Popular PIM systems: functionality, key features, cost

The year 2020 spurred the PIM market, or rather directed the trading and manufacturing businesses towards greater process automation. In this article, we reviewed the 8 most popular PIM systems and prepared a brief overview of their main features.

Each product can have more than 200 attributes: descriptions, articles, prices, photos, seasonality, discounts, the connections between products, etc. These attributes have to be assigned, edited, accepted, transferred to sales channels and internal systems, updated, and transferred again.

With proper transmission to marketplaces, each attribute can improve the position of catalogue item or change something in its relationships. Therefore, adding attributes or new values to them is a separate business process with actions required for its implementation. In addition, each attribute can be a separate complex directory that the procurement department, production service and suppliers can use for work.

Back in 2012, the Goodmasters research company estimated that it takes an average of 25 minutes a year to collect and update data about one SKU. It is still relevant for non-core systems and applications. The speed of data entry, for example, in Excel is slightly affected by the product version used by the manager.

If a company has 100 SKUs in their catalogue (which happens, though not very often), the time wasted on operations with attributes can be neglected. And what about companies that have more than 1000 SKU?

Even if there are 5000 SKU, the figures will be quite impressive. A few calculations will give us a total of 12 staff months per year spent on the manual data processing. In other words: there is an employee, who spends ALL their working time on product data processing!

Large catalogues result in greater maintenance costs and higher risks of human failure in maintenance. Most business processes are implemented in people's heads, instead of data systems. The data quality decreases whereas the time to market increases.

The PIM system (product information management system) automates your product information management: control of filling in, updating, versioning, sending and receiving data, data searching, etc. According to the research previously mentioned, the PIM system implementation reduces the time for collecting and updating data about each SKU to 4 minutes per year which is six times quicker! Also, the time to market for particular products is reduced by 3-4 times. Another important thing – the data quality improves significantly.

Apart from time savings, the PIM system allows you to:

In this article, we will review 8 systems most popular in Europe:

A master system for the centralized management of marketing and technical information. Akeneo PIM system is used at more than 500 enterprise-scale companies.

Akeneo PIM is a full-fledged PIM system with PxM elements. It provides:

The history of product data changes is saved in the system: you can see what has been changed, when and by whom. The administrator can roll back the changes to the necessary version at any time.

The open source code allows you to scale Akeneo PIM, taking into account the expansion of the catalogue nomenclature and the increasing number of distribution channels.

In addition to that, you can install modules for PxM: Akeneo Onboarder and Franklin. You can make improvements at the code level (for the Community Edition).

Businesses of any scale. The basic Community Edition (code-first, installed on your servers) with limited functionality is suitable for small businesses, whereas Enterprise Edition (SaaS) with advanced features will meet the requirements of major companies. We think that, in general, Akeneo PIM is not a good option for manufacturing companies and companies with strongly related product attributes due to the lack of the functionality of independent directories.

Akeneo PIM comes in three editions with a different number of features.

Yearly license cost is to be negotiated with Akeneo PIM personally.

Catsy is a PIM/DAM/PxM system providing the opportunity of centralized management of product information, digital data (photos, videos, etc.) and consumer experience.

Quick launch. The vendor's successful cases include the deployment and launch of the system, uploading the data about 66,000 items to the system in nine days.

The Catsy solution is designed for businesses of any scale. A small company can choose only the necessary modules, and then add new PIM system modules along with its growth.

Small and medium-sized businesses specializing in product manufacture and selling.

It is deployed in the cloud (SaaS). There is no free version, but you can order a demo from the vendor to make an informed purchasing decision.

User licenses are purchased for each unique user.

Information about the annual subscription cost is provided upon request.

Inriver is a PIM system with well-developed marketing tools. Apart from storing, unifying and transmitting information about products, it allows you to get effective recommendations about things affecting the consumer decisions.

A "pure" PIM system. Additional MDM and DAM functions are not available.

It is positioned as the only product in the industry with a flexible scalable model.

Сompanies operating in the B2B and B2C segments, primarily those focusing on online channels.

A SaaS product. Storage pricing is based on the amount of product data stored and the expected server loads. The starting price is € 55,000 per year; the inriver Evaluate system for working with the digital shelf is paid separately.

Pimcore is a PIM/DAM/MDM system and e-Commerce platform that is suitable for managing catalogues with complex structure, a multi-level hierarchy and multiple relationships between products.

