14 Dec 3 Signs That Your Business Needs Product Information Management
Do you have an offline shop? Yes, I do.
Do you have an online shop? Yes, I just started. But, I need some time to key in my product information and set up my online shop.
How many of you experienced this when you started your online shop? Keying in product information is the 1st crucial step in setting up an online shop. It is also the most tedious process. When you have 5-10 different kinds of products. It is perfectly fine to key in manually.
Imagine you have an online shop, Lazada, Shopee, PrestoMall marketplace, how many times do you need to repeat this process of keying in?; And, what if your business expands, and now you have hundreds of product ranges, could you still do this manually? How much time do you need? How many people do you need to hire to key in? Most importantly, how competitive could you be in the market? Time is money!
Now, you could have a hassle free, time and cost efficient process to manage product information with Product Information Management (PIM). PIM is more than a software. It is a centralized hub, or you could describe it like a middleman. You can just feed all the product information,and it will centralize the product content across different channels. Product content change? Price Change? Quantity change? Just tell this middleman, and it will do its job to communicate via different channels. This creates a seamless process to manage your online & offline business.
Is PIM what your business needs right now? If you could relate to these 3 signs, it is time for you to consider investing in PIM.
3 Signs That Your Business Needs Product Information Management
- Difficulty in Consolidating Product Content
- Difficulty in Managing a Large Number of Product Catalogues
- Difficulty in Maintaining the Same Sets of Offerings In Sales and Promotions
1. Difficulty in Consolidating Product Content
Typically, retailers receive the product information/specifications from the suppliers. Sometimes, we have to keep chasing the suppliers to give us the information. Sometimes, different suppliers have different styles of writing, different ways of giving information – email, catalogue, website links etc. And, it is tedious for retailers to compile this information. Even if some content may not be detailed or attractive enough to put in the online shop, they will just put whatever information they get in their online shop. Because less content is better than no content.
To keep our readers hooked, our content always has to be well-structured, creative, and contain all the relevant details. However, due to time limitations to manage hundreds or thousands of SKUs, beautifying the content may seem a luxurious thing to do for retailers. Some may do that, but it is costly and time consuming.
2. Difficulty in Managing a Large Number of Product Catalogues
If a business has 1,000 products to sell on its own online shop and 2 marketplaces such as Lazada, Shopee, how will the process be? The person in charge will need to log into each platform or marketplace and upload 1,000 products across each channel.
The reason being, different platforms have different data and format requirements. For example, Lazada requires the images of the products with a transparent or white background, whereas Shopee does not have such requirements.
Businesses could allocate more manpower to do it manually. However, tedious tasks like this are prone to human errors.
3.Difficulty in Maintaining the Same Sets of Offerings In Sales and Promotions
Nowadays, customers will make price comparisons on both online and offline channels before making purchasing decisions. In order to stay competitive in the market, retailers would offer different kinds of promotions such as festive season promotion, single-day sales, or flash sales. This means there are changes in pricing. To reflect the right pricing, businesses will have to log in to multiple platforms to change the pricing of each product. This has added more work for the business to keep up with different types of promotions. Manual work = prone to errors. Inconsistencies in pricing across platforms could lead to loss of trust and confidence from customers.
In order to thrive in this digitalization era, PIM would be a great tool for businesses to invest in. Other than thinking about the cost of getting a PIM system, it is important to take into account how PIM would help your business to save resources, boost your productivity and to get ahead of your competitors.
Looking for a good PIM Solution? Senwave’s has the solutions ready to help you to better manage your product information across channels seamlessly.