Product Information Management (PIM) solutions can be useful to the entire digital infrastructure. But what are PIMs? PIMs gives businesses a central location to gather, manage and create product information and product catalog. It provides businesses also with the flexibility to distribute to sales and eCommerce channels. This can have a big impact on the success of an online store. One of such impacts has been on cart abandonment.
Cart Abandonment
A few years ago, cart abandonment in eCommerce usually exceeded 70%. Product information issues are considered to have played a real role in this decline. For customer conversion it has been vital for online stores. Product information often includes product specifications such as material, usage, dimensions and logistics, and shipping information like packing date, expiry date amongst others. PIM solutions usually come with robust content creating capabilities. It enables product teams to input the needed details for a buyer to move from potential customer to paying customer.
Basically, accurate information helps in reducing product returns. Many companies still find this a big problem with up to 40% returns for the worst performing eCommerce businesses. PIM empowers AI enabled product recommendations which have been one of the biggest innovations in eCommerce in recent years. However, this is a path more online businesses must be attentive to. Logic will tell if there is a higher chance of retaining an existing customer than converting a new potential customer.
Opportunities
PIM provides a robust structure that outlines products usage, category and grouping similar items. Moreover, this helps to ease up selling and cross selling opportunities for the online store. Today eCommerce is the most popular channel for consumers to buy goods. Online shopping is convenient and informs buying decisions. The pandemic has made it more necessary. Millennials are still the main shoppers online and leveraging a PIM has proven successful for gaining and retaining their business. The frontend and backend of a company’s digital infrastructure must be designed to convert a deciding customer to a paying customer.
In conclusion, a customer with the correct information is quite critical to the eCommerce site in question. Product Information Management (PIM) is key to arming customers with vital information important to online businesses. They help manage your product enrich data and underpins all product information needs across the business value chain as well as the consumer journey. Broadly speaking eCommerce is malleable and is always changing as we have seen over the past year. Regardless, PIMs will continue to play a part in content management of eCommerce sites going forward.