What is product information management?

Companies need a centralized location for its stakeholders to view and access product information, rather than rely on time consuming, spreadsheet-based, manual processes. A central repository to store product information like marketing copy, feature descriptions, and logistics information provides the source of data you need to sell across the digital ecosystem.

Traditional product information management systems often focus on defining a schema up front and then managing data against that schema. Salsify helps you consolidate, manage, improve and publish great product information and digital assets to your retail, marketplace, and e-commerce channels. This flexible and next-gen capability helps your team identify bottlenecks in getting product information to the right sales channel – no matter what the format and structure that is needed.

Common questions for choosing a PIM system

• What types of product information can it store? To become your organization’s “trusted source” of product content, you need to be able store all of the information for your products, in any language, and for any internal and external use.  Whether that content is specific to a single sales channel or used universally, it should all be part of your primary product record.
• How do you get information into the system? A viable PIM must be extremely flexible in getting information into the system to create a centralized source of product content for your organization. Your product information system should be able to integrate / automate the import of data from sources such as ERP Systems, DAM Systems, Box folders, spreadsheets, et al. and accept flat files (Excel/CSV) via an FTP location for an automated nightly feed, as well as direct integrations using an open API. In addition, you should be able to conduct bulk uploading of digital assets via drag and drop from a hard drive, or by providing image URLs to the system.
• How do you get information out of the system? Much like the flexibility needed on the way in, the same concept can be said about outputs of the system. A viable PIM can take the content that has been imported into the platform and apply transformations to that data as it leaves, which means it can support any type of export format such Excel/CSV Files and specific JSON or XML formats.
• How does the system publish information to retailers, distributors, 3rd parties, etc.? Any product information management system that can support your ecommerce goals needs to flexible enough to export content in any format and transform data to meet virtually any retailer/distributor/3rd-party’s requirements.  Because each end-point has unique requirements for both content and format, a single export option is not enough.

Product information management built for ecommerce.

You need a PIM system designed to embrace the chaos and enable speed and collaboration along every step in getting that product information to market. Salsify lets you import any data type, enrich it in place, and then validate it against the requirements of any external use case that exists today or appears tomorrow.

Salsify can help ensure data accuracy and consistency

Define and enforce your company’s data quality requirements while providing all of your internal teams with a single location for accessing approved product content. Salsify’s Product Information Management capabilities improve the accuracy of your product content by making it possible to aggregate, manage and collaborate on your data in a single, trusted location that is easily accessible and useable by all of your internal stakeholders.

Salsify can integrate data from multiple sources.

Schedule imports via FTP or API from existing systems like ERPs and other enterprise systems to ensure all current product information lives within Salsify. Enables anyone in your organization to access, view, and manage your products from a single source anytime, anywhere – without sacrificing the security IT cares about.

Salsify helps get your products into market faster.

A central repository to store product information like marketing copy, feature descriptions, and logistics information provides the source of data you need to sell across the digital ecosystem. Salsify helps sales and marketing teams identify bottlenecks in getting product information to the right sales channel by automatically assigning tasks to team members.