Walking through the aisles of your favorite store is an experience in itself.
As you browse through products and pick up the most appealing ones, you don’t just purchase them right away; you dive into the story that the product is trying to tell via the product label.
The product label gives you a purchase narrative. It includes care instructions, ingredients, pricing, directions for use, expiration dates, and so on to ensure you are well-informed before you make the purchase.
The above is an ideal scenario when shopping at a brick-and-mortar store. Online shopping looks quite different. When you shop online, product catalogs are your storytellers. They are the silent salesmen who give you the experience of immersing into a product and unraveling its story.
However, product catalogs come bearing more information and a range of components.
A product catalog is a comprehensive and organized collection of information about a product.
It provides detailed descriptions, images, specifications, pricing, and other relevant data for each item. The objective of a product catalog is to help customers make an informed purchase decision in an online world where tangibility is not possible.
PIM plays a crucial role in enhancing the product catalog.
Product information management (PIM) platform brings structure and discipline to product catalog management and creation. It helps reduce errors and increase the efficiency of taking the product catalogs to market faster.
It helps in making the catalogs crisp and compelling and enables contribution from all the necessary stakeholders a piece of cake. It also helps enrich the catalogs, localize them for any region, and make the catalogs compliant with different channel requirements.
Let’s now look at the role of PIM in enhancing product catalogs in detail.
Let’s take an example of a furniture product - a wooden work table. When a buyer lands on the product page of this wooden work desk, they look at the product title, description, warranty, assembly instructions, materials used, care instructions, images, videos, reviews, and more before making a purchase decision.
What the buyer sees on the product page is 360-degree information that aids them with all the data that they need. But, for this information to be presented in such a crisp and digestible way, it takes multiple steps.
The data about the dimensions and the materials used comes from the manufacturer of the wooden table in spreadsheets, the suppliers give data in XMLs, and the in-house teams provide marketing information and descriptions in folders and documents.
Your product catalog is then meticulously crafted to perfection by stitching together all this information. Without a PIM, the product catalog is created manually, leading to errors, inconsistencies, and poorly presented information.
The role of PIM: PIM enhances your product catalog. It centralizes and streamlines this variety of information flowing in. Bringing together all this information in a centralized repository helps create a single source of truth so that there are no errors and data discrepancies.
Product data in its raw format has just basic information. However, a customer-facing catalog must be rich with all the information to the smallest attribute details and media assets.
Look at the following example of how enriched data differs from original data.
| Attribute | Original data | Enriched data |
| Product name | Basic t-shirt | Premium organic cotton t-shirt |
| Description | Plain white t-shirt | High-quality organic cotton t-shirt |
| Image | Generic image | Multiple high-resolution images showcasing design and fit |
| Fabric composition | Not specified | 100% organic cotton |
| Care instructions | Not provided | Detailed care instructions (machine wash, tumble dry) |
| Customer reviews | No reviews | Customer ratings (4.8/5 stars) with reviews |
| Availability | In stock | In stock, ships within 1-2 business days |
| Material origin | Not specified | Sourced from sustainable farms |
| Sustainability information | Limited details | Certified organic, eco-friendly packaging |
| Size chart | Basic sizing information | Detailed size chart with measurements |
| Related products | None | Suggests matching accessories and pants |
| Price history | Fixed price | Seasonal discounts and price history chart |
Data enrichment refers to not just improving the existing information but also filling out the missing information.
The role of PIM: PIM helps enrich product information by automatically extracting the right information from the right source. It helps make a weak product catalog more attractive, comprehensive, and conversion-driven. A PIM also helps enrich the catalog with visual components like videos, images, PDFs, and more.
A catalog cannot be called “done” with just one version.
Depending on where you sell your products, the catalogs' structure and format change according to that channel's rules and guidelines.
Let’s look at an example of a handbag and how it is presented across two channels:
Platform A
Product title: "Elegant Leather Handbag - Brown"
Price: $149.99
Key attributes:
Material: Genuine Leather, Color: Brown, Size: Medium, Closure: Zipper
Platform B
Product title: "Brown Leather Handbag - Medium Size"
Price: $149.99 USD
Key attributes:
Material: Real Leather, Color: Brown, Durability: Crafted for long-lasting use with high-quality leather.
Warranty: Comes with a 1-year manufacturer's warranty.
Ideal for working professionals and fashion-conscious individuals.
This shows how the format and structure of the product catalog might vary, and the content should be personalized to meet its unique requirements.
The role of PIM: Without a PIM in place, the process of syndicating the right content in the right format would be done manually, resulting in excess time consumption, errors, and poor product experience. PIM, with its syndication and integration capabilities, helps distribute channel-compliant data seamlessly across channels.
A good product catalog is one that is customized to fit the requirements of the geography to which it is catering. For instance, if your product catalog is catering to the Canadian market, you should have a catalog like this:
Source: Pimworks
Consider these components while localizing your catalog:
The role of PIM: PIM helps in localizing the product catalog and personalizing it to meet the unique requirements of each region and the channels.
A product catalog is never a one-person job, and there is no one-size-fits-all template. Creating an outstanding product catalog takes the effort of multiple stakeholders, such as content writers, graphic designers, SEO analysts, category experts, QA teams, and more.
The following list outlines the key roles involved in creating a product catalog and highlights the nature of their contributions to the catalog development process.
The role of PIM: PIM helps in breaking the silos both internally and externally by letting the key stakeholders collaborate from a single space. It allows people involved to tag, comment, assign, and speed up the entire process of catalog creation.
A product catalog is the face of the online shopping experience.
Hence, it is important to ensure the catalogs are accurate, compelling and consistent, and cater to every need of the customer.
There are a lot of challenges in creating and maintaining a catalog, and this is where a PIM comes in. A PIM platform helps streamline the complexities of product catalog management by centralizing the data, syndicating the right data in the right format, enabling collaboration and workflow creation, and more.
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