The technology field evolves rapidly, and also Product Information Management is moving forward at a fast pace. This offers plenty of new opportunities of taking advantage of technology and harnessing it to grow and support business operations.
In this text, I’ll set forth some trends that can be seen in the world of Product Information Management and that will offer significant advantages that help accelerate business. While revisiting your PIM solution, the importance of a competent and experienced partner will also be accentuated, because the partner should have first-class know-how and understanding of technology and be familiar with the customer’s business, to genuinely bring about the advantages and make them support the process.
Data analysis and performance on different channels
This year, PIM technologies’ own features and their capabilities to analyse product information from different viewpoints have made a great leap forward.
There’s no need to introduce data to a separate analytics tool any more. This makes it easier and faster to improve the quality of your own product information and significantly improves the analysis of, for example, e-commerce products, since it shows which parts of the product information are in order and which ones need improving.
Thanks to these features, information about the products’ performance in e-commerce, search engines or a retailer’s shop will be instantly available. An unlimited number of metrics can be set to evaluate the product information and its quality, which facilitates the steering of product information and enriching process.
This provides the organisation’s different levels with exactly the type of data needed to facilitate work and decision-making. At the same time, the visibility of potential issues in the product information is improved, making it easier to deal with the issues promptly. There’s an excellent tool for this purpose: the Evaluate module, published by our partner inriver in the autumn of 2021. It offers a wide range of tools for comprehensively analysing and improving product information on different channels, allowing to maximise the business results.
Augmented reality and virtual world
The concepts of augmented reality and virtual world are not directly PIM technologies’ own features, but they very strongly relate to the world of product information and the kind of services that can be offered to customers thanks to them.
For example, generating a 3D image from 2D is already a reality. This feature offers customers the possibility of viewing the product from every angle and virtually rotating it unlimitedly. If the product information in the background is in order, an excellent customer experience can be built based on it.
Let’s imagine a scenario in which I’m buying an armchair for my living room. I take a picture of the living room with my smart device, and the app is capable of suggesting armchairs based on the measurements, colour scheme, the style of the decor and even my personal preferences. When the customer can see the product in his or her own context at the time of purchase, and when we can offer all the information about the product at once, making a purchase decision will be much easier than if the customer would have to rely only on their imagination and suppositions.
Experience has shown that this helps to significantly improve conversion and, on the other hand, to keep the return rate as low as possible. However, offering these services to customers demands a lot from product information: it has to be comprehensive to enable the offering of this kind of services and experiences to the customer.
Data syndication
Data syndication refers to seamlessly fitting your own product information into another system, marketplace or retailer. These features offer many different opportunities to sell your products through, for example, Amazon, Ebay or the Finnish marketplaces. This is done by fitting the product information to the platform’s data model and creating a product feed that is then sent to another system.
This can also be adapted, therefore having the chance to offer customer-specific product feeds to your retailers directly into their own systems. This significantly accelerates time-to-market, offering visibility to the products and putting them up for sale quickly and efficiently.
Data syndication also enables the production of product information for the procurement systems of B2B customers. This way, they can be offered up-to-date product information at all times, making the placing of orders as easy as possible. As these examples show, data syndication has many possible applications that offer considerable advantages for the business.
PIM technologies’ features evolve at a tremendous pace, and it’s definitely worthwhile to keep pace with them to take advantage of this evolution and make them genuinely support the business.
The importance of a competent partner will be accentuated while adopting these business advantages, because the know-how and understanding of technology are key to implementing the new features exactly in the desired way so that they support the organisation’s own processes
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Did something pique your interest? Want to know more? Drop me a line and I’ll get in touch.
Rumbin Jussi, Lead Consultant
jussi.rumbin@bilot.fi
+358 44 970 8965
