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Shoppingfeed and PIMs: The Perfect E-Commerce Tech Pairing

Julie Stewart • August 9, 2019

 

For e-commerce tech stacks, two vital pieces of technology working together can grow your sales volumes by ensuring a great customer experience, regardless of where they’re shopping. One is for mastering and automating your product listings, and the other ensures that accurate data goes out automatically to every channel where you’re selling.

 

 

First –what is a PIM?

A PIM, or Product Information Management system, is a piece of software that can track all the information managed by a company immediately and in real time. Every product tag or attribute present in catalogs, inventories, image libraries, price lists, etc, is included in a PIM system.

PIMs are set up to efficiently distribute all this key information across the various channels managed by the company, keeping all the product information, branding and image catalogues unified and updated at all times. For e-commerce merchants with hundreds or thousands of products, a PIM is an essential part of the technology stack.

 

 

Advantages of having a PIM

A PIM system helps with generating catalogs and updating products for the marketplaces. It will also help generate product sheets and price lists. But it can do a lot more.

A PIM system can also handle product information in several languages. Oftentimes, those translations can be incomplete if you don’t have a digital solution. If your supply chain (or fulfillment centers) are in Asia, you will always be communicating accurately about the same products with automatic translations.

(After all, you don’t want one of your standard orders mistakenly tagged for a custom order category like what happened here.)

e-commerce tech fail

She only wanted Frog & Toad, but got the Troll version instead.

 

 

It’s all about truth and trust.

If your product information is always updated, perfectly and comprehensively identified, and free from inconsistencies, this assures a positive user experience for your customers, encouraging their repeat and referral business. PIMs serve as a master source of truth, and they generate trust from customers by accurately matching products to orders.

You have probably experienced this yourself when browsing some web or e-commerce site whose product or catalog information is a mess, disorderly, devoid of logic and with grammatical errors. Frequently this is because they are trying to publish from an Excel sheet, which can’t pull all the product information together into a single source.

In these cases, having a PIM system is one of the best decisions, because it will help improve the user experience, keep your catalog in good order, and overall improve your web or e-commerce site to a professional-looking level. It’s not enough to BE a legitimate online seller– you have to LOOK legit too.

 

 

What makes Shoppingfeed and PIM partnerships the perfect combination for e-commerce tech

A Pim system stores and internally manages the processes that rely on your product attribution data. However, a PIM typically does not syndicate data on the external side – e.g., for all the different channels and marketplaces. Of the handful of PIM solutions out there, If they do have an add-on syndication module, it is for a very limited set of marketplaces and retailers online, whereas there are thousands of channels to choose from worldwide.

Shoppingfeed can take a data feed from a PIM and use it as a master source of truth for syndicating products to thousands of channels. We inject inventory data from any source (ERP, SAP, Hosted CSV file, data feed) and provide the perfect tool for mapping complex sets of product attribute fields. And it’s all done automatically, customized to the individual product tag specifications for each channel.

Some of the big uses for this combination include multilingual product selling, ETL product data tools for data correction, or for building custom values automatically. When all these tasks are fully automated AND integrated into one seamless catalogue and channel stream, the possibilities for human error are reduced to almost nil.

Shoppingfeed currently partners with PIM providers Akeneo and Plytix to provide our mutual customers with the smoothest experience possible, so they can give their customers the same. We’ll guide you through the setup process and work with you to ensure all the APIs and integrations are properly configured.

Read about our ProductGraph Technology

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Julie Stewart

My mission at Shoppingfeed is explaining how to leverage e-commerce platforms and SaaS technology to e-merchants who just want to run their business and make more money.

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