Why PIM for Ecommerce Is Essential

Product detail pages (PDP) can make or break an ecommerce store. 

If the available content helps shoppers understand how the product will improve their lives, they’ll add it to their cart and check out. If not, they’ll take their business elsewhere. 

Providing compelling, consistent, and clear product information will help ecommerce brands build trust with consumers and drive sales. 

And the best way to make that happen is to implement a product information management (PIM) system. 

In this article, let’s take a closer look at three reasons why PIM for ecommerce is essential. 

What Are Consumer Expectations?

According to Salsify’s 2021 Consumer Research report, 31% of consumers said “not enough information or details provided” is the main reason they didn’t buy a product online. 

Top factors that influenced whether or not to buy included:

• Customer reviews, which ranked highest among respondents (62%);
•  Followed by product images (40%); and
•  Ratings (38%). 

The 2020 research study of 18,980 consumers in 28 countries conducted by IBM Institute for Business Value and the National Retail Federation found that today’s shoppers focus more on product information when shopping online. Specifically, they do more than just check the list of ingredients on a label. 

Here's What Customers Care About

They want details about:

• Sourcing;
• How products are made or processed; and 
• How they’re delivered. 

Approximately 73% indicate that traceability of products is important to them. Of those who say this trait is essential, 71% would pay a premium for it.

Even more, today’s consumers expect product content to be accurate, complete, and consistent. And when they don’t find enough information they want, they rely on bracketing (buying multiple items with the intent to return some of them) to navigate fit issues.

Narvar research found that bracketing happens more frequently, especially for apparel and home goods shoppers. 

1. How to Use PIM for Ecommerce Brands

Adopting a PIM solution is the best way for retailers and ecommerce brands to fulfill all of those expectations from consumers. Typically, it can help with creating a single source of truth and producing enhanced content. 

Create a Single Source of Truth

Create a single source of truth for product data. You can centralize all the information into one single place, making it easy for your teams to access, update, and manage data. 

This will also ensure accuracy and consistency for product information when being distributed across channels and platforms. 

Produce Enhanced Content 

Produce enhanced product content like videos, 360-degree spins, and comparison charts to improve online content experiences. It’s great for showcasing what’s unique about your products and convincing shoppers to buy. 

Salsify allows you to map product attributes to templates and create enhanced content pages for multiple products at once. 

Califia Case Study

Many retailers have achieved great success after implementing a PIM system. Take Califia Farms as an example. The plant-based beverage brand struggled with driving sales from branded content, but after using a PIM to optimize the content, Califia Farms saw a 400% increase in their (direct-to-consumer) D2C sales. 

They can now also take advantage of their PIM to activate content to marketplaces and other channels more efficiently.

Source: Salsify Youtube

2. PIM Helps Ecommerce Brands Track Content Quality and Performance With Analytics

A PIM solution allows you to solve content quality issues and manage data across channels effectively. 

It applies multi-channel data modeling that enables you to manage a product’s core data alongside a retailer-specific version of the product, the website version of the product, and more. 

These versions of truth are all mapped to one another in a single platform governed by validation rules, auditability, versioning, workflow, and security.

What You Gain From Using a PIM

By implementing PIM, you can standardize your data into the same format and use validation rules to check it against internal schemas before publishing it to each channel. 

You can also govern all product data across your organization to ensure its accuracy, consistency, usefulness, and security.

Furthermore, a PIM solution can give you:

• Ecommerce analytic reports into your brand compliance;
• PDPs;
• Search engine optimization (SEO); and 
• Share of search. 

From that information, you can know what works and what doesn’t to optimize product experiences and respond fast to market changes continuously.

You can also learn quickly from one channel and apply those learnings to other channels to enhance your overall digital shelf performance.

3. PIM Helps Ecommerce Brands Automate Workflows and Improve Productivity

Another benefit of a PIM system is that it provides automation capabilities to speed up workflows and facilitate collaboration across your departments. 

Using spreadsheets and traditional data management practices can lead to errors, endless revisions, constant duplication, and overlap. 

That will impact your teams’ productivity, but at its worst, your product information can be missing, incorrect, and inconsistent, which erodes customer satisfaction, brand trust, and revenue. 

But with a PIM system in place, your teams no longer have to work with disparate data, different datasets, and spreadsheets because they’ll have a single source of truth for data to access whenever they want. 

They can also use smart data feeds to streamline managing and publishing product content to retailers and channels.

Hence, your teams can free up their time and resources to focus on product optimization and revenue-generating tasks. 

Implement PIM for Your Ecommerce Business Today

A PIM system can help you create high-quality product content that meets customer expectations and increases the shopping experience. When you give customers what they want, they’ll trust you, buy more, be loyal, and share their experience with their friends. 

Apart from that, PIM can make your teams happier as it gives them useful tools to work faster and more efficiently. And what’ll happen when your employees are satisfied? It means more pleased customers.

Download the complete Forrester report, "The Forrester Wave™: Product Information Management, Q2 2021," to learn more about the evolving PIM market and Salsify's ranking as a Leader.