You’ve put a lot of effort into running your online business, and it’s finally starting to pay off. You have your portfolio of products, a reliable stream of customers, and a sales and marketing team. Your back is no longer against the wall. Now is the time to focus on optimizing your processes, so you can reap the full potential of your online business.
You need a solution to your growth hurdles, one that will allow you to maximize your profits without adding more risk. Luckily, there is a proven next step. It’s called PIM. Product Information Management systems have become the solution of choice for e-commerce businesses to manage and enrich their product information in an efficient way.
What is PIM?
A Product Information Management system is designed to control the complexity of your product content. It curbs the chaos that results from managing product content across a number of systems, technologies and databases. (Read more: What is PIM?)
With PIM, you have a central hub for all the product information, a single platform where you can add, complete and enrich product content. Once added, your content automatically becomes available across your entire sales ecosystem, including:
- your e-commerce platform,
- external marketplaces,
- POS information,
- printed catalogs,
- banners, and more.
Thanks to this automated process, PIM is able to send the right information to different sales channels, without adding extra burden on your time or resources. The right message in the right place equals satisfied and informed customers, leading to more sales for you.
Product information comes in from multiple sources and out to external channels
With or without PIM
Even though your business is past the early stages, it’s possible that you still edit product information, such as product descriptions directly in your web shop. Then, you have to repeat the process on any marketplace you sell on. This is not a very efficient way to manage product information, and it puts unnecessary load on your time and resources. So you hire more people, but then it’s even harder to communicate changes and keep the whole team on the same page. Sharing spreadsheets and templates help a bit, but eventually, someone still has to distribute the content manually to all sales channels. There is a fraction of businesses that went from small to bigger and have kept working this way, because they assume there is no better way.
Others have come up with solutions to reduce the manual load. They’ve been building systems upon systems to deal with their distribution channels. It’s all well if everything works today, but then a new opportunity pops up, and it takes while before you can start catching up. Meanwhile, your competition is already there, occupying the new channel, and enjoying the privilege of the early bird. Arriving at the scene before others is your biggest advantage, and it’s only possible if you have an efficient way to manage your product content.
If you are looking forward to the next major step for your e-commerce business, this is your chance to get it right on the first try. Putting quality product content at the center of your business gives you an opportunity to reach your customers with a more accurate message, and clears the way for fast future growth. Taking a moment now to see the bigger picture will save you from the dilemmas of custom systems, makeshift software integrations, and other temporary solutions that somehow tend to spill over into the future. This is what major businesses do today to maximize their profits, and this may be the only way to stay competitive in the years to come.
About Bluestone
Bluestone is a Nordic eCommerce brand with a global reach. It was established in 2015 to build Bluestone PIM, a disruptive SaaS platform for Product Information Management (PIM). The team behind Bluestone PIM has been part of digital commerce for more than 20 years, and with 15 years of specific PIM experience. We are now more than one hundred dedicated colleagues with teams in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Palo Alto, Gdańsk, Bangkok and Tønsberg. If you are interested in a demo of Bluestone PIM, visit this page.
