If you’re managing a large inventory, selling across multiple channels, navigating relationships with vendors or channel partners or selling bigger ticket items that need greater purchase consideration and confidence, then a PIM solution’s additional control and efficiency can benefit you.

PIM solutions streamline product management and improve team collaboration. They also help to deliver a better customer experience through more informative product pages and increased purchase confidence. As a result, PIM solutions also have a positive impact by reducing return rates and support team requests.

Only high SKU count businesses need apply. If you run limited lines, or launch new products infrequently, then you’re not a great candidate for a PIM solution. 

Consider investing in a PIM solution when you outgrow spreadsheet-based management of your product listings, and start to see products under-performing as a result of inaccurate or under-populated product page listings. If you’re still struggling with Excel, we’d definitely recommend exploring other options.

Also, if you’re expanding into new channels or starting to sell via channel partners, a PIM solution will help you achieve and maintain better consistency and brand control.

The implementation of a PIM solution will be the responsibility of your Ecommerce Product Manager. One of the key roles of a PIM platform is to enable better product team collaboration, so careful management of individual user access is important to maintain consistency. Although many solutions will leverage AI to deliver automated next-best-step suggestions for each user, general oversight and control of the bigger picture will be needed for optimized performance.

Important features include a strong capacity for syndication (the ability to port product data and assets directly from brand catalogs and similar), some form of data-driven quality scoring (so that listing improvements can be made efficiently), and strong taxonomy management (through auto-categorizing, with metadata or tagging enabled).

Consider too how your business intends to leverage the platform. Pricing models vary across solutions, so the best fit will depend on how your team uses the platform, and the nature of your inventory.

If you have inventory that requires a high number of data points, bear in mind that some platforms calculate costs based on data storage rather than SKU count (i.e. if you have 15 data points for 1 SKU, pricing will reflect those 15 data points).