E-commerce requires data, numbers and systems to move forward and interact with customers; consumable data. Mobile devices and search engines determine the design of the market presence. Therefore, the company must offer its products and services quickly and transparently in order to attract and retain customers. The digital natives expect refreshing product approaches and services up to completely new digital business models.
More sophisticated product data is needed. E-commerce operators recognize that traditional tools such as Excel or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) from the original e-commerce platform are no longer designed to handle product data. The analysts from Forrester observed a significant increase in customer interest in an integrated digital solution to make large-scale use of companies' product information. To meet their needs, the majority of e-business companies have prioritized investments in PIM technology in 2017.
Further research on the business benefits of PIM solutions revealed that the majority of the companies surveyed were involved in PIM as part of their e-commerce projects. Key message: Customers and prospects as well as suppliers and producers can be successfully served with PIM.
As the chart shows, the product attributes of the product data are the most important website functions for e-commerce, accounting for 82%. After that, the product information comes from the retailer and manufacturer, as well as real-time inventory information. The preparation of product data is handled by onedot.com, a company that is able to simplify the most complex data problems of the data age.
The change thus begins with the expansion of classic product information. Basic knowledge in the form of product data for a wide variety of recipients such as prices, product descriptions, product relationships, accessories, spare parts or media assets are expanded with, for example, diverse customer wishes, extensive product variations or even social manufacturing environments.
Just as PIM is a useful addition to the ERP system, we can talk about a push forward in the automation of Product Information Management that extends ERP and PIM. The original PIM system from 2003 is designed to provide consistent and up-to-date basic information for different channels. Software solutions and databases of the respective company that are connected to the PIM are organized with the database system of the PIM in such a way that timely and accurate information about products and services is optimally prepared for each individual output channel at all times. The software systems directly connected to a PIM system are usually ERP systems such as SAP, an online shop and the points of sale (PoS) integrated in the retail stores.
PIM supports companies in product data processing, which leads to sustainable customer loyalty and return on investment (ROI) acceleration. When a PIM solution works with other digital tools, it enhances overall business performance by enriching, planning, organizing, and publishing meaningful product data. However, the flood of data from different sources, in different data formats and systems must be managed.
This results in the necessity to integrate an automation of the PIM. The sales department wants to offer the entire product range online as soon as possible in order to increase turnover and market share. With product data preparation services such as Onedot, thousands of products can easily be transferred online in the perfect structure and format for internal systems. E-commerce spends most of its time manually assigning attributes and categorizing products in spreadsheets like Excel. Onedot automates this time-consuming work and reduces the effort to 10% of the time needed to validate the processing results. The marketplace lacks a scalable solution to expand the product range quickly and with little manual effort. Onedot enables the integration of more than 30 new traders per week, which corresponds to approximately 500,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKU), by automating supplier onboarding and data conversion. Automated PIM organizes data flows in record time and provides cross-channel coherent product data.
The Automated PIM advantages at a glance:
