6 Must-Have PIM Features for E-Commerce Catalogs

“Time is money” has become a cliché statement, but one that has proven true through the years. Today’s customers demand the convenience and instant gratification that e-commerce provides, and it is up to the retailer to do everything in their power to ensure that shopping with them is a quick and pleasant experience. Having a great product is not enough if your website requires a customer to jump through hoops to get their hands on it.

One of the most crucial tools for growth and relevance in the e-commerce landscape is product information management (PIM). Companies seeking to stay at the forefront of the industry all leverage PIM software to centralize, organize, and analyze information about their products. There are several key features that are critical for a robust, flexible, and intuitive solution.

Data Management

Importing data into your PIM needs to be easy and efficient, which is why it is vital to allow import data mapping and validation before import processing. You should never have to manually re-enter data that has been saved in other formats.

Product Relationships

A great PIM solution will enable you to present your products to customers in an intuitive manner by allowing you to set up relationships between products, which can be as simple or as complex as your catalog requires. The ability to build robust mappings will boost your bottom line by allowing customers to navigate efficiently from the home page to the product they want, enabling them to place their order and move on with their day.

Advanced Filtering

Whether you are migrating a vast catalog in or onboarding a new seasonal line, managing everything is extremely difficult without a robust filtering functionality. Your PIM tool must have advanced filtering options that enable you to easily find exactly what you’re looking for, even as your business scales up and you offer more products.

Unlimited Attributes and Templates

The whole point of a PIM tool is to organize and manage the vast multitude of attributes you need for each product you sell, so it would make no sense to limit that ability in any way. But allowing you to store all that information is not enough.

The complexity of multiple brands, product types, categories, and an endless array of specialized attributes unique to a client and their product should be easily managed by well-thought-out product templates. Product type templates streamline the process of adding new products to the catalog, allowing anyone to import a new seasonal line with minimal training.

You should also be able to easily view, manage, and quality check products by groups, types, or any other criteria that make the most sense for the task at hand. By filtering your view using any attribute most relevant to the task at hand, you will save time and easily catch any errors or omissions.

Bulk Editing

A huge time suck of catalog management is making individual edits to products by accessing them one at a time, and a great PIM tool allows you to make edits directly from the product list overview. The ability to filter a view and see only the products you are working on, to identify any missing data, and then edit all the items directly from that view without having to go into each item separately is crucial.

Asset Management

There are certainly tools available that can help you manage digital assets, but wouldn’t it be great if your PIM tool had that built in? Asset management is one of the reasons brands start looking for a PIM solution in the first place. You can significantly decrease the number of returned products and create an infinitely better customer experience simply by ensuring that each product on your site displays as much information as possible, so that buyers know exactly what they will be receiving. This means that some product items might end up with dozens, if not hundreds, of attributes. A robust PIM solution enables you to store and manage images, videos, graphics, and files in one place, while also allowing you to easily link them directly to products. All this while keeping every asset safe and up to date at all times. If the tool also has built-in image optimization, then that’s even better!

Steersman: The ideal solution to all these problems and more

To stay relevant in today’s e-commerce market, you must leverage every trick in the book to increase efficiency and enable automation for as many repetitive tasks as possible, while storing all data in a centralized manner so that all departments in your operation are working with the most up-to-date information. There are many products available that provide one or two solutions for your e-commerce platform, but very few that do it all, and even fewer that do it well. Steersman e-commerce platform and ERP suite provides an unparalleled set of tools that equip a business with everything they need to efficiently run a business, all at a very competitive cost.

Ideal for both B2B and B2C retailers, our PIM tool enables companies to manage extensive catalogs of products with ease by providing simple and intuitive tools for managing robust product information. Want to learn more about what Steersman has to offer? Read more from our blog, or contact us today and see how Steersman can launch your brand and improve your business.