Every retail ecommerce business — whether just starting out or well-established — reaches the point when adopting a more mature product information management (PIM) strategy becomes crucial to reach the next level of growth. For younger retailers that first launched with just a few product SKUs, scaling their PIM approach is necessary as partner networks and product lines expand.
More mature retailers, rooted in legacy PIM methods, often need to modernize their now-outdated practices. Incorporating a centralized digital asset management (DAM) strategy fits hand-in-hand with this modernization to double down on better ecommerce efficiency and marketing organization at scale.
Replacing inefficient PIM and DAM practices with a more streamlined strategy offers substantial benefits. Ecommerce retailers are continuously collecting and sharing product information, including specific SKU data, pricing details, documentation, marketing images, videos, customer reviews, catalog data, translation and localization details and more. This information needs to be accurately transmitted to local, regional and global partners like marketing partners, manufacturers, suppliers, sellers, direct consumers and internal stakeholders.
When ecommerce retailers rely on antiquated and poorly controlled PIM methods — such as manually updating spreadsheets customized for each partner’s formatting requirements — inefficiencies and errors are unavoidable. These inefficiencies consume employee time with tedious work, limiting ecommerce growth potential. Retailers in this situation are also likely to lack uniform DAM practices.
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Without a central repository for digital assets, employees often store those assets on their own hard drives or department networks. Coworkers naturally have a heck of a time trying to find the right files quickly and efficiently, and are error-prone when sending partners the correct assets. Errors further impede communication and can erode partner trust when mistakes escalate.
In contrast, ecommerce businesses that adopt modern integrated PIM and DAM strategies can maintain partner trust while having the agility and capacity to expand their brands, reaching new partners, customers and markets.
Choose a PIM and DAM Strategy that Maximizes Efficiency
Ecommerce retailers that don’t establish an integrated single source of truth for their product information and digital assets default to storing data in multiple repositories with multiple access points and limited information in each different data silo.
There’s much to be said about the benefits of a single source of truth. Consider the perspective of an employee responsible for manually entering data into spreadsheets: performing that tedious yet precise work while knowing it prevents them from focusing on more impactful efforts that could drive the business forward is frustrating enough.
However, that frustration is equally felt by the employee or partner on the marketing side who tries to access product information and assets only to discover they have an outdated version of a marketing image, or that their search for a particular SKU yielded no results due to a data entry error they have no clear way to rectify.
A single source of truth eliminates all of these frustrations. Employees only need to enter product data once and it can then be distributed to all stakeholders in whatever formats are required. Customizations for each partner, sales and marketing channel, language and locale are easily accessible or can be automatically generated through system processes. Searches will never come up empty again because there is one comprehensive source containing all requisite information.
Moreover, employees can easily save hours per week that were previously spent entering data into multiple places and searching across different product information silos. In the same way, a centralized single source of truth can ensure that digital assets are up-to-date, self-service accessible, and that only the correct assets are available to the teams and partners that need them, eliminating errors.
Enable Collaboration and Accelerate Time-to-Market
Organizing product information and digital assets — and equipping internal teams and external partners with direct and secure access — enables collaboration that just isn’t possible without a single source of truth. Product, sales and marketing teams that previously might not even have been looking at the same spreadsheet or asset version can suddenly coordinate their efforts and fly in formation when it comes to customer communications and getting products and brand campaigns out the door. Ecommerce retailers with effective strategies can send product information and digital materials out across multiple sales channels and reach customers at speeds that their disorganized spreadsheet-burdened competitors just can’t match.
Improve Accuracy and Transform the Customer Experience
Here’s a troubling statistic: inaccurate product information is responsible for an estimated 22% of product returns. Now here’s an even-more-troubling follow-up: 76% of consumers will stop doing business with a company after a single bad experience. That is to say, when customers make erroneous purchases due to your inaccurate product information, you not only ultimately lose those sales, you’re also handing those customers to your competitors.
Implementing a PIM strategy to get your ducks in a row and ensure the integrity of all customer-facing information keeps those customers from slipping through your fingers and sets the stage for earning their long-term loyalty.
Reap the PIM and DAM Benefits
Ecommerce retailers with traditional approaches to managing their product information and digital assets may not even recognize the cumulative impact of the daily frustrations and operational shortcomings they live with each day. Those hours of manual effort and mistakes that reach partners and customers can add up to drag a brand behind its rivals. For a business in this position, introducing the benefits of an effective integrated PIM and DAM strategy will transform its competitive pace and jumpstart new growth.
Jeff Olsen is the Director of Product at Image Relay. He joined Image Relay in 2021 and moved to his current role last year. Previously, he held sales and solutions engineering roles at the revenue intelligence platform InsightSquared and sales intelligence tool Chorus.ai (since acquired by ZoomInfo).
