With the proliferation of e-commerce platforms, online marketplaces, social media selling, mobile apps for purchases, and even offline stores, what’s the most effective way to make hundreds or thousands of products available to customers across these channels in a customized way? Well, there’s a great shortcut that modern businesses are now implementing, and it’s called PIM (Product Information Management)! Happy Horizon is a renowned creative digital agency that frequently uses our integration platform to help its customers integrate PIM systems into their tech stack. We recently interviewed their e-commerce sales specialist, Casper Verhorst, to get a first-hand industry perspective on how PIM systems revolutionize product information management, enrichment, and distribution. Read on to find out the valuable insights Casper shared with us!
What is a PIM system, and why is it essential for modern tech stacks?
“A Product Information Management (PIM) system is a software solution that helps create and manage a central database for all your product information on a user-friendly interface. It works as an intuitive front end that can be used to enrich and distribute product data across all your sales channels.
Whether a business is selling products via a webshop or online marketplaces, product data ends up getting stored in multiple places and in silos. A PIM system acts as a single source of truth that organizes all this product data into one interactive database, which all teams - whether Sales, Customer Support, or Marketing - can access and manage.”
What are the benefits of a PIM system for modern businesses?
“First, a PIM system ensures faster time-to-market: It enables businesses to make new products live much faster. For instance, when you work with seasonalities, you can add more products at the same time, and you can build workflows to enrich product data better in a structure you prefer to work with.
Secondly, sell anywhere swiftly: Whether it’s selling to customers B2B or on B2C e-commerce platforms, or if you wish to go live on marketplaces with your products, a PIM system helps you manage and distribute your data across all sales channels effortlessly from one central hub.
Third, a PIM allows you to tailor product data: Customize your product data according to the specific needs and nuances of each specific sales channel. For instance, a product title on Bol needs to be built as per a predefined specific structure, or else your products won’t rank high on the marketplace.”
What are the most popular PIM systems that customers use?
“At Happy Horizon, we work a lot with Akeneo because we believe their PIM system is built more around marketers and content creators. We really like their product story and the three underlying pillars for their PIM system that we’ve adopted, which are “Sell faster. Sell better. Sell anywhere”. Another PIM system that Happy Horizon has partnered up with is Pimberly, and we really like their PIM proposition and their platform, which is very user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to connect with.
Pimcore is another popular PIM system, especially in the Netherlands. It offers several capabilities, and it’s built more around the idea of allowing users to customize and implement the platform more according to their requirements. Then, there are the larger players in the PIM market, such as Salsify and Inriver, that are focused on providing more advanced functionalities and features to customers.”
Why do businesses really need PIM systems? What are the pain points?
“Data silos are definitely a major pain point that leads businesses to benefit from PIM systems. When you sell products online, it’s absolutely necessary to have all your data stored in one central hub, and it’s important to be able to find and retrieve this data quickly. Having all this product information saved in scattered folders or Excel sheets is tedious and hard to find. PIM systems make all of this product data available on one search-friendly interface.
Another pain point that drives businesses to use a PIM is product translations. You can easily compare and modify product translations side-by-side on a PIM interface and add new translations effortlessly. Most importantly, a PIM system simplifies product data distribution, where apart from helping manage and modify the product information, it also helps automatically push this product data to various sales channels.”
Why do businesses need a PIM system if they already have an ERP?
“A PIM system helps effectively differentiate between cold and hot data (less frequently changed data and more frequently changed data). While an ERP system is very important to have, it’s more useful for hot data such as prices, stocks, discounts, sales prices, margins, etc., where the data keeps changing frequently. A PIM system, on the other hand, is great for managing all of the cold data, such as marketing data, product content, multi-select product attributes, color types, and other specifications.
Unlike ERP systems or even e-commerce platforms, PIM systems are specifically designed to provide a user-friendly experience for product information management. And, once again, a PIM offers the advantage of pushing all this data to multiple sales channels, which is a key feature that ERP systems or e-commerce platforms lack.”
What kind of businesses usually opt for a PIM system?
“Businesses that have multiple product categories and sub-categories, with many product data variables, can fully benefit from PIM systems. So, businesses that are looking to automate product workflows or those that are struggling with complex product structures that aren’t easily manageable via Excel or another platform tend to see the advantages of opting for a PIM.
For businesses targeting diverse global markets, a PIM system can empower multilingual support. Acting as a central tool for translation management, a PIM makes it easy to translate product information in multiple languages from one interface, ensuring linguistic consistency. It also helps simplify the localization process and launch products faster in multiple regions. Most importantly, a PIM is definitely a crucial application to integrate for multi-channel or omni-channel businesses, automating the process of listing and updating product information.”
What kind of product enrichment features do PIM systems offer?
