Do you still use spreadsheets to work with information about your products?
How many spreadsheets do you have for Google Merchant, Facebook Ads, Amazon and other marketplaces? Maybe you even have a separate spreadsheet for each specific category?
Here you can find only a few of the important tasks that spreadsheets don’t do well:
- Working with many sources of information (if you have several suppliers, it will not be easy for you to bring everything into one spreadsheet)
- Difference between various versions of images and product descriptions (if you have several people working on the same spreadsheet, it will be difficult to put everything together)
- Ensuring separate editing, approval and publishing
- Version control and content rollback
So why are you using spreadsheets for work they weren’t meant to do?
E-commerce catalogue management software is commonly referred to as product information management, or PIM for short. PIM solves all the problems that spreadsheets don’t manage to handle as it is built specifically for managing product information on websites, ecommerce platforms, print catalogues, sale points, etc.
How PIM influences your income
PIM can increase your productivity when it comes to handling and cataloguing information on products. Therefore, some people tend to consider it only as a time or cost-saving tool. However, in our experience, very few customers use it to directly save on labour costs. They rather use time-saving and efficiency to expand their business.
Channel multiplexing became practical
It’s no secret that any business needs to expand opportunities to increase income, and selling goods through various channels is one of them. However, like with many other things, it is easier to talk about the transfer to channel multiplexing than to achieve it.
A successful multichannel strategy is more than just offering your products everywhere and to everyone. You have to customize the customer experience depending on where and how they shop. Many companies lack the necessary resources to develop at the speed they would like to while delivering excellent product data across multiple channels.
Multichannel support at a low cost
When product information becomes available, PIM can upload it to various channels automatically. Besides, it can automatically check the quality of the data and upload information only when it is fully usable for a specific channel.
Shorter product launch time
For many industries such as apparel, electronics, toys production and others, product launch time is critical for success. Increase your sales by reducing the time it takes to fill in all the product information, which will then be distributed through various channels.
In other words, quitting spreadsheets use and adopting PIM is not just a matter of everyday efficiency. It is more like an opportunity for transformation. Does that sound good? Let’s find out how it works.
Simplify your work
1. Import your data
Import data from any third-party system including ERP, spreadsheets and files from your supplier automatically. Start by evaluating your sources of product information. Does it come from ERP, database or spreadsheets by email? Automate this flow by integrating your PIM with ERP and other sources.
Don’t waste your team’s time manually exporting information from data sources. PIM may regularly collect updated information. These import automation efforts require some investment, but they pay off quickly.
2. Organize and categorize product information
- Organize and classify your products at your own discretion. Organize your workflow and use any logical product groupings. A well-designed graphic interface can eliminate hundreds of useless spreadsheets.
- You can set up automation rules to categorize your products in the right categories and forget about manual work.
- You can define the structure of the product so that data duplication is avoided, for example, all T-shirts of the same SKU, but of different sizes and colours, will contain identical information about the product, except for the fields that need to be changed.
- Just like in product grouping, some fields require to be updated for different channels, but others may remain the same for some or all channels.
3. Add, edit and translate
Enrich your product information, add multimedia content in any format, and translate only the descriptions you need.
As a catalogue, product, or ecommerce manager, you can focus on what is really important. And now, thanks to PIM, you can:
- Keep product information up to date;
- Work with colours, sizes and specifications;
- Enrich products with photos, videos and other files;
- Customize information about your products for each channel.
4. Use built-in quality tests
Make automatic tests available to ensure that all required fields are always filled in, formatted correctly and contain the proper data. This prevents incomplete or inaccurate product records from being published.
5. Publish your data.
Export any product data to any sales channel: online store, marketplace, mobile app, etc. The point of product information management is to give your potential customers the most complete, accurate and compelling product information possible – wherever they search. This means that product information may be different for various channels, platforms or region to region.
Focus on your real work.
The best part of automation is that it allows you and your team to focus on your real work, that is, on effective merchandising to increase sales.
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