PIM system: how to bring order to thousands of products and stop living in tables

I’ll be honest: when I first heard the acronym PIM, I mentally rolled my eyes. Another fashionable system with a beautiful name, I thought, which promises mountains of gold, but in reality it’s just another program for which you have to pay. We have Excel, we have an accounting system, everything somehow works. Why fence a garden?

It works — this, of course, was said loudly. The catalog with eight thousand items lived simultaneously in five places: some of the descriptions were stored in tables, some in the accounting program, the photographs were on a shared disk in folders with names like “new_final_2,” and managers filled out the characteristics for marketplaces manually each time anew. When a supplier changed product parameters, updating them everywhere was a separate quest. And at some point, tired of this chaos, I seriously began to study how the implementation of the pim system works and what it is all about. Spoiler: the skeptic in me did not survive.

So what is PIM in simple words

PIM stands for Product Information Management, that is, product information management. If you remove the buzzwords, this is a single database where everything you know about your product range lives: names, descriptions, characteristics, photographs, videos, instructions, certificates, translations into other languages. One product — one card — one source of truth.

The main idea is that the data is entered once, and then the system itself distributes it where needed: to the website, to the mobile application, to marketplaces, to the printed catalog, to partners. We changed the description in one place — it was updated everywhere. It sounds obvious, but when you live in spreadsheets for years, this simple thought feels almost like a revelation.

What pains does it cover

While I was understanding the topic, I constantly caught myself thinking: this is literally about us. Here are typical situations that PIM solves at once:

• Different versions of the same product in different channels: there is one description on the website, another on the marketplace, a third in the catalog, and all three are outdated.

• Long launch of new products: while managers manually fill out cards for all sites, competitors are already selling with might and main.

• Lost content: photos were taken, money was paid, but no one can find the source code six months later.

• Errors in characteristics, for which refunds, negative reviews and fines from marketplaces arrive.

• Dependence on a specific employee, who alone knows where everything is. The man quit, and that’s it, we arrived.

How it looks in practice

class=»notranslate»>__GTAG7__ Internally, the system is arranged quite logically. There is a product card with all the attributes, there are roles and rights: the content manager writes texts, the photographer uploads images, the category manager checks and approves. No one bothers anyone or overwrites someone else’s work, and the history of changes is preserved.

Working with sales channels is a special pleasure. Each marketplace has its own requirements for cards: somewhere you need thirty characteristics, somewhere the photo is strictly on a white background, somewhere your category names. PIM stores reference data and automatically converts it to the format of each site. What used to take days happens in minutes.

What the business gets in the end:

• New products reach all platforms many times faster, sometimes literally in hours instead of weeks.

• The completeness and quality of cards are growing, and with them the conversion and positions in the search of the marketplaces themselves.

• The team stops copying data from table to table and does the work that actually brings in money.

• Scaling is no longer scary: adding a new sales channel or a thousand new positions is no longer a disaster.

Who needs it, and who needs it too early

I'll be honest: PIM is not a magic pill for everyone. If you have fifty products and one website, you will live just fine without it. The system is revealed where there is volume and complexity: hundreds and thousands of positions, several sales channels, regular assortment updates, a team of several people working with content.

Sure signs that it’s time to think:

• The assortment has exceeded several hundred positions and continues to grow.

• You sell on at least two or three sites and plan to connect new ones.

• Filling out cards takes longer than anything else.

• Errors in product data have become a regular expense.

My skepticism, with which it all began, dissolved approximately in the second week of studying the issue. PIM is not about a fashionable abbreviation, but about the elementary order in the data on which all trading is based. And the sooner this order is established, the cheaper it costs. Tested on my own nerves.

Xrust PIM system: how to bring order to thousands of products and stop living in tables