Unlock the Power of Magento and PIM Integration

Unlock the Power of Magento and PIM Integration
Unlock the Power of Magento and PIM Integration

Pranu Dhyani

Brands & Communications

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Initially developed by UCLA students in 2007, Magento witnessed a meteoric rise in popularity starting in 2009. In 2018, Adobe recognized its potential and acquired the platform for an astounding $1.68 billion. 

Today, Magento stands proudly among the top-tier ecommerce platforms. The platform's open-source nature empowers businesses with control over their ecommerce processes, attracting a wide range of enterprises.

Notably, medium to large businesses find Magento especially appealing, thanks to its ability to handle extensive product inventories and its proficiency in catering to business-to-business (B2B) companies' unique needs. 

Let’s now dive into understanding Magento and PIM integration.

Why do you need PIM for Magento? 

Though Magento is on the list of top ecommerce platforms, there are many product information management-related issues that businesses face with it. The lack of a product description and a catalog systematization system leads to discord between the data in various promotion channels, which not only reduces the efficiency of the ecommerce business but also confuses buyers, reducing the platform's attractiveness.

As a result, retailers and manufacturers face the following challenges:

  • Multiple attribute mapping for products
  • Bulk product uploads
  • Sellers face challenges around multichannel selling on 3P Marketplaces
  • Selling on multiple channels becomes a challenge as the data is not centralised. While Magento offers an extension for the same but it becomes a hassle down the line to manage.
  • Failure to meet the deadlines for launching new products;
  • Overloading the directory with unnecessary information;
  • Difficulty communicating with suppliers and customers;
  • Data inconsistency.

7 Tips to master Magento with PIM

Here are seven points among the most important ones for how PIM integration can enhance your Magento stores:

Enhance your Magento Product Pages

Poor product pages are a huge contributor to abandoned carts and lost sales. Around 87% of consumers rate proper product content as a deciding factor to purchase a product.  

As many as 50% of consumers are likely to return their purchase because the product information doesn’t match the actual product. Hence, a product page requires accurate and enhanced data to drive better revenues. 

A PIM does that efficiently for your Magento product pages. 

  • Product information like pricing, sizes, material, variants etc needs to be complete, accurate and updated at all times. A PIM tool's data validation capabilities identify errors, and missing information, and standardize data to meet Magento formatting requirements and customer expectations. 
  • A Magento marketplace extension or the Admin panel can be used to manage customer reviews and testimonials on product pages, but for broader purposes such as sales processes and website promotion, a PIM for Magento becomes invaluable. It not only stores product information but also crucial sales data like pricing, customer reviews, and testimonials, ensuring easy accessibility whenever needed.
  • Customers are highly likely to trust a product when it’s more visual. A study found 75% of consumers consider product photography "very influential," and it influences the buying decision while 22% stated they would return items that didn't match the photos displayed on the listing. A PIM proves to be very useful as most of them now come with an inbuilt DAM. So, all the pictures, gifs etc along with the product information are stored in one place.
  • Cross-selling, up-selling and bundling of products help increase sales. A PIM can create these product relationships, increasing the shopping experience. 
  • A lucid structure for page navigation is very crucial. If it is hard for shoppers to find what they need, they’ll discontinue their buying journey as buyers are impatient. PIM has structured your data into various categories and improves the product taxonomy. 

Having a global presence with PIM localisation becomes swift

Customers would any day like to visit websites which are showcased in their country's language because that’s more convenient and confusion-free. It also offers a touch of personalisation to the brand and allows it to reach to a broader audience through different languages. 

Magento allows you to create different channels for sales, but managing these channels for different countries or regions in various languages is made easy by PIM. PIM allows for localisation of product information, i.e. the product information is available in the local language of the specific country. This makes it easy for the customers to understand properly and hence take informed buying decisions. 

A PIM Magento and PIM integration makes it possible to manage the complexities of scaling globally as we know language is a major barrier to scale.

Scale up with centralised information for your Magento Store

Another challenge that exists while scaling up or scaling globally is being able to manage multiple storefronts. Embracing PIM as a scalable solution empowers you to tackle your expanding product catalog with confidence and agility, ensuring that your Magento Store remains a competitive force in the dynamic e-commerce landscape.

Though Magento allows you to create numerous storefronts or open many website domains for the store, it’s not easy to handle these. It would require an exhaustive time and handling thousands of SKUs on many domains is itself a hassle. Scaling up your Magento Store can be a game-changer for your business, and a Product Information Management (PIM) system is the perfect solution to achieve this. 

By centralizing all your product information in a PIM system, you gain a powerful tool to manage and enrich your product data efficiently from a single dashboard. With a comprehensive and standardized repository for all your product attributes, descriptions, images, and specifications, you can ensure consistency across your entire inventory, regardless of its size or complexity. This centralized approach allows you to easily update and edit reducing the risk of errors. 

