For merchants wishing to produce and easily manage product content destined for multiple digital channels, turning to a PIM solution is necessary: it becomes a single source for the meta descriptions product data, images and all their technical specifications.
Thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic, online commerce experienced a real surge in demand. Brands must now organize themselves to offer an appropriate range, structuring and optimizing large volumes of product data and providing accurate and consistent information across an ever-growing variety of online shopping platforms.
Implementing a PIM solution helps a brand ensure that quality data is organized both for internal use and for multichannel distribution, by consolidating relevant product information into a single solution. With the rapid growth of online sales and the expanding emergence of new channels, using a PIM solution can help connect these different channels to preserve product data quality.
What is PIM software?
Marketing specialists, e-commerce managers and data analytics teams can all use a PIM application ("Product Information Management") to collect, enrich, streamline and improve product data, and have it propagate automatically across multiple channels.
This contributes to improving the customer experience, while helping businesses gain an advantage over their competitors, reaching a market faster while reducing overhead and resource waste.
If a PIM application enables smooth management of product information, enriched and completed with media, it becomes an even more powerful tool when combined with a DAM (for " Digital asset management ", translated as "digital asset management") that allows you to upload, store, organize, manage, share and track all your digital assets in one place, from a single source.
As part of a omnichannel strategic development, the "PIM-DAM" duo then becomes the essential central hub for effective information management.
Some of the tools presented in this article combine both types of software. Let’s now review some of these tools, among the most popular.
1. Akeneo
Open-source and free, Akeneo is a PIM software aimed at product managers who want to bring consistency to data entry in a collaborative way.
Different users can indeed share tasks related to product data while easily tracking how many items still need to be completed, which are in progress and which are finished.
Each product page is scored with enrichment and data consistency scores. Indeed, Akeneo it integrates measures of data quantity and quality, with the goal of providing support for collaboration and teamwork.
Its graphical interface is elegant and intuitive; it’s easy to send product information to the DAM or to task management. The progress tracking dashboard shows at a glance which products are being worked on.
If Akeneo does many things well, it’s unfortunate that its capabilities are limited when it comes to substituting one product for another and establishing relationships between products to enable upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Akeneo integrates into your tool stack via REST APIs. Application integrations include popular e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Google Shopping, PrestaShop, OroCommerce, Shopify Plus, etc.
2. Pimcore
Pimcore is also an open-source product information management solution. The tool allows you to model data, manage it, control its quality, and organize workflow management. It includes a DAM and offers omnichannel publishing thanks to easy integrations with third-party applications.
The community edition of Pimcore is offered for life: this free plan provides an open-source software license (GPLv3) with publicly accessible source code. Pimcore’s free plan includes PIM/MDM/DAM and allows an unlimited number of entities, data, and users.
Because Pimcore's DAM extension is not yet compatible with mobile devices, you unfortunately won't find reliable support for iOS or Android smartphones. Teams working collaboratively will also regret that there is no way to see who is making changes to product data in real time, which can lead to accidental overwriting during simultaneous edits.
3. ContentServ
Contentserv is a cloud-based product information management solution designed to help small and medium-sized distributors, manufacturers, and retailers import, validate, and manage their product content across multiple sales channels.
Collaborative, the tool allows team members to set up integrated workflows and restrict access to only relevant content and tasks through role-based permissions.
The main features of Contentserv include content syndication, product sheet management, and version control, all supported by collaboration tools.
The solution also enables quality control of data quality and their modeling.
The ability to automatically import product data in various formats from multiple sources (such as raw material suppliers, third-party content aggregators, existing ERP systems, etc.) is one of Contentserv's strengths, and it also allows users to manage product associations based on supplier, location, or brand information.
Contentserv allows entering product localization information, enabling companies to translate this information into desired languages or to identify content that needs initial translation or correction. The platform helps teams visualize workflows through options like a "calendar" view and Gantt charts.
Finally, Contentserv helps on-site staff create previews of product sheets by presenting them from the customer's perspective before publication on printed or digital channels.
4. Pimalion
Pimalion is above all a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Based in the cloud, the tool is designed to help companies manage their content and streamline marketing operations. Users can use a planning tool to create marketing campaigns according to the business action plan, identify stakeholders across processes, and analyze performance using dashboards.
Companies can use the online visualization module of Pimalion in order to validate the production of printed publications. It allows managers to perform extract, transform, and load operations on downloaded data. An indexing feature facilitates the organization of digital assets, and users can store product information in a centralized repository and sort content according to different communication channels: web, print, in-store, mobile, social media.
A user role system allows the creation of different levels of data access authorization to reduce the risk of unauthorized use.
5. Syndigo
Designed to help companies in the healthcare, hospitality, and automotive sectors in particular capture and store product data in a centralized repository, Syndigo is a web content management solution that enables suppliers and manufacturers to display product information across multiple sales channels and interact with all stakeholders.
This platform allows employees to request (and receive) product information from manufacturers and to download high-resolution photos and videos in multiple file formats. Among the many features of Syndigo, catalog management, a content library, multichannel marketing, access control, asset categorization, and more.
Syndigo enables professionals to search for information using brand names, product numbers, or manufacturer part numbers.
6. Feedonomics
Feedonomics presents itself as a comprehensive product feed management system: the tool collects, organizes, and optimizes data related to your products, providing information on the various online marketplaces, such as Amazon and Google Shopping. Feedonomics can also help you automate order fulfillment across all channels.
Unlike some PIM solutions that are more enterprise-oriented, Feedonomics is intuitive to use with red or green text clearly marked to indicate which data must be entered or transformed. Feedonomics has formed partnerships with Google, Amazon, Facebook and Walmart and can leverage these privileged relationships to perform remarketing.
Feedonomics offers a ton of data fields and columns, which is great when you need them… Otherwise, it quickly becomes cluttered, and the ability to remove unnecessary fields would help users stay organized and better control their data. The admin interface is therefore a bit disorienting and takes time to learn as you explore the software.
Feedonomics easily integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Google Shopping, Facebook Shops, Amazon, eBay… and can even help you connect eCommerce platforms to each other, like Shopify to Amazon, for example.
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