Optimizing Product Data for E-Commerce Growth

As e-commerce ecosystems grow more complex, the need for efficient product information management becomes increasingly critical. Lokion’s clients typically add a Product Information Management (PIM) system into their ecosystems when their growth introduces challenges in managing and distributing product data across multiple channels.

Your organization may be ready for a PIM when you face: 

• A growing number of SKUs
• Multiple sales channels
• Increasing complexity in product data requirements
• Expanding into new markets
• Dealing with frequent product updates
• Experiencing inconsistent product information across different touchpoints

A PIM streamlines your product data management workflow, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and quick time-to-market.

Common challenges

Implementing a PIM offers substantial benefits, but organizations often encounter several challenges that can hinder the process:

• Data quality issues: Organizations often discover that their product data is incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated when migrating to a PIM. This can cause significant delays, requiring extensive data cleansing and enrichment efforts. Addressing data quality early accelerates the implementation and ensures that your PIM operates with accurate and reliable information, leading to better decision-making and improved customer experiences.
• Complex data models: It isn’t easy to define a data model that accurately reflects your organization’s product hierarchy and meets the requirements of all your channels.  Marketing, sales, IT, and other stakeholders must collaborate closely to ensure that the PIM will support all of your use cases. Investing time in a well-structured data model allows you to create a scalable framework that adapts to future growth and changes.
• Integration difficulties with existing systems such as ERP, CRM, and e-commerce platforms can be technically challenging. Successful integration enhances data accuracy across platforms and improves operational efficiency by reducing manual data entry and synchronization errors.
• User adoption: Encouraging your team members to adopt the new PIM can be challenging. It’s essential to provide adequate training and demonstrate the value of the PIM to ensure that all users are comfortable and proficient with the new system. Fostering user adoption early leads to smoother transitions and better utilization of the PIM.
• Cost and resource allocation: PIM implementation can be resource-intensive, requiring significant time and financial investment. Be sure to prepare your organization for the initial costs and ensure you have the right expertise and resources in place for a successful rollout. Allocating resources wisely and planning for potential challenges keeps the project on track and within budget.

Defining your data model

Defining a data model for your PIM requires careful planning and collaboration. Your team should start by identifying all the attributes needed to describe your products across all of your channels. This includes both core attributes—like SKU, name, and price—and enriched attributes—like descriptions, images, and videos.

It’s also important to map out how different product categories are structured and ensure that the data model can accommodate variations in product attributes. Additionally, your team should consider future needs, such as expanding product lines or entering new markets, to ensure that the data model is scalable.

To minimize risks, be sure to test your data model with a subset of products to help identify potential issues and refine the structure prior to a full rollout. The goal is to create a flexible and comprehensive data model that supports efficient product data management across the entire organization, ultimately saving time and reducing errors in the long term.

Preparing your data

Before migrating data to your new PIM, it’s crucial to undergo a thorough data preparation process:

1. Data audit: Start by conducting a comprehensive audit of your existing product data to identify gaps, inconsistencies, and outdated information. This tells you how much data cleansing is required.
2. Data cleansing: Next, clean and standardize your data to ensure consistency. This might involve normalizing naming conventions, filling in missing attributes, and removing duplicate entries.
3. Data mapping: After cleansing, map your existing data to the new data model that you defined for your PIM. This step ensures that all product information is categorized correctly and prepares the data for import into the new system.
4. Data enrichment: Enhance your product data by adding missing information, high-quality images, detailed descriptions, and additional attributes that improve each product’s marketability.
5. Testing and validation: Finally, before the final migration, test the data within the PIM to ensure that it’s correctly structured and behaves as expected. Validate the data across different scenarios to catch any potential issues early.

Choose the right PIM to make the process easier

One leading PIM solution is Salsify, which integrates product information management, digital asset management, and syndication capabilities into a single, easy-to-use solution.

Salsify’s flexible data model allows your organization to define product information in a way that aligns with your business needs and supports multiple sales channels. It also provides tools for data governance, ensuring that product data is accurate and consistent across all platforms.

Salsify’s collaborative features make it easier for teams across different departments to work together on product data management. With real-time updates and streamlined workflows, Salsify helps reduce the time and effort required to manage product information, allowing organizations to bring products to market faster and more efficiently.

Summary

Taking time to prepare your data and choosing the right platform, like Salsify, can make all the difference in a successful PIM implementation that builds your competitive edge. Begin your journey by auditing your current data practices and exploring how a PIM can transform your business operations.

Ready to move forward on PIM selection and implementation? Connect with Lokion to get started.