11 proven ways a PIM ERP integration can help scale your eCommerce business

Maintaining data using an eCommerce store back-end can be time-consuming if you have a huge set of products. You can store the company’s back-office information in an ERP and push data from there to your eCommerce store. Simple, ain’t it? But is this the best option you got? In this blog, let’s see if that’s a yes or no for you.

An ERP is a central repository for data related to products, customers, vendors, logistics, and so on. It can be inventory data, vendor information, customer details, orders, pricing, stocks to name a few.

This is where a PIM comes in. A PIM (Product Information Management) tool is built to manage marketing information for your products like descriptions, catalogs, and digital assets. You can sync the product SKUs from your ERP to the PIM and enrich them with marketing data within the PIM.

If you want to manage and sync data from the ERP to the eCommerce store directly, it’s surely doable without a PIM. But, if you have products in thousands or millions where volumes of information need to be added or edited every day, a PIM ERP integration would deem fit.

ERPs handle information related to your back office operations and manage dynamic information like stocks, pricing, logistics, and so on. A PIM solution on the other hand handles marketing-related information for your products.

PIM tools do not store any information related to pricing, warehouse info, stocks, or the likes, simply to say, quantities that change by the hours/days. It can store them as a static value for your reference.

A PIM solution helps you build rich product descriptions, organized catalogs, and enrich products with digital assets like product images, videos, tables, and variant data. It is a dependable source of data for your multichannel and multilanguage eCommerce operations.

A PIM-ERP integration makes the transition of data to the eCommerce store smooth. There can be two scenarios, depending on the type of business needs.

Your business needs may require you to create data in your ERP and sync it with your eCommerce store. Here, you would import the required product data from the ERP to your PIM, edit/enrich it with the marketing information and send it back to the ERP from where you will channelize it to your sales points.

For this, you will need

If your business needs require you to create data in your PIM and sync it with your eCommerce store, you need to be able to generate product SKUs in PIM, add and enrich them with the required information and send it to the ERP to add the technical information.

For this, you will need

An ERP independently handles transactional data whereas a PIM takes care of the marketing information. When used independently these two amazing tools may not give your business the results you expect. A PIM ERP integration is the coming together of both these independent functions to smoothen the data transactions between your ERP, PIM, and eCommerce stores.

Let’s understand this using a scenario.

You have a new product-line idea. You want to launch it within say 6 months. You ideate it, create a design, a prototype, assemble it and finally get it ready for the launch. You created an SKU in the ERP for this product and time is running out. You want to create SKUs for all the variants of this product, source information about it such as appearance, color, dimensions, weight, pricing, and so on.

You need to assemble all this information from multiple departments into one single system, say your ERP. You get it done. Now you want to push this product ut to the market. Your ERP has information like SKUs, pricing, stocks, quantity, logistics information, and much more. Your ERP has all the information, But,

How do you make that information appealing and meaningful to a person who is a potential customer on the other side of your eCommerce store?

You will have to create new categories and fields within your ERP for all these variants. Develop a system that will sync with the structure of your eCommerce store. This will,

When your time to market is slowed down, you lose out on sales. The demand for that product may have gone down by the time you launch it. The time you spend on developing your ERP internally will be directly proportional to the loss of ROI.

Let’s see what happens when you have a PIM solution integrated with your ERP.

You ideate a new product line. All the processes up to creating SKUs remain the same as in the first case. You now have a PIM which is built to collect SKU information from your ERP, enrich it with SEO-friendly product descriptions, variant information, pictures, videos, and all that engage your customers. The SEO-friendly content adds new customers to your basket by showing your product up on their internet search. This will,

A faster time to market means increased opportunity for sales when the demand is still on the splurge. Time saved is equivalent to the gain in ROI.

Most PIM solutions are priced fairly and will definitely cost you less than the long wasted hours of complex and manual processes.

Related posts:

Pengembangan sebuah aplikasi memang secara alamiah bersifat kolaboratif, jika kita berada pada sebuah perusahaan tentunya kita akan bekerja dengan orang lain. Development team dibentuk untuk…

I used to work at my father’s office in my young days at the time of holidays. He was a business person. I, remember, one time I was let to write the bills in the pharmacy of his supermarket (back…

Todas as noites Alma Luna se deita, estendida na cama, do lado esquerdo, acostumada com o vazio da metade do leito. A noite inteira. Não muda de posição na cama nem na vida. No fundo, no fundo, ainda…