Nowadays, going online with your retail business is the standard. If you want to draw in more customers, you must be available on numerous marketplaces so that you can serve them where they are. Maintaining hundreds of product portfolios across numerous sales channels can be a challenging task that causes data errors and poor customer experience. That’s why a PIM solution is a must for grocery retailers to stay updated in the industry with the right product information. A dedicated PIM tool can bring value to online grocery shopping in a myriad of ways. 

Follow the rules and regulations

When you are showcasing your products through a sales window, you need to follow certain laws and regulations. Missing these laws can create some serious legal complications. A Product Information Management tool will maintain your product data and enable you to follow the guidelines of the platform with ease. PIMworks aids in gathering product information that is channel-compliant from a variety of sources. A PIM solution helps the user to make smarter purchasing decisions by delivering product information gathered from accurate and trusted sources. Groceries are bound to very less shelf life which causes the customers to be conscious about the expiry date and the ingredients list. PIM provides all this information about the product to the customer and thereby enhances sales. 

For instance, if you are selling any beverage which includes dairy products, you need to mention the addition of milk in the product information section to alarm people who are lactose intolerant. This way customers will develop a sense of loyalty towards your brand which will contribute to your brand image. With the help of a PIM solution, you can include specific categories like dairy, vegan, and vegetarian and categorize your products accordingly. This process makes it easy for the customer to identify the products they need without wasting time. 

Monetize the market peaks 

Grocery demand surge during particular peak seasons. The success of digital and e-commerce depends on quick turnaround times. Online grocery retailers must be able to anticipate and respond to variations in demand brought on by events, seasons and festivals. For instance, time around the Christmas season will witness a high demand for groceries as people are busy treating their loved ones with the best food and hospitality. A PIM tool will help you to gear  up for this season with its efficient product data handling and its enrichment. 

Cloud-based PIM helps companies to readily take advantage of market possibilities without placing additional strain on your internal resources. The online grocery sales increased by 12.5% during December 2021. These are times when grocery retailers introduced promotions, new product launches and stock up their supply to adhere to the market demand. With a focused PIM tool, retailers can update their existing inventory and also can integrate new products and promotions across numerous selling platforms. The centralized approach can help online retailers make the change in PIM software and the change will be reflected across the sales channels in a fraction of seconds. 

Wear transparency like a crown

People are on the lookout for honesty everywhere. According to Fleishman-Hillard, 89% of customers use Google, Bing, or other search engines to research goods, services, or companies before making purchases. When they search for a product in multiple channels, they are expecting consistency in the data they see. A PIM tool can syndicate and enrich your data across multiple sales channels in a streamlined fashion. Sensitive information like ingredients, price and expiry data needs to be updated frequently to prevent any kind of miscommunication with the customer. 

A PIM tool can help you achieve transparency when dealing with your customer which will enhance your brand value. For example, let’s imagine a person is looking to buy Ferrero Rocher during an offer season. When she/he looks at your platform to buy that chocolate, they are expecting a discount on its price. If you forget to update the price during the offer season, that will disappoint the customer and create a poor impression about your company. Releasing time updates about a product, strategy or scheme frequently using a PIM tool can help you boost your sales as it is more transparent from the customer standpoint.

Accelerate your sales through visuals

The image and the visual assets you see in a product listing platform influence your purchase. From a study conducted by Search Engine Journal, 63% of people say their purchase decision is influenced by product image. With the aid of a PIM software, online grocery retailers can add important content and graphics to master data to attract its customers. On the internet, in stores, and on mobile devices, your product data must convey an appealing story. A product information management system will do this job better. 

For instance, if you are listing any kind of ready-to-eat food or beverage in your online grocery platform, the image and all the associated visual assets must be compelling enough to attract customers. A customized PIM tool can help grocery retailers to add value to their product data with these visual assets for better conversion. 

PIMworks is helping numerous retailers across the globe to digitize their in-store grocery shelves. Simplify your online grocery retail journey with our customized PIM solutions. We provide dedicated support to grocery retailers using our PIM solutions which are dedicated to the needs of grocery retailers. 

The post PIM: A catalyst for grocery retailer’s success journey appeared first on PIMworks Blog | Fresh Retail Insights.

From maximizing our work by working from home to finding new ways to keep ourselves refreshed, technology has gained so much over the year.

A few like the telehealth industry saw a massive opportunity in these challenging times. Telehealth has emerged as an effective and sustainable solution during the pandemic crisis. It helped bridge the gap between people, physicians, and health systems, enabling everyone to stay at home and communicate with physicians through virtual channels, helping to reduce the spread of the virus to mass populations and the medical staff on the frontlines.

COVID AND THE IMPACT ON ECOMMERCE

Other industries that have gained so much during the treacherous last year was the ecommerce industry. With safety being a primary concern throughout the year, everything and everyone went online, which became a blessing in disguise for the ecommerce industry. 

According to the Hindu Business Line, the ecommerce industry grew by almost 40% this year compared to the 23% growth during 2019.

Of the total sales for the last quarter of 2020, the ecommerce industry alone accounted for 15% of the total sales, which was quite remarkable considering the decrease in overall sales across other industries.

From bulk buying to online shopping, people changed what they’re buying, when, and how. 

As more cities went under lockdowns, customers avoided public places, and the importance of retailers being present online became even more important. 

According to a McKinsey report, 75% of all customers now prefer online shopping, with more than 49% of customers shopping online for the first time. 

In short, the pandemic has accelerated the shift towards a more digital world.

In countries like the United States, more brick and mortar retailers are taking a leap into the ecommerce world, with the share of ecommerce retail shooting up by 16% during the pandemic. 

Retailers who made the shift to ecommerce platforms stood out in the market, and we were glad to help those retailers win over their competitors.

THE EVOLUTION OF PIMWORKS

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking

2020 was a crazy year for us as well. With the world moving ever so closer to a digital market, we also worked on many new features in PIMworks. As the industry changed, we knew we had to adapt as well. At PIMworks, we pride ourselves as a customer-centric and agile company. Although we scrambled our brains and made those new features possible, we could bring in many more new product features thanks to the constant feedback from our customers.

The beginning of a year is not just an opportunity to say hello to all new things, but to say thank you to all the things achieved the previous year. Before we step into the new year, here’s how your favorite tool made the most of a tough year by adapting fast.

What happened in 2020: Major highlights

New integrations enabling greater reach for our customers

The one major thing that we worked on throughout the year was the integrations. We integrated with 5 new players like Houzz, Walmart, Amazon, etc., so that our customers could sell seamlessly on any platform. 

Incorporating customer feedback through upgrades

Not just the integrations, we brought in some upgrades to them too. For Amazon, we had introduced a no-touch process to create a new product on Amazon. This means everything is automated, and users can focus on other kinds of stuff to improve their business and earn more profits.

New features for a new kind of customer

COVID 19 changed the way we work and the way our customers’ shop. With everyone working remotely, collaboration was of utmost importance. An important feature that we developed last year was the team collaboration feature. Nobody likes to work alone, and we know that teamwork makes the dream work. Through PIMworks’ product pages, customers can collaborate with their teams with social media like comment threads. This has helped lots of users improve their overall business efficiency, and we are glad to be part of that progress.

Agile mapping for more precision

Other vital features like having multiple taxonomy mapping levels for a comfortable inheritance of attributes, the ability to set up multiple templates for exporting data, the option to auto-sync attribute level data to the product were aimed at improving the overall efficiency of our users and also ultimately to satisfy them.

That’s not all. We brought in many more features last year. Click here to know the entire list of new things that we did last year.

Our year in Numbers

The Road ahead

The secret of success is to focus all our energy and efforts not on fighting the old but on building the new.

With all things said and done, we have a new year ahead of us, and we have so much lined up for you. With the world shaping up to adopt more towards an ecommerce landscape, we are very well prepared to adapt to all the changes and present you with the best possible product. Some of the things that you can expect from us in the coming year are:

• A new and updated variant dashboard for the Walmart channel.
• Exporting data from PIMworks has become even better with granular controls and FTP data push.
• Enhanced ‘IF,’ ‘Else if,’ and ‘Nested If’ conditions for better control over the product information.
• Increased number of endpoints to connect various channels.

Well, that’s not all that we will be working on. With the constant feedback that we receive from you, the customers, we are sure to make our product the best in the market and help you win over your competitors. 

New year, new features, new integrations, but still the same dedication.

The post Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021! A yearly round-up on PIMworks. appeared first on PIMworks Blog | Fresh Retail Insights.

Every businessman or woman, retailer, manufacturer, or brand is talking about it. Customers are now present across every possible channel out there and they expect brands to be where they are. A joint study by Google and Sterling brands says that customers spend 82% more while purchasing across multiple channels and expect brands to serve them across all the channels that they are in. That brings us to the all-important question.

