When selecting the best PIM (Product Information Manager) tool for your organisation, it’s important to look at what features and functions you require. Like any software, PIM’s come in all shapes and sizes.

Comestri’s PIM is the best PIM software for most retail businesses. It’s a pretty bold statement – we know! But we genuinely believe it and our customer feedback supports our claim. Don’t just take it from us, read some of our recent case studies to hear it from our customers themselves.

By making product data ecommerce readiness our biggest focus point, we have created one of the best product information management software on the market. Keep reading to find out how we stand out from the rest.

We are extremely passionate about helping retailers sell more, be it via their ecommerce websites, or marketplaces. Also, assisting our clients in marketing their products on the best platforms to increase traffic, build awareness and teach the world about their products. These are the reasons we focus on enabling our clients with a flexible and easy to use platform to create, add, enhance or transform product data and digital assets. All so we can shine a bright light on exactly what consumers are looking for.

What to look out for when choosing the best PIM

When researching for the best PIM solution, it’s important to make sure that it’s easy to learn and use, customisable to suit your product catalogs and integrates with your existing infrastructure.

Easy to use

Ease of use is key so that your team can focus on increasing productivity rather than getting caught up in never ending spreadsheets and complicated tools. Having a PIM software in place is essential for marketing and ecommerce teams to stay on top of their game.

Customisable to suit your needs

We understand that every business’s product catalog is unique, so our PIM solution has been built to accommodate all types of product structures, and an extremely large number of business scenarios, from simple standalone products to very complex multi-tiered product structures.

Integrates with your existing infrastructure

The purpose of PIM is to centralise product information and streamline the process of collecting, enriching, and spreading your product data to all your sales channels. Therefore, it is critical for the PIM to be able to easily connect to other systems and tools.

Questions to ask yourself when choosing the best PIM system

1. How does your business currently manage its data?
2. Do you currently have multiple sources of product data? If so, in what form does it currently take?
3. How can your data be imported into a PIM? Are you working with Excel sheets?
4. How often does your product data need to be imported, and – just as important – how often does it need to be updated?
5. How automated would you like your PIM to be, and what benefits will an automated system bring to the business?
6. What is the current process for enriching and updating product data?
7. How many sales and marketing channels do you need to export product data to?
8. What specific requirements does each channel require?

Best PIM benefits

Utilising all the amazing features of a PIM software benefits your business by:

• Boosting searchability – Give customers an exceptional experience making it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. The descriptive content on your product pages can be the difference between a sale and an abandonment.
• Increasing conversions – When product information is accurate more products are purchased. Increase sales by publishing products to sales and marketing channels, such as eBay, Amazon, Catch, The Iconic and many more. Synchronise your inventory and pricing across all channels for a true omnichannel experience.
• Reducing returns – Returns are reduced as the customer knows exactly what they’re purchasing – there’s no ‘this product looks different’ or sizing issues. The more product data, the less returns.
• Integrating with additional sales & marketing channels – Make the product experience consistent across all channels. PIM allows you to enrich product information once and then distribute it to multiple channels. This ensures that your products look great no matter where they are sold.
• Scaling with ease – Other than making it easier to expand product offers, PIM can also help scale your business worldwide. Streamlined translation and localisation workflows make it easy to prepare product information for several global markets.
• Increasing team productivity – Your teams are no longer stuck spending hours completing endless spreadsheets and can instead focus on more valuable activities

Download the full Product Information Manager (PIM) Features & Functions Guide:

What the best PIM Software should include

1. Product Information Flow

Here are a few attributes of Comestri’s PIM software that make it the best option for managing product information:

• Collect: With a range of customisation and integration capabilities, you can import data from multiple data sources. What’s more, you can prioritise data sources to ensure that you’re collecting from the most trusted source information.
• Enrich: Once all basic product data is imported your team can enrich product data with technical data, usage data, rich marketing descriptions, and other media. As part of the enrichment process, products can be classified into one or multiple catalogs based on your unique catalog organisation.
• Distribute: Once product information is enriched you can easily manage your products throughout a variety of sales channels. You have complete control over product distribution with the ability to select the products and relevant attributes that you want to include in each channel.

What the best PIM Software should include

1. Product Information Flow

Here are a few attributes of Comestri’s PIM software that make it the best option for managing product information:

• Collect: With a range of customisation and integration capabilities, you can import data from multiple data sources. What’s more, you can prioritise data sources to ensure that you’re collecting from the most trusted source information.
• Enrich: Once all basic product data is imported your team can enrich product data with technical data, usage data, rich marketing descriptions, and other media. As part of the enrichment process, products can be classified into one or multiple catalogs based on your unique catalog organisation.
• Distribute: Once product information is enriched you can easily manage your products throughout a variety of sales channels. You have complete control over product distribution with the ability to select the products and relevant attributes that you want to include in each channel.

2. Features That Matter

Your PIM will be the backbone of your entire commerce operation – make sure you pick the right one for you! There are many options available with different features and at different price points.

Here are some features to look out for when selecting your PIM for ecommerce:

• Ability to import data from a variety of sources in a variety of formats. Your PIM should be able to alter the data to make it consistent, no matter what the format.
• Manage data quality by defining a product completeness formula.
• Advanced search and product filtering capabilities.
• Support for multiple languages and currencies.
• Group product data in a logical format.
• Assign specific data or data sets to grouped data. Make updates automatically to streamline product enrichment.
• Attach rich descriptive data to product images – check out how product content can help you convert here.
• Add tags to images and videos.
• Create rich SEO data to improve SEO ranking and searchability.
• Manage inventory, set thresholds and buffers, and allocate stock. Advanced inventory management in conjunction with a DOM (Distributed Order Management) System
• Order and shipment management.

Let’s work together.