What is a PIM system and when do you need one?

What is a PIM system and what does it hold?

PIM stands for product information management: gathering and maintaining all the product information needed to sell goods across several channels 1. The PIM is the central place from which webshops, marketplaces and catalogues take their data 1.

What it holds is everything a customer or a channel needs to know about a product:

• Basic data: title, brand, EAN, category.
• Copy: descriptions and bullet points, possibly in several languages.
• Attributes: size, colour, material, technical specifications and other properties.
• Media: images and other files.
• Relations: for example accessories, alternatives and cross-sells.

A good PIM does more than store. It lets you merge, improve and check data from different sources before it goes to a channel 2.

Who needs a PIM, and how does it differ from ERP or a feed tool?

There is no fixed number of products at which a PIM suddenly becomes necessary. These are the signs that matter:

• A large or growing assortment. Making changes one by one takes too much time.
• Several channels. Every marketplace asks for its own fields and categories. Also read managing multiple stores and channels.
• Several suppliers. Their feeds differ in structure and quality and must come together in one catalogue of your own.
• Quality problems. Missing EANs, bare copy or images that a channel rejects.

With a handful of products in one shop, managing them in your webshop is usually enough. This is how a PIM relates to the systems you already know:

In practice a PIM does not replace these systems but works with them: an ERP or POS can be a source of product data, and the webshop or marketplace is where it is finally shown. That fits how PIM is described, as a link between e-commerce and ERP among others 1.

What to look for when choosing a PIM

Ask yourself these questions and put them to every provider.

• Sources. Can you load supplier feeds, your ERP, POS, webshop and loose CSV or Excel files, and does the PIM refresh that data by itself afterwards?
• Improvements that stay. What happens to your own title or description when the supplier updates their feed?
• Channels. Which webshops and marketplaces can you feed directly, and which export formats exist for the rest?
• Data quality. Can you see what is missing or wrong before a channel rejects it?
• Scale. Can you edit thousands of products at once?
• Price. Do you pay per user, per product or by usage? At StoreLinkr the price depends on your monthly order volume, see the pricing.

What StoreLinkr does and does not do

StoreLinkr has its own PIM where you bring product data from different sources together and prepare it per channel. According to the pages on managing product data and the PIM system, it can:

• Load products from supplier feeds, your ERP, POS or webshop, or from a CSV or Excel file.
• Write descriptions, sort or exclude images, manage attributes and metafields and link products as cross-sells, up-sells or accessories.
• Set product rules, so your title or description stays when the supplier updates their feed.
• Enrich on the EAN, comparing old and new values, with nothing saved until you agree.
• Use a data quality dashboard and set export filters, for example to keep products without images out of a channel.
• Edit thousands of products at once and export to WooCommerce, Shopify and SitePack, or via XML, CSV and JSON.

What it is not: an ERP or POS. Those can be a source, but you do not run your accounting and purchasing in it. Its reach is otherwise the list of available integrations.

Frequently asked questions