How to Update Product Catalogs with a PIM Automatically?
Product catalogs play an important role in any type of business to showcase which products are available for customer display. This is one of the main reasons for successful sales conversions and a predominant influencing factor of customer’s buying behavior. Since products keep adding to a business, you will be required to update the product catalog more often.
Product Information Management (PIM) can make it possible effortlessly and customers find the PIM product catalog very informative and accurate since it is its specialty. Product catalogs ensure the smooth functioning of your operations.
This post will help you know how to update your product catalog using PIM. There are some tips on how to design your online product catalog in the end.
How Important is Product Catalog Management in Your Business?
Product catalogs are the main source of influencing customer’s purchasing behavior not only online but even on prints as well. Retail and B2B consider product catalogs so crucial to their businesses. Any customer would know about your product only if you have listed them somewhere with all the required details that they want to know.
Since your product catalogs come with images, product specifications, descriptions, and prices, customers find it easy to get what they want. In recent days, many vendors have started using digital product catalogs to attract customers online.
At the same time, print catalogs are also popular among people which makes them show more interest in buying retail products (e.g. Brochures distributed in supermarkets).
Updating and controlling product catalogs can be a critical factor in customer satisfaction and service level. But, it can mess up everything if there are more online and offline channels involved in sales and promotion. With this, on one hand, third-party data from suppliers and vendors is one of the biggest issues on the other hand.
The pain point would be in receiving such data in various file formats which can slow down the update of the product catalog. There are chances of mismatched or missed data when doing it in a hurry. This is where PIM takes the place fulfilling all gaps in product catalog management.
Advantages of Having an Online Product Catalog
- The online product catalog is cheaper to maintain than that of a manual preparation; therefore, it saves you cost in every aspect
- Improved launch times of your products
- Not worrying about the space or materials for the catalog
- Easy customer behavior analysis
- Quick distribution across multiple sales channels and social networks
- Great scope for a wider audience and newer markets
- Intensive interaction with users
- Instant catalog fixes
- More flexible and omnichannel marketing
- More agile and effective, extensive customer service
Do you want to leverage all these benefits by implementing PIM?
What Consequences Arise if Vendors Use Obsolete Product Catalog Management Methods?
When most parts of the world quickly adapt to technology, it is ideal for every business person also to adapt to it. Vendors may find it very difficult if they are far away from updating their business with the latest technology for product catalog management. These are the issues vendors may experience with using outdated product catalog management:
- Retrieving data from various sources
- Sending frequent emails to other vendors and suppliers
- Copying and pasting revised information into catalog files
- The aforementioned process is not done on-time, data becomes obsolete
- Product catalogs are delayed or possess old information
- Introducing unnecessary errors in your product catalogs
Due to high expectations of customers in terms of accuracy and in providing the right product information, companies that still use the manual method of updating the catalog cannot take a chance. Therefore, poor catalog management can result in the following:
- Customers receive wrong products
- Customers pay the incorrect price for the products
- Product return from customers
If you do not update the product catalog using PIM, it will create a negative impact on your business.
How Can You Use PIM as an Alternative to Your Product Catalog Management Issues?
To update your product catalogs on time automatically, implementing a PIM system is an ideal solution. PIM comes with multiple benefits to vendors, suppliers, distributors, online and physical sales channels, and other platforms to update the following product information in the catalog before it gets published for customers view:
- Images – You can use photos, diagrams, or other visuals of your products
- Prices
- Videos – You can upload product demos or explainer videos
- Multiple Languages – Translation of languages when you sell your products across countries
- Multi-Currency – Support different currency to simplify the sales for you in the different regions
- Any other data which is useful from the customer-aspect
Some PIM systems contain an in-built report designer that lets you customize your catalogs the way you want, whereas with some other PIM systems you can integrate product information with your InDesign files. Product catalog management becomes way easy with PIM systems because it is not time-consuming, at the same time, not too expensive as well.
The main purpose of businesses using a PIM system is automation; therefore, you don’t incur too many errors and focus on how to take your business to the next level.
Benefits of a Good PIM Solution
A PIM system provides a plethora of benefits in which knowing the important ones can get you the clarity of why PIM.
- It saves your time and money by automating varied processes and activities.
- It shows improvement in product data quality.
- It allows you to deal with complexity in language variations in product data and lets you include multiple languages for various markets.
- It enhances the speed and accuracy of catalog publication.
- It helps you in streamlining product catalog management.
- PIM enables customization of any product-related information you create, such as images, videos, pricing, and descriptions for specific customers or a group of customers.
- It allows you to send multiple and various product catalogs to different customers at a time.
With all the aforementioned benefits, PIM can let you create responsive product catalogs, as well as price lists, whenever you wish to. Depending on what your business needs, you should decide upon which PIM system can benefit you extremely high.
Are you looking for a Product Information Management system that enables you with all the above-listed benefits?
Tips to Design a Product Catalog Online
The following basics can help you with creating a new product catalog or improvising your existing catalog. Before that, you should begin by asking yourself a few questions.
- Why do you want to design a catalog at first?
- Are you completely transforming into a digital product catalog or keep a combination of both online and manual catalogs?
- What kind of response do you wish to receive?
- Do you expect a change in your brand image or want to drive in more sales?
Once you have all answers ready, you have to know who your right audience is. After that you need to create engaging content to publish it online; get the PIM system implemented for excellent product catalog management and equip yourself with product catalog design tools, which is possible with the PIM system end-to-end.
Tips for Presenting Your Products in an Online Catalog or PIM
If you want your products to attract customers, you should present them in a visually appealing way by following certain aspects when developing your online product catalog:
- Which needs more weightage – the product images or information?
- Should you require a professional for a product photoshoot?
- Which color can be set as the background that favors your products?
- Will your product catalog have more visual resources like videos, 3D simulations, etc.?
- How many images have you planned to show in each product?
- Which will be the best way to present the product so that customers get visually more attracted?
Having answers ready for these questions can help you realize how to design your product catalog.
Step by Step Approach to Creating an Integrated Product Catalog with PIM
Step 1: It starts with product selection allowing you to select the product (s) of your choice, making it easier to handle multiple products and import all the information of all your selected products.
Step 2: The next step would be designing your product datasheet. PIM allows you to fill in whichever fields you need for each product, choose any complementary material to be included, and easily let your data fit between draft mode and public mode at any time.
Step 3: The third step is to optimize your descriptions and technical data. PIM allows you to check the quality of the information in your product catalog and ensures no inconsistencies seen between similar products.
Step 4: The last step would be connecting with multiple platforms like several sales channels, online channels, social media platforms, etc. as per their required format. PIM also supports different types of file formats so vendors, suppliers, and other users can upload the data in their preferred format.
Do you want to automate the product catalog creation process by implementing a powerful product information management system?
Conclusion
A product catalog will always be the start point of your product selling; therefore, it is mandated that you should update the product catalog often. To update the product catalog using PIM, you should deploy the right Product Information Management system as a great tool for product catalog management.
Hoping this blog has given you good detailing of why PIM for product catalog management. If our information has instilled an interest in you, come back to this pace to read more and know more.
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