500 million products in 2000 cards: how to show customization options to a client without complicating the catalog

6/9/2023. Reading time: 5 min. We explain how Pimcore was implemented in the architecture of the manufacturing and retail company Askona.

Using reference lists and rules increased sales of customized products, cut order time from 2 weeks to a few seconds, and reduced non-core workload for production.

When you are responsible for a product throughout its entire lifecycle, from development to sales, you can keep adapting it to customer needs: create made-to-order products or customize standard items.

To show customers every option, a company often ends up creating a huge catalog.

In theory, this shows variety.

In practice, however, customers see hundreds of pages of similar products with minor differences: color, size, or the presence of extra elements.

Such a detailed catalog is hard to maintain manually, difficult to navigate, and every new page lowers conversion.

What should you do when you want to meet customer needs, and how can a PIM system help with that? The KT.Team PIM systems integrator explains.

For Askona, our team implemented a PIM system that made it possible to represent information on 500 million products in just 2,000 cards.

What about unique combinations?

Ordering them was a long and labor-intensive process for everyone involved: the customer, the seller, and production.

If a customer wanted, for example, to change the height of a bed's legs, the sales team had to check with production technologists whether the change was allowed and wait up to two weeks for an answer.

Customers did not want to wait, so they either ordered products from the visible part of the catalog or turned to other manufacturers.

The broad customization options were underused.

How is a card created for an individual product variation?

For each configurable characteristic, the KT.Team team created reference lists of possible options, for example: sofa fabric reference list mattress length reference list

Reference list of materials for sofa back cushions

The permissible values for these reference lists were provided by Askona's technologists.

More complex conditions also had to be taken into account.

Some attributes, such as fabric type, can affect the applicability of others, such as the quilting type on a bed's headboard.

Not all bed models can be ordered with an upholstered headboard, different chair types require different fabrics, and so on.

Such relationships had to be accounted for in the reference lists as an additional condition.

A system made up of a master card and reference lists makes it easy to create any permitted product variant the moment it is needed.

When the seller or customer selects the required attributes from the lists, a new SKU is created in all of the company's systems.

At the same time, IT systems are not burdened with an excessive number of unused SKUs.

The customer selects the attributes and gets a complete picture of the product, while production receives the order as separate components.

If a product has only a few editable attributes, the system uses automatic card generation.

This option is needed for products that cannot be changed significantly. For example, if a mattress model can only have its length and width changed, all possible variants will be created at once.

The buyer can choose from 500 million product variants. By selecting attributes, they can create their own version of the product.

The seller assembles the product for a specific request right away, taking production capabilities and constraints into account.

It can immediately inform the customer about production and delivery times.

The approval time for non-standard orders was reduced.

The system makes the possibilities and constraints for changes to the base product visible immediately: the buyer does not have to wait for an answer from engineers about whether, for example, the sofa can be made longer or the cabinet produced in a different color.