What is OmniChannel ecommerce?

Many of us would be familiar with the term multi-channel ecommerce, which means selling across multiple channels like a website, or marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and brick and mortar stores. Each channel works separately and is independent of the other. 

Omnichannel ecommerce is very similar to multi-channel ecommerce. It is a multi-channel sales approach that focuses on providing a seamless customer experience across all the different platforms, from a website to the brick and mortar store.

So, what differentiates the two? The big difference lies in the fact that omnichannel ecommerce connects all the different channels to provide a consistent, personalized, and seamless customer experience whereas multi-channel is the mere presence of a brand across various platforms. The shoes you viewed on your laptop are the same ones you were checking out on your Instagram and the same pair you received an email about when they went on sale last week. The message and the product information are consistent, device-agnostic, and, most importantly, customized to you, the customer.

Many businesses take a multi-channel approach, but that does not guarantee an omnichannel experience for the customer. Omnichannel commerce eliminates the silos created by multi-channel commerce and focuses on providing a holistic experience to the customer and reducing the gap between offline and online.

Customers are shopping across platforms, and brands must serve the customers at their convenience. You must be ready to take the jump to get that much closer to your customers, and omnichannel commerce helps you achieve it.

Here are four reasons why brands must be omnichannel ready with their products

Improved Customer Experience

Let’s face it. Customer experience is everything in the current digital world. Customers are spoiled for choices, and providing them with the best possible experience helps keep competitors at bay. With an Omnichannel approach, brands can provide a seamless customer experience.

Let’s use a retail fashion store as our example. Customers might be browsing Facebook on their laptops when they see an ad for a nice pair of shoes. They can click on it, and it leads them to the store’s Facebook page, where they can read more information about the product. From here on, they can proceed to buy the shoe from the store’s website. Before buying, they find out that their size is not available. They can then contact the store’s support team through the live chat widget on the website. They come to know that the size is available at a retail store near them. The customer can pre-book the shoes and collect them from the store the next day.

The customer had various touchpoints, and each touchpoint was connected to the next one, thereby providing a seamless experience to the customer. The customer got to purchase from a touchpoint that they were comfortable with and had a personalized experience throughout. This personalization helps improve the customer experience and helps brands get more and more customers.

Better Brand Loyalty

Improving the overall customer experience through an omnichannel approach also results in better brand loyalty. A study by Omnisend found that customers who are connected with a brand in three or more channels were 90% more likely to buy from the same brand again. Once brands establish an omnichannel approach, customers know that they are likely to get a personalized experience every time they encounter your brand. This results in customers sticking to a particular brand, meaning more number of repeat customers. More the repeat sales, the better the customer’s loyalty toward the brand, win-win, right?

More channel=more sales

Now, this is an easy equation for the brain to remember. A study by Forbes says that 82% of shoppers tend to research a product from their smartphones and on the internet before making a final purchase. So, if a brand is present across multiple channels, it guarantees them sales, right? No, it doesn’t.

Customers want a holistic experience. They look at a product first through an Instagram ad, then study about it through the product’s webpage, and finally make a purchase through a marketplace. A brand needs to have consistent product information across all the channels that the customer is in. This enables the customer with their buying decisions and also helps the brand earn more revenue across channels.

Better data collaboration and cost reduction

With the old multi-channel approach, brands stored marketing analytics from various channels in silos. The data from each channel didn’t interact with or influence the action of the other channels. Brands were unable to manage all product information from a single place, which leads to more manual work and lesser efficiency.

An omnichannel approach brings all sales channels together. It combines the brand’s data streams to easily get a strategic view of their marketing efforts and take a more holistic approach towards marketing the product. It also enables brands to more precisely track customer behavior and see which channels buyers are interacting with before making a purchase, so brands can better allocate their marketing budget and reduce costs.

In the same retail fashion store example, brands can collide the customer data available from their Facebook page, their website, and their retail store and find out through which channel the customers prefer buying. Based on that, the inventory and stock can be adjusted accordingly, and the majority of the budget can be put towards a particular channel, thereby reducing unnecessary costs.

With all the challenges associated with an omnichannel approach like managing all product information from a single place, providing consistent product information across various channels, etc., a question might linger over your head on whether it is possible to be omnichannel ready.

The simple answer is, yes, it is possible.

A simple Product Information Management (PIM) solution might solve all your problems. A PIM solution like PIMworks will make it possible for you to be omnichannel ready with your products by allowing you to manage all product information from multiple channels in a single place, enabling you to provide rich product content and helping you provide a seamless customer experience to your customers.