“A PIM allows you to create product attribute sets and categories effectively. It allows you to create rules for product attributes that are required before a product goes live on a sales channel. For instance, you can have 50 product attributes but choose 10 essential attributes that need to be filled before a product is classified as sufficiently enriched and ready to go live.
You can also build workflows using a PIM system. For example, a buyer can add the basic data from the supplier, and a content marketer or an e-commerce manager can add metadata and SEO-friendly content to enrich the product data. Then there’s the rules engine, which can be used to create rules and presets to automate your product enrichment flows and pre-fill categories. You can also translate product attributes side-by-side per attribute per product.
A new big trend that we see is the use of AI (particularly integrations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT) to create and translate product data within PIM systems. We always make it a point to inform customers that they need a human to check AI-generated content for factual accuracy, but it definitely simplifies content creation.”
What are the most common PIM integrations?
"The most common PIM integrations we see are with ERP systems, where a basic workflow involves a product being created in an ERP by a buyer or product source. This base data is then moved to the PIM system, where the product information is completely enriched. At this stage, the enriched data from the PIM system needs to be distributed via sales channels, which involves PIM integrations with e-commerce platforms (like Shopify or Adobe Commerce) or with feed management tools like ChannelEngine, Channable, Vendiro, or EffectConnect. Enriched product data from the PIM can also be used for Sales catalogs or B2B print catalogs, wherein you can pre-fill data from PIM systems like Akeneo into Adobe InDesign.”
How does an integration platform help with PIM integrations?
“Apart from helping develop and manage integrations, an integration platform like Alumio helps to decide what product data needs to be updated via the PIM system across sales channels. Alumio makes it easy to constantly check new or changed product properties or field properties that need to be updated.
For a particular case at Happy Horizon, we used Alumio to create a solution where products are created in the ERP system via the Alumio integration platform only when the product is ordered. In this case, there are a lot of products in the Akeneo PIM system, and the customer didn’t want all these products in the ERP. So, Alumio checks if a new product that’s purchased is already within the ERP, if not, it creates new product data for it within the ERP along with the order info.
In the case of e-commerce, PIM integrations aren’t common if the e-commerce platform is the only sales channel. An integration platform like Alumio promotes and enables the Composable Commerce approach or facilitates multi-channel or omnichannel strategies. This involves businesses seamlessly integrating multiple best-of-breed applications such as PIM systems and other sales channels. Once again, this plays to the advantage of having a PIM’s capability to enrich product data and deliver it across multiple sales channels.”
How do manufacturing businesses benefit from PIM integrations?
"PIM systems allow you to easily create articles and product bundles. Manufacturers have several components that they manufacture themselves, and they use those components for other products as well. With a PIM, you can manage the product information of all those components and merge them together for one product.
In other words, with an integration platform, you can also create a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solution with PIM integrations, where you can trigger a notification when a product is ready for sale. You can enrich the data by sending all the basic product data like prices, stock, and orders to the ERP and the more marketing-optimized data to the e-commerce channel.”
What are some great case studies for PIM integrations?
“One great ongoing customer case at Happy Horizon is where we helped one of our customers to make around six million SKUs available within their Akeneo PIM system. We then migrated all this data from their Akeneo product database to an elastic database, which is directly connected to the front end. So all the data on the shop is filled in from the front end, and we use BigCommerce as an e-commerce engine, which is a completely “Composable” SaaS platform.
In this customer’s case, when a product is bought, it is created on the fly in BigCommerce, and when the order is placed, the data goes via the Alumio integration platform to their ERP system. Alumio checks if the newly purchased product is already in the e-commerce platform, and if not, it sends the product data from the Akeneo PIM system to create it within the ERP system.
Another great case study is where Happy Horizon is helping a major European online marketplace for professional tools with PIM integrations via the Alumio integration platform. The customer uses Exact as an ERP, and they have around a million products and 16 languages in the Akeneo PIM that they need to navigate. Whenever there is anything changed in the root language, which in this case is Dutch, the Alumio platform sends out an email notification to all those responsible for the product information in the other languages, so they can implement the changes in translation.”
Is PIM system usage increasing in popularity?
“There is definitely an increase in the implementation of PIM systems. We see a big trend in businesses looking to build a more modular software stack by implementing best-of-breed solutions like PIM. An integration platform like Alumio definitely helps unify these different solutions that are designed to solve unique challenges. It helps create a holistic ecosystem of integrations with an e-commerce platform being connected to a PIM system for product information management, an ERP for enterprise resource planning, a WMS for logistics, and so forth, with Alumio at the center to orchestrate all these integrations. So, this trend of integrating best-of-breed SaaS solutions like PIM is definitely something that’s on the rise.”
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