Decoding PIM: Boost Product Merchandising and Marketing Efficiency

Being in touch with your customers’ shopping behavior and desires is the ultimate goal of any ecommerce company. However, product merchandising and marketing are often laborious, manual processes that require multiple systems and data sources to be effective. Things like pricing information, digital assets and product descriptions are often stored in separate systems and only to be forced manually inside of the ecommerce platform itself. It is this lack of a centralized data hub from which to import, format, manipulate and publish data is why Product information Management (PIM) software was created. Not only does a PIM centralize product data across your entire technology suite (which comes with its own, separate set of benefits), but it makes product merchandising and marketing easier and more effective than ever. By leveraging all product data stored in a PIM, a single person is capable of creating a successful campaign in a short amount of time. This is especially important during the holidays and other peak shopping periods when time is an issue, but the ROI is even higher.   By using powerful, advanced elasticsearch parameters and bulk editing features, creating product merchandising campaigns can be as easy as identifying the relevant fields. Real-World Example: Let’s say a retailer uses “Skill Level” as a product attribute for filtering musical instruments. By using Jasper’s advanced search feature, one person has the ability to set up 5 different holiday landing pages from two fields: “Price Range” and “Skill Level.” Beginner Level instruments were grouped together in a new dynamically updating smart category. Intermediate and Professional Level instruments were each split into “Under $X.XX and $X.XX and up.” The product merchandising capabilities of PIM go beyond product data, extending to categories as well. The PIM stores category data and assets as well, allowing these newly created categories to be published complete with banners and rich descriptions and SEO meta data. Combined with the ability to schedule the publication of content, PIM is a fully-capable product merchandising tool. Where PIM truly shines is the ability to connect with on-site search engines such as Search Spring or Nextopia. E-commerce platforms can be limited in their sorting of products, this is where on-site search providers shine. For instance, in the case of our musical instrument merchant, categories were pushed to Search Spring and their product ordering was initially set to promote based on inventory levels with the highest showing first. From there, by tracking customer interactions with products on those pages, popular items were elevated to the forefront automatically. The entire campaign from inception to publication took only a few weeks and one person to accomplish, all thanks to Jasper PIM. The beauty of the centralized structure of a PIM is that users gain an overarching point of view into all aspects of product creation, organization and publication. The more time one spends in PIM, the more informed one becomes and the easier it is merchandise products for any occasion. ]]>