A survey conducted by the National Retail Federation found that eCommerce product returns accounted for about 8 percent of all sales by respondents. With that figure amounting to about $260 billion in lost sales in the United States alone that year, any way of paring it down can bring in a substantial return of income (ROI).
Entreprises Look to Invest in Products and Platforms in the New Year.
Enterprises are looking to invest in products and platforms that can improve their bottom line, either through cost savings, increased profits, or both. Many companies, especially those that have been in the market for a long time, still struggle with decentralized, irregular means of managing product information.
Businesses are at a crossroads where data quality matters more than ever, and enterprises are going out of their way to keep customers supplied with accurate and relevant product data. Each piece of data can impact operational efficiency, customer experience, and ultimately ROI.
Standardize Product Data Across Channels
In many ways, standardizing product data across channels is the key to driving measurable ROI in eCommerce, which makes Product Information Management (PIM) inevitable. A PIM enables improved data accuracy, productivity, and customer reach.
Customers look for a frictionless path to buy products, and an organized product catalog through PIM implementation can amplify customer retention rates.
From centralizing product information to improving business productivity and powering content syndication to shortening the time to market — PIM’s positive impact on businesses are far-reaching.
Your Product Information Management not only enhances product data and product-related processes but also enables seamless syndication. These processes increase selling opportunities, as well as reduce returns and buyer frustration.
Benefits Directly Achieved Through PIM Implementation
1. Exceptional Productivity:
Streamlined processes and collaboration make the optimization of product data and digital assets a breeze. An advanced PIM solution can automatically update eCommerce platforms with product data from sources throughout the value chain, minimizing manual work and reducing the room for errors.
The process enables operational excellence, supply chain optimization, and order fulfillment accuracy, thus reducing instances of product returns, complaints, and even shopping cart abandonment.
In addition, advanced PIM streamlines product data management processes and facilitates collaboration across departments, resulting in more time and resources to focus on growing and scaling eCommerce operations — which all translate to higher online revenues and ROI.
PIM can empower enterprises with unlimited internal and external data sources that can be crafted accordingly to enable personalized online experiences for customers across channels. By centralizing product data and combining it with store analytics, PIM allows businesses to access insights that aren’t possible by comparing countless spreadsheets.
2. High Growth:
To thrive in an increasingly crowded and competitive eCommerce environment, enterprises need to differentiate themselves through engaging product experiences powered by accurate, complete, and consistent product data.
Customers, retailers, distributors, sales teams, and other stakeholders can have consistent product data anytime, anywhere, hence significantly reducing the chances of deviation from expectations or human error. PIM is a single repository to gather, manage, and expand product information and integrate it with other data sources and eCommerce channels.
Being a central hub for all product content, PIM helps businesses to increase product data quality, improve the team’s communication process, drive more sales, elevate customer experience, and significantly boost ROI.
Moreover, with robust and accurate product data and customer details, it is easier to target users with specific product needs, enabling cross-selling and up-selling, reducing search time, and increasing sales revenue.
An advanced PIM platform allows enterprises to gather, standardize, enrich, contextualize, and distribute product data. Plus, it can help accelerate time-to-market and speed up the enrichment process, giving businesses more selling days and slashing enrichment costs, all without increasing the number of errors in the product information.
In addition, completeness of product information facilitates informed purchases and eventually reduces returns.
3. Customer Loyalty:
“When customers connect with brands through multiple devices, portals, interfaces, websites, and apps, the accuracy and consistency of product data can significantly impact customer trust.” When shopping online, accurate and up-to-date product information plays a vital role in converting potential buyers into actual buyers.
According to a report by Forbes, businesses that focus on improving customer experience achieve an 80% increase in their income. Data consistency and accuracy assure customers about the authenticity of product specifications, improve brand credibility, and build confidence.
By perfecting the product data, enabling increased upsell, and cross-sell opportunities, PIM helps businesses master the customer experience. In addition, an advanced PIM tool can enhance product pages, adding all the details necessary for a buyer to choose a product over competitors, boosting sales and revenue.
4. Scalability:
The number of products are subject to change as products are upgraded, modified, or changed over time. To manage and organize the purchasing, production, and communication across channels — relevant product data for multiple uses is critical.
PIM can provide complete data compilation transparency, so the latest changes stay updated when product information is updated, revived, and enriched by multiple teams across the value chain.
PIM can also act as a single point to gather and nurture product data and synchronously disseminate it across channels as the product line expands.
A repeatable, robust process to translate and localize content and push it out to appropriate markets or regions greatly increases a business’s ability to engage globally and be relevant locally. A research report by Facts & Factors reveals that the global cross-border B2C eCommerce market is forecasted to reach $4,820 billion by 2026, at a 27% CAGR through 2027.
PIM enables companies to easily and quickly onboard, validate, manage, localize, and publish the product information they need to market and sell across multiple distribution channels successfully. PIM can fast-track cross-border growth strategy that depends on expansion into new locales. This will enable businesses to achieve scalability across channels, resulting in reaching a wider user range and maximizing revenue.
5. Flexibility and Adaptability:
Quick turnaround times are crucial to eCommerce and digital success, enabling enterprises to plan and respond to changes in demand because of seasonal shifts, events, and new product launches. With a cloud-based PIM, businesses can configure the solution to take advantage of market opportunities easily.
The PIM platform offers flexibility to adapt and manage all data processes swiftly and seamlessly, resulting in multi-domain and multi-vector compatibility. With such capability, any size eCommerce business can gain an impactful omnichannel presence, ensuring that correct product data and information is accessible to customers at the right time.
In addition, it helps companies to expand their catalog and launch new products at the right time without leaving competitors the space to outshine. Also, accurate product information helps design compelling messages around the products.
With PIM’s complete, transparent, optimized, and reliable data, marketers can plan targeted promotions across sales channels for different geographic and demographic categories.
Achieve ROI with Automated PIM
The advancement in multi-channel marketing platforms provides ample opportunities for businesses to expand brand reach and increase ROI faster. However, investing in advanced PIM technology can drive more qualitative and quantitative ROI.
For enterprises looking to manage data of thousands of products and attributes, PIM’s capabilities support other systems and will produce the returns decision-makers seek. Instead of spending days in analytics programs calculating ROI, an automated PIM can enable enterprises to analyze and respond faster than competitors to generate more sales.
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