Some Pimcore functionality is a low-code. This means that individual integrations, business processes for collecting and transmitting product data can be implemented by company managers or analysts themselves without developer's involvement.

Pimcore is open source, so its scaling capacities are unlimited.

Companies of any scale and with any number of sales channels. It is considered a good option for integrators and manufacturing companies. What is especially nice is that the Community Edition has open source code and provides sufficient functionality even for major implementations that can be deployed on enterprise servers.

Three tariff plans, the cost depends on the functionality.

Plytix is a SaaS PIM system with DAM out-of-the-box functionality. It's aimed at the joint work with product information. The vendor mentions a well-thought and intuitive system design as one of Plytix key advantages.

Plytix opens up great opportunities in terms of analytics: you can get reports on the selected filters that are really important to you (sales channels, products, categories, dates (Black Fridays), time periods, price ranges). Dashboards are formed right in the system. Some data is taken directly from Google Analytics.

In addition to the basic functionality, you can connect:

Depending on the selected tariff plan, Plytix can suit the needs of small businesses and large commercial and industrial organizations with up to 100,000 SKUs in their catalogue.

Three tariff plans have been developed for Plytix users.

All tariff plans provide for DAM functionality.

PIM/MDM platform (SaaS), part of the Syndigo ecosystem. An industry leader according to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions and The Forrester Wave: Product Information Management.

Separate applications for data management, tracking, and improving the consumer experience. Riversand products have built-in applications to analyze commercial information, making it easier to see the bottlenecks in your processes and data and improve the quality of your presence in sales channels.

It is possible to supplement the basic Riversand platform functionality taking into account the business needs by downloading connectors, applications for consumer experience tracking, and services for content improvement from the Riversand App Marketplace. Also, you can create your own applications for Riversand.

The enterprise-level companies.

The approximate price for medium-sized businesses starts at € 50,000 per year, for large businesses – at € 150,000 per year. The price depends on the number of users working with the system, and on the required capacity of the cloud product data storage.

Sales Layer is a PIM system with DAM functionality. It is positioned as "the first PIM system developed with the special focus on marketing departments". Cloud-based.

Automatic translation of product descriptions into the world's 36 most widely-spoken languages: English, French, Chinese, Spanish, etc.

The system automatically retouches uploaded images.

The basic functions of the Sales Layer are available to all users. As the catalogue expands and the number of sales channels increases (as well as the need for additional functionality, such as connectors, languages, etc.), the company will have to switch to more expensive tariffs.

Businesses of any scale. It is in demand among multinational global companies that have more than 100,000 SKUs in their base.

Three tariffs for companies with different functionality needs.

Information about the tariff plans and the prices is provided upon request.

Salsify is not only a PIM system, but also a commerce experience platform – a platform that handles all the product data, prices, consumer experience, product promotion experience, digital data, etc.

Cloud-based. Individual microservices support multi-tenancy.

A separate product within Salsify platform is a live chat with digital shoppers embedded directly in a website or online store.

Salsify was built with the microservice architecture, parts of the system support multi-tenancy. This allows companies to optimize the cost of platform ownership. Salsify provides the opportunity to use only the services that you need, and scale the platform if it's required due to the company's growth.

Retailers, who work across multiple channels or sell products of several brands. The system is designed for work of large teams and for the processing of large amounts of constantly changing data.

The cost of license starts at $ 25,000 per year. The price depends on the number of users and their roles, the selected functionality and the cloud data storage capacity.

At first glance, if we consider the PIM functionality, there is no great difference between the review participants. Of course, each system has its own features and extra functions that might be necessary for a business (although they can also coincide). In that case, how can you choose an exact product to integrate into the IT infrastructure of your business, if a theoretical review of the functionality is not quite helpful?

At the stage of choosing an exact product, it is important to understand whether it fits the current IT architecture of the company, how it can affect the existing processes, what problems are possible during integration or further system scaling.

IT consulting can help you clarify all these points. After analyzing your business, the existing processes and goals for the next few years, the consultant will reduce the number of options to two or three.

The next step is requesting a demo from the vendor or its partner. You will be able to see how the systems look and operate, if they have a convenient interface and which of the claimed functions you really need.

In our experience, these two stages are sufficient to make a decision and start the integration of a PIM system – or any other system in the company's IT infrastructure.