Product management with PIM in practice

In e-commerce and retail, quality product information makes the difference nowadays. The appropriate tool for this is a Product Information Management (PIM) system: this gives you the opportunity to support expansion of the product range and you can improve the quality of the product information. But in practice this does not happen automatically. After using PIM and the hard work involved, the expected results may still not be achieved. Frustrating for the team and the people with the wallet, the management. How do you ensure that you have optimized the products in a targeted manner in PIM?

Deepening and broadening the product range is on the agenda, especially for retailers and trading companies. With a larger range you offer your customers a more complete offering. With the opportunity to acquire new customers. And the ability to entice existing customers to purchase additional products from new range categories. And when this amount of products no longer fits into an ERP or e-commerce environment, the obvious step is to opt for a PIM solution. Easily scalable and the ideal way to enrich product data. As an e-commerce manager, you have advocated for an investment in PIM among the management. Resources and people have been made available for the purchase and implementation of PIM. It is then up to the team to convert the opportunities presented into hard results. But they don't happen.

What is going on? The team responsible for entering and optimizing product data is faced with an enormous amount of work. And despite additional capacity that has been freed up, it continues to struggle to not only get the products into PIM, but also to optimize them smoothly. Because not only is the number of products being expanded enormously, more unique information about a product is also needed to improve its findability and marketability. Where do you start?

Product content management in practice: how do you divide your team's attention as best as possible across the product range?

The big pitfall is to start somewhere and keep entering and optimizing with blinders on until the pile is gone. For example, if you start with supplier A in PIM and work your way to Z, at some point you will have to update supplier A again when there are updates. Do you want to provide all products with a unique product description? Then you will still be busy for months. Provided that no new products are added in the meantime. Which is a utopia. Although PIM offers practical tools to manage large amounts of product data, personal attention remains necessary at item level.

Work in PIM based on the assortment strategy

The solution lies in working on your range strategy: If all goes well, all products in your range are included for a specific purpose. Then divide your product range based on those goals. You tackle the goal with the most priority first.

An example. For an online retailer, the following goals may apply:

1. Traffic. What part of your range are you using to build traffic? These are your traffic builders for SEO or for visitors to your shop floor. Margin. Then you look at the products with which you would like to see your customers leave your store or webshop. With which products do you earn the best margin? Competitively purchased products or private labels typically fall under this. These are the margin makers. Additional sales. With which products can you optimize the number of order lines? These are additional and associated items, such as an extra battery or Office 365 software when purchasing a laptop.

If you ask these key questions to your own organization, you can start with product optimization in a very targeted manner. Do you not have enough traffic in your stores or webshop? Then you start introducing and optimizing products that will attract visitors. Branded items with unique photos, descriptions and a competitive price, for example. Is the average margin per product disappointing? Then take action with your margin makers. See how you improve those products. Promote these products additionally by indicating, for example, what your best choice products are in this category, supplemented with unique USPs. This allows you to build a bridge to products that bring traffic. Are those two doing well? You can then further optimize with products that ensure cross- and upsell.

Practical and effective with PIM

This is truly a model born from practice. You will not find it in the marketing books. But it works very well when you have to make choices in the amount of products you can optimize with your team. You can also apply this model to parts of your range, per category or supplier. Do you have a category with enough traffic but not enough margin? Then you focus on the margin makers in this category. Does the season have a decisive influence on a certain product category, such as central heating boilers or garden products? Then you plan the optimization of the product content in these categories at an early stage so that you are ready in time for the season.

Take your range strategy as a starting point for determining priorities for product optimization. This way you get the most out of your product content optimization efforts and you see that PIM becomes the indispensable, central source for product content for everyone within your (retail) organization. You will see that you create the peace and space that your team needs to efficiently create unique product content in PIM.

Do you experience a challenge when optimizing product data? Or do you have another question in the field of Product Information Management?