Product Information Management in B2B eCommerce

Agility and time-to-market are just as important in the quick-moving omnichannel age, as is the accuracy and consistency of your product information. Ensure you’re establishing and keeping this trust with your buyers with a PIM solution that offers advanced user rights and permissions management capabilities.

This is key to providing a secure and controlled environment for governing PIM processes, and for outsourcing parts of your product enrichment or translation processes. These allow your team to fine-tune users, roles, and permissions, allowing them to access only the information they need and the field values they are allowed to change.

More importantly, it ensures your team knows exactly whose job it is to update various product descriptions, assets, or other data, leading to fewer errors in product information and a faster time-to-market.

As the cost of labor increases, so will the use of eCommerce automation. Customers are already hungry for tools that help optimize data integrity across systems, or eliminate some or all tasks related to logging data, reporting or updating content.

If your team is wasting time on tedious, time-consuming tasks, your PIM solution needs to take this repetitive work off their plate. Strong solutions typically include dedicated features designed to help you improve product data, rather than simply providing a different avenue to enrich product information.

The top offerings will also include features designed to automate and eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline processes. This frees up your team, letting them focus on value-add activities. Find a solution that can do some of the work for you by performing bulk actions and tracking completeness before publishing and validating product content.

It’s not enough that your product information be accurate and consistent — you also need to be agile enough to keep up with the quickly changing ways commerce is conducted.

That means your PIM needs to be both able to support your current processes and current sales channel requirements, as well as to easily adapt to future processes and channel demands.

The best solutions conform to the way you do things, rather than force you to change your processes and workflows to suit its needs. Make sure your PIM can adapt to a changing environment before you make your investment.

A PIM is a business application that you and your team, along with outside users, must adopt and use every day. That’s why you should ensure that your solution offers an intuitive interface and doesn’t require your team to sit through hours of training.

It should also provide a clear path to managing and enriching products and give a clear overview of the entire product catalog’s status, ensuring that your team won’t feel they need to use a separate product management tool for data enhancement.

Your PIM should also play nicely with your existing technical stack, because PIM systems are not one-off projects — they are constantly growing and evolving to support more connected systems and technologies.

Creating compelling omnichannel customer experiences starts and ends with digital assets. So, make sure that you pick out a PIM with strong digital asset management capabilities. Ideally, that means a solution that offers both robust digital asset management capabilities so your teams can enrich and transform product assets easily and efficiently, in context for different channels, and strong connectivity to your existing Digital Asset Management system (DAM).

Your PIM should also give you a clear preview of any images, videos, PDFs, or other assets before you display them on your channels. Finally, find a PIM offering that provides a unified library for digital assets. That way, you have a system of record to help manage product assets, regardless of their storage or type, accelerating time-to-market and ensuring accuracy.

Improving product data quality is the key to creating better and more compelling omnichannel experiences. Customers who feel confident that a company is providing them with accurate, consistent information are far more likely to make repeat purchases or recommend the company to others. Build better relationships with your customers by choosing a PIM that ensures you’re providing only the best and most reliable product data.

Strong solutions will offer features that both help you identify and integrate high-quality, accurate product information from sources around the web, make it easy for you to quickly measure just how good your existing product information really is, and suggest improvements that can make your product data better than ever before. A strong PIM solution will function as more than just a container for product information. It should also deliver high-quality data directly to your enrichment team.

Delivering a great product experience can, and should, include relevant non-product content that can serve to further inform and educate customers, and help you build trust among buyers. Your PIM should come equipped with features designed to help you organize your product catalog around pieces of common information shared among products, including brands, designers, materials, colors, and more.

You should also be able link enriched information to your product, including ingredients, materials, and care instructions for a faster, easier enrichment process. Your team can then use this data to easily and efficiently link information to relevant products in your PIM system to create content-rich product pages. You’ll also be able to deliver deeper experiences to customers by providing richer product information while also reducing time-to-market.

Once you’ve used your PIM’s various enrichment features to populate your channels with high-quality, consistent, and complete information, your solution will need to have strong versioning and publication features to help you distribute it to your various touchpoints.

Ensure your PIM is able to allow marketers to spread enriched, complete product information to all channels and all users with the snap of a finger, while also making sure they only export the data they need and route it only to the desired channel and locale.

Your solution should also provide connectors capable of hooking into virtually any channel, allowing users to efficiently store product information across a wide range of channels. Look for a solution that allows you to filter or export data based on several products, as well as attributes, families, categories, and identifiers, plus save these profiles for future usage.

The right PIM should also let you restore previous versions of a particular product in one click and maintain multiple versions of your data at the same time. This is especially helpful for staging specialty catalogs.