Anil Kumar
What software do you need to enrich your content – Product Information Management (PIM) or Content Management System (CMS)?
If this question was asked few years ago, the answer would have been CMS. But today, with the rapidly changing eCommerce landscape and the variety of tools available, the answer is no longer that simple.
There are several factors that influence the decision to invest in a PIM system or a CMS.
The rise of eCommerce, errors and technology stack overlap
Traditionally, most product companies stored product attributes in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems and then extracted the data into spreadsheets for enrichment.
The push toward digital and multiple new channels have proven to be a recipe for mistakes (and lost business) as data moves from an ERP (or PLM) to spreadsheets to web pages. Not to mention a horrible user experience for business users and a maintenance nightmare for IT.
Believing all content is the same, many companies resorted to using a highly customized CMS to store product content. This didn’t address the other manual processes in the chain and resulted in inflexible and expensive systems.
Adding to the confusion, PIMs and CMSs have common features:
- User friendly interface for editing content
- Enrichment workflows
- Multichannel deployment features
- Localization
PIM software were also ignored by analysts for many years and have been categorized as a sub-function of either Master Data Management (MDM) or CMS. One main misconception was that PIM was mostly for IT or product team use and were outside of marketing teams’ interest or control.
Why care about a PIM?
Let’s start with the main functionality of a PIM:
Integrate out-of-the-box with multiple ERPs and PLMs to extract basic technical product data and store it as product attributes
Allow marketing to enrich product descriptions, assets, media, product bundles/kits and various related content to cross sell, up sell and create promotions
Create easy, consistent distribution across multiple sales catalogs and categories to sync not only with eCommerce sites but also other marketplaces and distributors
Organizations who have their own products, or whose product content is core to their main business, need to seriously consider a PIM system.
As you create true omni-channel commerce experiences, getting rich product content to your own site is just the beginning. It’s equally important to sync up your sales catalogs with distributors, retailers and other marketplaces on multiple channels like web, mobile and print.
PIMs are specifically designed for this and natively support import and export in multiple formats with connectors for various content aggregators, eCommerce systems and marketplaces.
Content drives commerce and rich content results in better conversion rates, but that doesn’t mean content is only stored in a CMS.
In the last few years, the awareness around PIM has grown significantly and many good products are now in the market. Salsify, Pimcore, Akeneo and InRiver all provide user-friendly interfaces for business users to edit content without help from IT. And cloud-based solutions make them easier and faster to deploy in the enterprise.
While a CMS can store product content, they aren’t really designed to store product attributes and don’t usually provide the connectors to eCommerce systems and marketplaces.
Also, as companies move to a modern architecture like MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless), attempting to use CMS platform for product information becomes even more problematic and inherently more costly.
CMS is still critical
CMS technology is still critical for managing unstructured marketing content for your websites, such as articles, blogs, marketing collaterals, campaigns, landing pages, etc. If the main business goal for your website is marketing your content and capabilities, you definitely need a CMS software.
Although some features of PIM and CMS are overlapping, often in large corporations and retail businesses you will find both systems complementing each other: PIM stores structured product content while CMS stores unstructured web content.
Small to medium-size companies often start with buying the system that matches most of their use cases. But in the long run, both systems make up a critical component in the eCommerce landscape.
Our thoughts
At Zorang, we feel content drives eCommerce online stores and that more relevant content drives conversion. To manage content effectively, PIM is a critical part of the overall eCommerce stack.
As a recognized leader in the commerce and content space, Zorang can provide strategy guidance, vendor evaluation/selection and implementation. We can help you make the right decisions for your organization and deliver quick results.