Data plays a crucial role for all the teams involved in the enterprise for the sales and marketing of the products and services. This data acts as a touchpoint for attracting customers to make their purchase decisions. Managing this data is very crucial and also the most challenging part of eCommerce retail.
As the business starts growing, the amount of data also increases, and manually handling this data becomes difficult and tiresome. It is important to keep the data updated with real-time values for efficient growth. The Product Information Management (PIM) solution helps in managing and fine-tuning the product details.
Key Features Of PIM For Retailers
The PIM system acts as a one-stop solution for retailers who are looking to transform their business digitally. Well, digital transformation is no more a choice for businesses these days. It is inevitable for a business to get transformed into digital to succeed in today’s market race. The retail business is not an exception to it.
Let’s take a look over the key features of the PIM system that offer significant benefits to retailers.
- Easy to manage product digital assets.
- Full-fledged product dashboard with analytics features.
- Customization of the user’s role.
- Option to edit in bulk.
- Built-in connectors for seamless integration.
- Customization of languages and currency.
- Easy to categorize products.
- Support product relationship management.
- Intuitive & friendly interactive user interface.
When it comes to experiencing success in online business, you need to be very cautious about streamlining your business operations in such a way as to achieve the goal/target. The PIM system helps to streamline the retail business toward the right path.
Common Challenges Faced by Retailers:
There are several challenges faced by retailers while handling a huge amount of data. The key challenges for online retailers include:
- The rising expectations of customers: Customers play a leading role in the growth of any business. It is important to align the eCommerce stores with the customer’s needs and provide them with a seamless shopping experience. As new businesses are coming up, customers have several options for shopping. To stay ahead in the market, it is important to stay unique and relevant. The store should have faster access to the market and content to understand their customers’ expectations.
- The proliferation of multi-channel marketing: Social commerce helps retailers sell their products directly to customers. They have to manage the queries from the customers across the different channels, and distributing the content across these channels is a difficult task. Staying on one channel will limit the reach of the business to several potential customers. To expand its reach, the enterprise should dive into multi-channel marketing.
- Increased global competition: the global market is expanding and several opportunities are flourishing. Several new products are launched to meet the ever-increasing needs of the customers. To reach out to customers across the globe, the enterprise has to overcome the barriers of language, currency, data flow, etc. by meeting the global sales requirements that are a challenge to the retailers.
- Management of product returns: Data management is very crucial and inaccurate or incomplete data can give a bad customer experience. Product data drives the customers to make the purchase. If the data is false or inadequate, the product return rate increases. This will directly affect the brand’s reputation and revenues. All businesses need to keep their product details accurate and up-to-date on all the channels. They should have improved product data quality to gain customer confidence.
- Maintaining customer relationships: Customers are the main players in any business as they govern the sales of the product. It is important to understand the needs and requirements of the customers and provide them with the products they demand. Keeping the customer happy is a very challenging task. This can be done by providing them with personalized service and value-driven experiences. It is important to have improved communication with the customers for a better understanding.
5 Reasons Retailers To Implement PIM System:
There are several reasons for any enterprise to implement the product information management system for retail, and these key reasons include:
- Improve data quality: The quality of data provided to the customer plays an significant role compared to the quality of data itself. PIM systems provide single, accurate, and unified specifications of the product, using an innovative algorithm that allows for management of the product data. The PIM solution allows for collecting, organizing, editing, updating, storing, and sharing real-time product details across all the channels. This leads to improving the quality of data, which leads to building customer confidence in the product.
- Upgrade customer service model: Implementing the PIM system leads to streamlining the data and helps in personalization of the eCommerce platform and connecting the customers with true and accurate product information. If any customer has a complaint, the PIM System allows for providing a quick response to handle the issue. A delay in customer response can lead to misunderstandings, so faster resolution of the issues is necessary. The PIM system allows for providing updated information to customers, thus helping them to emotionally connect with the product and also providing them with loyalty programs to enhance customer satisfaction.
- Increase SEO ranking: It is very important that once the channel is available on several channels, it should be easily noticed by the different search engines. Thus, it is important to have a good SEO ranking for any search engine to help the customers reach the desired webpage. The PIM solution helps in enhancing the SEO ranking by providing adequate product attributes, increasing the page density, and enriching the product details. All these efforts help in promoting increasing traffic.
- Easy addition of channels: To increase the business, the enterprise expands its reach by attracting global customers. This can be done by adding or including more channels for expanded global coverage. The PIM solution makes use of a complex algorithm that helps in the easy incorporation of new channels with ease. PIM allows for locating the newest store location for the product for growth.
- Streamlining the business: For the growth of an online business, it is important to implement newer, dynamic ways of utilizing local support for translation services and currency conversions. PIM helps in creating localized information for any interested customer at any global location, thus breaking the barriers of language and currency across the globe.
- Creating data-driven models: The PIM system helps in creating detailed analytics reports that help in making crucial decisions. These include managing the warehouse, sales, inventory, etc. with ease. It enables tracking of the process, expenses, details of sales, etc. PIM also enables the sharing of accurate product details, including the graphics that help the customer visualize the product for emotional connection. The PIM system helps in forecasting the risk and finding a solution to prevent the issues.
Conclusion
Product information management tools are very useful and critical for handling different product-based information. The PIM for retail helps in keeping track of all the sales channel data, inventory details, sales descriptions, and other essential details updated. It allows for streamlining the product development process and thus fastening the process of reaching the market. This implementation of the PIM system allows the enterprise to reach its intended audiences across the globe, thus expanding its brand and business.
