5 obstacles that keep a manufacturer from selling more, and how to remove them with a PIM system

The more sales and distribution channels involved and the wider a manufacturer's product range, the harder it becomes to update information about those products.

When responsibility for information has historically been split across dozens of systems, people, and positions, any change depends on technical and human factors. For example, a stationery manufacturer has launched a new line of notebooks, pencils, and erasers featuring cartoon characters.

First the company reached an agreement with the rights holders of the characters as copyrighted works, then the designers created a new design.

Production printed the covers and bound the notebooks, applied the design to the pencil barrels, and made erasers in a new mold.

On the signal, the sales department must send information about the new product to all distributors and partners, noting separately that sales should ideally launch in late July, because August is the peak season for children's stationery. The e-commerce unit must update the information on its own website and on marketplaces.

Marketing has to shoot the promotional photos. And so on — the list of required actions can be endless.

Each of these actions depends on a whole range of conditions and circumstances.

Who should report the changes or new products, and when?

Who should be in charge of making the changes?

What happens if the responsible employee goes on vacation or misses the signal?

How do you make sure the signal was received on time? Within what period must the changes be made? Who inside the company must approve them?

Who do you ping on the partner's side?

What do you do if D-day has passed but the information on the partner's site or on the marketplaces still hasn't been updated?

What do you do if production of stationery with a new design has already started, but the promo materials for it aren't ready yet?

If this process is not digitized, with no defined deadlines for each stage and no tools for control, validation, and feedback, there is a high chance that one of the mandatory actions will not be carried out.

The information will not reach some distributors, or the new notebooks will be published on marketplaces without preview images.

Turkey — your niche there is relatively open, and demand for the product exists, as confirmed by market research.

Or even better — a potential distributor has approached you, ready to take the product for resale.

But there's a catch — the distributor's representative asks you for a catalog with names, specifications, and composition in Turkish and with prices in Turkish lira.

If you do not have a PIM system, product information is most likely scattered across the ERP, spreadsheets of the commercial and sales departments, and the marketing department's folders of photo and video materials…

In our experience this situation is typical: each department stores the part of the product information it is directly responsible for.

To assemble an up-to-date catalog, the manager has to go through every information source, compile them into a single file, translate everything into Turkish (for example, with an online translator) and convert all the prices.

At the most conservative estimate, a catalog of 10,000 SKUs keeps one manager fully busy for three days, even if no translation is needed. With translation you can safely double the time, and the number of errors inevitable in manual copying multiplies tenfold (it's an unfamiliar language, after all).

With a PIM system, the process looks different.

The manager does not have to gather the information again, because all product data is already stored in a single source — the PIM system.

You can be confident the information on every product is current. The PIM system records the date of the last changes and the name of the user who made them.

Up-to-date product images are gathered right here, in the product cards.

There is no need to request them from the marketing department.

Most PIM systems support multilingualism and price conversion into different currencies. For example, Pimcore supports these features even in its base version (Community Edition).

This means that building a catalog in the required language takes just a couple of mouse clicks: add attributes for the description and composition and launch automatic translation for the needed products or categories.

In the same way, prices can be converted in a couple of clicks.

You can also build a catalog in PDF using the basic features of PIM systems. In Pimcore this is handled by the Gotenberg microservice, in Akeneo — by the Akeneo Product PDF Generator module.

In total, building and exporting a tidy, complete, accurate catalog in the required language will take the manager one working day at most.

Buyers, especially before making expensive purchases, do a kind of market research — even if they don't think of it in those terms.

What the product looks like, what features a hand drill has, what granola is made of, the shelf life of candy, whether the shelving unit has a manufacturer's warranty…

The list of questions that matter to a buyer could go on forever.

For all of this information the buyer goes to

The internet — the websites of official dealers or marketplaces.

If the answers to these questions are clear, accessible, and acceptable to the buyer, they will decide to buy. And if not? Imagine that, because of some absurd accident (for example, a content manager's finger slipped), your product is described differently on different sites.

On one site the vacuum cleaner has two attachments, on another — three.

Or the armchair is photographed under different lighting and appears now greenish, now beige.

Color perception in a photo depends on lighting — here is one of the most famous examples.

The buyer can't tell which source to trust and ends up trusting none of them.

But since the buyer doesn't think about the behind-the-scenes details, they stop trusting not a specific marketplace or online store, but the manufacturer itself — since that is the only common factor.

When you have a PIM system, it becomes the single trusted source of product information.

All other systems and channels are secondary to the "golden record" in PIM and merely pull information from it in some format or combination of fields.

You can set up direct export to sales channels — possible both in complex products like Pimcore and in lighter, less flexible systems such as Brandquad.

This requires a one-time mapping of fields in the PIM system to the fields in product cards on the sales channels.

And if direct integration is impossible for some reason, you can export the catalog from PIM in convenient formats — XLSX, CSV, XML, etc.

Since your systems become the source of data, photo, and video content, the discrepancies disappear.

Now all sales channels will list three attachments for the vacuum cleaner, and the chair's upholstery color will match across all visual materials.

Here we will not discuss product quality issues — they are outside the scope of this article.

Let's focus on how product information shapes buyers' expectations. Imagine: a buyer needs a dresser that will fit perfectly into a niche 135 cm wide and 50 cm deep.

Among a thousand models, he finally picked your dresser after seeing its dimensions: 125 × 135 × 43 cm.

A few centimeters' difference in depth doesn't bother him — after all, the drawers pull out.

The purchase is paid for, the dresser is delivered… but it turns out the dealer for some reason listed the drawer width without the outer body, and on each side the wall thickness — 1.2 cm — has to be added.

Those fatal centimeters are fundamentally important to the buyer. And they lead to disappointment, returns, negative reviews and other consequences that cut your product sales and damage your company's reputation. And it no longer matters whether the platform's content manager made a mistake by copying numbers from the wrong field, made a typo, or deliberately showed that particular width, considering it more important.

The review is now there, and it will affect all subsequent sales.

With a PIM system, the impact of the human factor is minimized.

You decide which information is sent to the sales channels and in what form.

Data is automatically transferred from your PIM system to the systems of dealers, marketplaces, etc. in the required scope and format.

Automation eliminates the human factor. For example, for KT.Team client Polaris, a maker of household and climate appliances, we set up delivery of data on 1,000 of the brand's SKUs to four marketplaces.

To do this, views (child cards) were created within each product card for each marketplace.

The views account for the marketplaces' own requirements for how information is organized — for example, the image format or how overall dimensions are recorded.

Colors highlight identical information that is presented differently across marketplace standards.

Yet in fact it matches, which rules out confusion and any mismatch between the buyer's expectations and the goods they receive.

When all media files (photos, certificates, licenses, patents) are linked to product cards in the PIM system, you control what reaches the sales channels.

Distributors physically cannot access outdated files.

But there is a risk that a dealer or distributor will "keep a copy" of some old file and use it at their own discretion.

That's why, for full control over media files, it's best to use a PIM system with a DAM module.