PIM lessens manual tasks and saves time and resources too. Moreover, centralised data in a PIM is consistent all across the domains and sales touchpoints, minimising the chances of erroneous data and lost sales. 

Build a deep product hierarchy and user-friendly categorizations

By acting as a centralized repository for all product data, PIM enables businesses to organize products into multiple levels of hierarchies, such as categories, subcategories, and attributes.

PIM allows for the creation of flexible and customizable data models, accommodating various product attributes and relationships. This flexibility allows businesses to build complex hierarchies that accurately represent their product offerings, making it easier for customers to find and compare products based on their specific needs.

With PIM's data governance features, businesses can enforce standardized categorizations and data structures, ensuring consistency and coherence throughout the product catalog. This consistency enhances the customer experience, as users can navigate the product hierarchy intuitively and effortlessly.

Additionally, PIM's ability to manage large volumes of product data efficiently ensures that businesses can scale their product offerings without sacrificing the organization and usability of the catalog. As a result, users can explore the entire product range easily, promoting cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Collect data from multiple suppliers and platforms

A Product Information Management system proves indispensable when dealing with data from multiple suppliers and platforms for your Magento store. Managing product information from various sources can be challenging due to inconsistencies, varying formats, and data quality issues. 

PIM acts as a central hub that efficiently gathers, normalizes, and consolidates data from different suppliers and platforms, providing a unified view of the products. With PIM, you can establish data governance rules and standardize attributes, ensuring data accuracy and completeness across your entire catalog. 

Additionally, PIM allows you to enrich product data by adding additional information, such as marketing content, translations, and media assets. This ensures that your customers receive consistent, detailed, and up-to-date product information, regardless of the source. 

Embracing PIM when dealing with multiple suppliers and platforms not only enhances data quality and consistency but also enables you to respond quickly to market demands, launch new products faster, and maintain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

Centralize Multiple Storefronts on PIM

Having multiple storefronts implies more niches to target a larger set of audience. Magento lets you create multiple stores with as many website domains, hence letting you generate more revenue while tapping different niches. 

But there’s a catch! These stores have different products, and many of their variants make up huge amounts of product information and media to handle which is highly likely to be prone to errors. It also involves a lot of time and effort that goes into the handling process with an increased cost of resources. 

A PIM helps you maintain all that above-mentioned data for as many stores as you have in one place! A centralised repository to keep everything handy and not spread all across places where it becomes hard to find. It lessens the efforts of many resources and helps handle multiple stores with ease from a single dashboard. 

Tap Into Omnichannel Marketing

A PIM system proves indispensable when dealing with data from multiple suppliers and platforms for your Magento store.

Magento is prominent for its omnichannel opportunities due to its extensive features that seamlessly connect multiple channels, creating a consistent customer experience. Not only you can integrate marketplaces and your website, but PIM connects your physical store too which you can handle from one single dashboard along with other sales touchpoints. 

PIM serves as the central hub for managing all product-related data, including descriptions, images, specifications, pricing, and inventory information. By consolidating and organizing product data from multiple sources into a single, authoritative repository, PIM ensures that accurate and up-to-date information is available to all channels in real time. This helps in delivering a unified and cohesive brand message, regardless of where the customer interacts with the brand. 

Also, PIM facilitates the creation of rich and engaging product content, which is essential for compelling product presentations on diverse channels.

With PIM, businesses can easily adapt to the constantly evolving omnichannel landscape by quickly onboarding new channels and expanding their reach to different marketplaces, geographies, and customer touchpoints. This adaptability and agility enable retailers to stay competitive, increase their market share, and cater to ever-changing consumer preferences. 

How to integrate Magento with PIM?

It's important to consider the specific needs and technical capabilities of the business when making a decision.

Here are the best practices you need to follow to integrate Magento with PIM: 

1. Import product and category data from Magento into the PIM system to establish a centralized repository of product information.

2. Ensure that the necessary PIM database fields exist in Magento and align with the data structure in the PIM system.

3. Set up a connection channel between Magento and the PIM system, ensuring that the fields have the same names in both systems. 

4. Install a third-party extension that enables communication between Magento and the PIM system. This extension should meet the specific business requirements for integration. 

5. Conduct preliminary tests with a subset of products to verify that data synchronization and communication between the two systems are functioning correctly.

6. Ensure that all product content, including custom attributes and images, is properly synchronized between Magento and the PIM system.

7. Once satisfied with the results, proceed to integrate the rest of the products into the catalog while paying attention to maintaining unique and optimized content.

8. Regularly monitor the integration to identify any issues or discrepancies and address them promptly.

It's essential to carefully choose the right PIM system and extension for your specific business needs and consider seeking professional assistance if needed, especially for complex integrations that involve technical challenges.

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