Why does your business need product information management?

Headlines to the tune of “personal shopping experience is the future of retail” are everywhere. Less often, we see posts on how brands and retailers can manage their product information to revolutionize the customer journey in the new era.

Forward-thinking brands and retailers that want to stay ahead of the curve and competition, understand that finding an effective approach to manage product information and add metadata to their catalogue is critical…it allows you to be confident that your product data is complete, consistent, and up-to-date at every stage of the process.

When the product information on an online store appears non-uniform or incomplete, it is often because it can be difficult if you have to manually manage and tag all of the products as you try to present them uniformly. Using technology to auto tag and manage the product information in the form of a PIM system enables you to manage data associated with your product lines and provide your customers with shopping experiences that are enjoyable and perfectly pertinent at all times.

Intelligent systems that enrich and manage your product information offer significant benefits that can promote higher profitability in today’s competitive consumer and B2B markets.

What is a PIM?

Product information management, more commonly known as PIM, is the process of collecting and managing all the needed information — from descriptions to images and more — about a given product, in one central place. Consolidating your product data more effectively allows you to save time at every step across the marketing process.

Intelligent system for product meta data management, creates efficiency when updating existing product information, as well as when adding new products to your online platforms and sales channels. And it better ensures that your customers have access to the right information about your products when they are ready to purchase, regardless of what sales channel they are on.

The PIM e-commerce connection: why your business needs rich product information management.

Rich product meta data can help your company reach more customers with the information they need to make a purchasing decision. product information solutions can provide the following five major benefits for your business.

Establish a single source for product information.

Product information comes from numerous departments and tools. Instead of individuals across teams manually tagging or pulling data from multiple systems and creating unwieldy spreadsheets, a PIM system brings the raw product specifications, marketing copy, and creative assets together. Data can be automatically ingested from sources like enterprise resource planning (ERP) or added into the PIM directly. Advanced image recognition technology, enabling you to scan all the product images in your catalogue, identify the items and assign detailed meta-tags based on their minute visual attributes.

The primary records of your products in the PIM system are then exported to quickly populate your e-commerce website, marketplaces, and social media shops. And any corrections, updates, or adjustments made to these records are applied across the board for all product lines on all sales channels.

Personalize the shopper offering.

Product metadata — the more detailed your product metadata, the more information you have about the products your customers interact with on-site.

A solution using this technology can provide recommendations that are more accurate than traditional personalization engines by It’s a revolutionary way of flipping the script to get the details on the items themselves rather than relying on third party data as “look alike audience”, deepening the data without compromising privacy.

Go to the market faster.

Whether you’re launching a new product or sales channel, your time to market determines when you start generating revenue. PIM solutions make it possible to manage product data efficiently. Instead of marketing and e-commerce teams waiting on requests for product information from the ERP, they can proactively find it in the PIM system. It also reduces the long email threads and confusion around where to find the most up-to-date information. Plus, integrations minimize the busywork by plugging information and assets into other marketing technology (martech) systems.

Automating workflows reduces the need for manual data entry, allowing teams to launch and maintain new products and sales channels faster.

Improve quality and consistency of product data.

Incorrect or incomplete product data costs your company sales and increases returns, drastically reducing overall profits. Because PIM solutions allow you to ingest, add, and review data in one system, you’ll improve the quality and consistency of your product data. Any changes made in the PIM system can be published across your e-commerce platforms. Your accurate, up-to-date information will help build your reputation as a reliable brand.

Create more effective marketing strategies.

According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing report, 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. With today’s customers using multiple channels, it’s never been more important to provide a unified experience across customer touchpoints. Establishing one source for your product data will allow you to enhance the user experience for your customers by ensuring they receive accurate, current information at every step of the purchasing process.

Get started with PIM today

At AskLily we created an intelligence system that pull the basic information from your product catalogue and enrich it with more data, we use image recognition and NLP to add rich attributes to your catalogue, we learn the semantics and expectations of the shoppers that really matters: the ones impersonating your brand.

We bring your product specifications, marketing copy, and digital assets into one flexible, scalable system that provides your marketing team and product team with actionable insights that will improve customer engagement and retention.