So are you ready to take the jump and bridge the gap between you and your customer so that you can stand apart from your competition? Of course, you are.

The post What makes Omnichannel ready products stand out in the market? appeared first on PIMworks Blog | Fresh Retail Insights.

Whether Covid-19 ends or not, the uninterrupted online shopping experience altogether will attract more people than it did before. Great product experience is what most eCommerce retailers are striving to deliver, to retain their buyers. One bad product experience ruins your brand reputation and pushes your customers away. 

The wide range of information available on the product site helps people make informed decisions. If you are selling your product on various platforms like eBay, Amazon, Walmart or so, maintaining your brand credibility with peace, is close to impossible. Product Information Management (PIM) software and products can help you deliver on that front by enabling great customer experience in a short span of time with minimum efforts in the above-mentioned platforms. With magnifying customer demand for online purchases, product data management tools will help you maintain your brand’s credibility and deliver great product experience.

Stumbling Blocks in Product Information Management

Assembling the right sets of product information on the website plays a crucial role in making customers buy a product. To be precise, delivering accurate information about each product and monitoring them from time to time for credibility is no easy joke. 

If you had to do it manually, updating just a handful of products and its variants would take you forever to complete. A lot more unfolds when you begin.

• Retailers handle humongous data. However, any data when manually handled is prone to errors.
• Collaborating across different domains and with multiple resources is a tough task without a unified communication platform or a tool. 
• When retailers publish product details across diverse platforms manually, the errors pose a potential threat to the accuracy of information. 
• With that said, doing precision checks on product details without an automated tool consumes 90% of the retailers’ time.

5 PIM Features You Can’t Miss!

A product information management software not only helps you restructure the product data it also supports you to distribute your product content across different platforms. However, these are not the only qualities of a product content management platform. The most crucial traits that you should look for, are here:

Integration and connection

• You may have to deal with high volumes at any time. Hence, it is important that you buy a scalable product information management solution, with high potency.
• Your product information management solution should let you integrate with your internal ERP systems. Besides this, your internal and external teams should be able to coordinate without disruptions. These are the primary PIM features.
• Apart from being able to derive details from multiple repositories and distribute data across varied platforms like mobile apps, suppliers, online storefronts, POS systems, your solution should also be robust.

Intuitive User Interface and beyond

• Resources from different domains may have to use your PIM software. Do a quick check if the tool has a friendly UI with all the key features handy. 
• Your PIM platform should let you take advantage of the best features it serves. 
• Also, a user-friendly interface should let you have a concise view of the whole product catalog’s status. 

Omni-channel publishing

• Product information needs to be published on various channels. A PIM software should let you automate the process and empower you to increase your productivity. 
• With your PIM platform, you should be able to post the exact information about the products on the platforms with the right optimization. 
• The PIM software should help you meet the guidelines of different platforms with details such as product titles, features, images, and descriptions.

Better authority on data

• A well structured PIM application acts as a centralized repository and aids in publishing various data simultaneously on multiple sites.
• Data mapping and categorization modules should come in handy when you need to work with bulk information.
• A fully automated data enrichment module will be a bonus if your firm deals with extensive product categories. 

Data Quality Checks

• Above all, the quality of product data can make or break the sale. Product data faces quality issues like misinformation or inappropriate, obsolete, or inadequate information.
• The product information enhancement attribute in the PIM software that you choose should help you fix it. 
• Your PIM software must let you run precision checks periodically with customizable sampling methods.

Choose to Step Up Your Business!

Researches state that 72% of satisfied customers spread the word with 6 or more people. However, 13% of the customers are likely to share their negative experiences with more than 15 people. In PwC’s research 72% of people state that product experience plays a major role in decision making. There is no doubt that the majority of the companies will pay attention to product experience just as much as they would to rev up their ROI. It is important that you are not left behind.

The sole purpose of a PIM software should be to curb back and forth processes that are time-consuming. It is important that you choose PIM solutions like PIMworks that help your clients have a seamless product experience. Curious to know more? Drop your comments below!

The post 5 must-have PIM features every eCommerce retailer should look for appeared first on PIMworks Blog | Fresh Retail Insights.

The upsurge in global eCommerce sales is astronomical in recent years. With 46% user penetration rate in 2020, the number of users in the eCommerce market is expected to mount to 4600 Million by 2024.

These figures assert that the future of eCommerce businesses is exhilarating and absolutely promising.

