Product information management (PIM) tools are common, but they usually fall short in helping brands deliver the consistently optimized online shopping experiences that shoppers demand today. With PIM’s primary focus centered around master data management, they fail to address the information needs of modern commerce, making it difficult for brands to optimize their digital content to better serve the wants of content-driven consumers, and the requirements of the various retailers in the space.

When looking to succeed in online commerce, online search and navigation must be optimized daily, reaching that goal will require PIM users to consider whether it is the right tool to entrust with delivering the results they need to keep thriving digitally. That being said, below are the four most common disadvantages of a PIM system, and what you can do to overcome them:

1. PIMs don’t allow easy adaptability of ever-changing product information. 

Because product taxonomies are tightly coupled with pre-existing attributes, modifying product information to match seasonal or popular keywords, lengthening, shortening or adding a product field can become a long and arduous process. The same also applies to correcting product information mistakes. Ecommerce information needs to move quickly, a task that proves difficult within the strict confines of a PIM system. A Product experience management (PXM) tool can solve this issue by providing agile attribute management, which can help drive data quality against market requirements.

2. PIMs prevent effective communication among different teams, and can even be locked off to others like marketing, sales, operations, etc.

Because PIMs are designed to hold one single version of large sets of data, they can often be locked off to teams that are typically collaborating together to get products published to an ecommerce space. These inflexible workflow systems that are built only for technical tasks and not ecommerce can contribute to the proliferation of product information silos, hurting adoption and product information publishing schedules. In these cases, a PXM can give brands an easy workflow design that drives in-app collaboration across a variety of teams.

3. PIMs have limited to no support for rich media and other digital assets.

When it comes to consistently driving product conversions on ecommerce sites, high quality and quantity of media is key when it comes to closing a sale with a consumer. Because PIMs are designed to collect and store product information, it has limited capabilities for storage and manipulation of rich media like videos, high resolution images, long form content and many others. In short, a PIM is not a DAM (digital asset management tool), but a PXM has the ability to support robust channel-specific image manipulations, image transformations and list search, ensuring high quality media is easily managed across thousands of SKUs.

4. PIMs lack ecommerce insights. 

PIMs can manage product information fairly well, but they lack the tools necessary to gather analytics about product information performance and suggest changes that could improve product performance. A PXM is designed to provide actionable insights on products, integrating three major components of the consumer online shopping experience: content, ecosystem and insights.

For many brands looking to succeed in today’s modernized ecommerce space, ensuring success might equate to upgrading their PIMs into PXMs. Salsify provides an integrated PXM platform that allows brands to deliver a superior product experience by allowing multiple users to consistently update and optimize product data in a timely fashion, providing brands like Coca Cola, Bosch, Rawlings solutions to their ecommerce platform issues.