal effort and growing pains. SupplySail makes it easy to reduce returns by providing accurate product information across platforms, improve inventory control across different channels, and easily create and publish customized catalogs for all of your products in multiple marketplaces.

4. IBM Product Master

IBM Product Master combines PIM with data management and provides options to deploy the platform in the cloud as well. IBM’s Product Master PIM can be set up quickly and offers a number of pre-built tools and integration options to hasten the setup phase. This PIM allows businesses to manage, create, and track product data across various channels.

5. BlueStone PIM

Bluestone is a scalable PIM solution that empowers users with omnichannel consistency to enrich product data across multiple channels and marketplaces. The solution is also centered around API compatibility, making it easy to integrate with other solutions that you’re already using. BlueStone PIM allows you to set up different roles and permissions to collaborate on product information across a wide swathe of users, you can break up product enrichment life cycles into smaller bits to make tasks easier. You can save time by customizing product templates and update attributes using bulk actions. BlueStone also enables cross-selling, upselling, integrating into multiple marketplaces and eCommerce apps, and marketing tools.

Conclusion

When it comes to choosing a PIM solution, there’s no one universally right answer. The perfect solution depends on what you are looking for, and how each solution fits into your organizations’ requirements. Before you start testing different solutions, make sure you have your needs on hand and prioritized before you start shopping. Ensure that you are asking about any customizations and setup support from the vendor before you finalize, including scalability and supporting multiple marketplaces across different geographic locations.

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