Sounds exciting? But that’s not all of it. 

This promising prospect comes with its fair share of challenges too.

While the fast-changing trends of the eCommerce landscape open doors to more opportunities, there are also new challenges that businesses may not be able to keep up with. The biggest challenge for businesses is how to prepare themselves for the expanding market, growing competition, and unforeseen complexities.

In this article, I will take you through the new-age challenges in the eCommerce sphere and how to solve them effectively. 

Challenges in store for eCommerce businesses:

• Validating product information – It is researched that 85% of consumers conduct online research before making a digital purchase and this trend is only to increase in the future. This advocates the importance of providing accurate product information. Inadequate or obsolete information is the biggest turn-off for a customer. Rapid and frequent changes in the product information make it humanly impossible to keep up with the real time.
  
  
• Data management challenges – As inventories grow, it gets increasingly difficult to access and manage humongous volumes of product data. Businesses need to employ painstaking attention in the future to monitor thousands of products across multiple channels. It is more than challenging to maintain heaps of product data like technical specifications, manufacturing materials, size, weight, color, and much more on spreadsheets and legacy tools.
  
  
• Multiple shopping options – Changing trends in eCommerce widen the horizon and pave the way to multiple shopping channels, web stores, social media, and other marketplaces. And about 73% of customers use multiple channels to make purchases. This entails the businesses to shift their focus from a traditional approach to channel-specific strategies.
  
  
• Hassle in collaboration – As competition increases, market expands and inventories grow, it takes strenuous effort for the stakeholders and product managers to collaborate seamlessly across multiple departments like supply chain, procurement, logistics, shipment, marketing, etc.  
  
  
• Difficulty in grievance redressal – A customer feedback survey revealed that 21% of online shoppers accidentally ordered something they didn’t want and 42% shoppers made purchases that they regretted later. It is expected that by 2021 customer service will overtake price and quality as the key differentiator for the brand. With more options for the buyers to buy/return products with no obligation, resolving customer disputes is going to be more challenging than ever.    

Complex problems require modern solutions:

There’s a lot to add to the list of challenges. But, the good news is there is a solution. If you are an eCommerce enthusiast, you must be familiar with the acronym ‘PIM’. 

PIM stands for Product Information Management. 

23% of businesses worldwide use a PIM software to run their eCommerce show. This percentage will increase multifold in the coming years.

PIM provides a centralized platform to access, monitor, and enrich product information, and distribute it across appropriate sales and eCommerce channels.

Here’s how an effective PIM platform makes the future of eCommerce a breeze:

• PIM makes ‘fast data management’ a possibility. While static requirements and slow-changing data have become things of the past, PIM tools empower businesses with a scalable and robust solution. PIM centralizes volumes of inventories in a standard repository making it easy to collect, update, and validate product information effortlessly and efficiently.
  
  
• PIM makes the product omnichannel-ready. PIM tools enable businesses to meet channel-specific requirements by employing appropriate strategies for every channel. This also facilitates the distribution of the right content to the right channel and thereby enriches the product information.      
  
  
• PIM makes collaboration a cakewalk. With a centralized and standardized information architecture, PIM tools help businesses streamline their workflows, eliminate manual work, automate data validation, and focus more on items that deserve human attention. Besides improving productivity and saving time, PIM solutions put different teams together ensuring they are on the same page and make collaboration seamless like never before.
  
  
• PIM helps improve customer service. PIM tools help businesses deliver an enriching product experience to their customers. With accurate product information, consumers are likely to make informed buying decisions. This not only makes users place appropriate and relevant orders, but also reduces disputes like returns, exchanges, and cart abandonment too.
  
  
• PIM helps save money. Information accuracy mitigates the cost of bad-quality data and helps save a lot of money which is otherwise spent on operations, labor, and logistics. 

These are just a few benefits of PIM for eCommerce and the best of them is that the PIM tools are flexible and scalable that can be customized to meet different business needs. There are many platforms that provide product information management tools and solutions to help businesses deliver product experiences that their customers need. These product information management tools have been revolutionizing the eCommerce industry to benefit both retailers and customers in recent years. PIMworks is one such platform designed to help businesses deliver product experiences that their customers need.  

There’s no denial that eCommerce is the future of shopping. 

That case, PIM is the future of eCommerce.

If you are excited to learn more about how a PIM platform can help accelerate your business, reach out to us.

The post The future of eCommerce businesses with effective PIM platforms appeared first on PIMworks Blog | Fresh Retail Insights.