PIM Solutions With Shopify Plus: Benefits & Usage

In the last few years, we have worked on many projects involving a PIM (across Magento and Shopify Plus) which simplified the process of data migration, allow for more complex logic, add an extra layer of data governance, utilized multiple things of the e-commerce platform and generally make managing product data highly efficient and effective.

Thus, we realized that using a PIM solution is a great way to meet complex requirements and develop e-commerce with better governance. In this article, we will go through the advantages of using a PIM solution and what PIM solutions are available for Shopify Plus.

Benefits Of Using A PIM Solution With Shopify Plus

1. Product Data Governance

There are huge chances of making errors with product data management in Shopify such as with tags which are free-text fields with no validation. Thus, if you switch to a more manageable/structured format can reduce the error considerably. PIM allows you to create attributes/fields using pre-populated options or you can also add a layer of validation which is highly valuable.

Along with this, you can also set rules for not publishing changes by a PIM until all fields have been populated. It assures the quality of product data.

2. Managing Product Data Across Multiple Stores

This factor is highly important for the businesses that are going to use Shopify Plus stores because this is a major weakness of the Shopify platform (lack of multi-store functionality). A PIM allows you to manage data at different levels and you can choose which data points to push in different stores. There are shareable fields across different stores or you can also create a global value. This is really good for Shopify stores and it can also reduce the repetitive manual work of your teams to do around merchandising and production tasks. There is the same principle for multi-brand setups and B2B/B2C setups.

A plethora of Shopify Plus stores are managing more than 10 separate clone stores using a PIM. PIM is giving them efficient management of product pricing along with descriptions, other product data points, images, and various other things. With pricing, a PIM is helpful for creating more advanced logic for international pricing, for those without fixed price files.

A PIM (on the basis of its type) can apply benefits for asset management too such as image resizing and then sharing assets across the different stores.

3. Automation

Automation is another huge benefit of a PIM which lets you create or implement logic or rules to assign data to products, associate products to categories, assign assets, etc. The same goes for Shopify. It can help to make things easier for store managers especially if you have multiple stores.

Let’s Understand It By An Example Of A Nike T-Shirt:

• The brand “Nike” will be automatically added to Nike collections across all stores
• If the gender is men or women but if it is not present in the product name, inject value in the meta title. The same goes for things like collection and product type etc.
• Now if gender is “men” and brand is “Nike”, it will automatically add Nike men’s copy block to the product
• Since it is globally available it will publish in all stores
• Since “brand” is Nike, multiply GBP_price by 1.5 for AUD_price
• Send all images to all stores
• Inherit images for variant products from the parent

4. Efficient To Manage Other Aspects

Apart from product data, there are many things that can be handled/managed through a PIM with Shopify such as category merchandising (dependent on how the collections have been set up), the logic for upsells, cross-sells or related products, product collection association, management and distribution of collection page content, images used in the store, breadcrumbs addition, and much more.

With the availability of Shopify, PIMs can help to manage a lot of different areas that can be highly time-consuming in the admin.

5. Unified Product Data Against Different Stores And Channels

A PIM if used with Shopify plus allows you to keep the data in sync at different stores. If you are having multiple stores for your business then there are different product data in places, merchandising differently, etc. A PIM will help you to manage these areas at a global level and ensure unified product data.

Popular PIM Systems To Use With Shopify Plus

1. Akeneo

Akeneo PIM is a highly easy-to-use PIM that optimizes all your processes. It can bring great value to Magento or Shopify Plus stores. It is considered a leader of the PIM industry and has numerous complementary modules for supporting the management of supplier data and many other things. Akeneo comes in both free and paid versions. It can centralize all the product information and makes fluent the process of collecting, spreading, and enriching the product data. It can easily integrate into other systems and tools. Akeneo is perfectly customizable for meeting your organization’s needs. It is built to support all types of catalogs whether simple or complex.

Integrating Akeneo in your online e-commerce store will result in reduced returns, better customer experiences, speed up the process of maintaining product information, and high conversion rates. It comes with standard features like import/export data, organizing & classifying products, Edit/Translation, Extension ecosystem, product asset manager, and others.

Some Of The Other Benefits Are:

• Managing category content
• Sorting and merchandising of category
• Handling of lots of logic around product availability, product shipping classes, and various other things
• Management of category association
• Managing of product data for different stores against single products and then different data points will pass into different Shopify stores as tags and meta fields

2. JasperPIM

Jasper PIM is highly popular in the US in comparison to the UK as our US clients use this PIM more. But both the UK and the US find it good for their Shopify Plus store. It is a SaaS-based PIM that has been used a lot with Shopify Plus and BigCommerce stores.

3. Pimberly

This is a Manchester-based PIM startup that can serve all market ends. It is quite different from Akeneo in terms of what is offered as a managed service i.e. you will not have an integration partner. It has been used by Shopify Plus retailers such as Moonpig, Current Body, and Harvey Nichols. It has a rich feature-set with automation, workflows, channel management features, scheduling publishing, enrichment, and strong DAM features.

 Wrapping Up

We’ve gone over the benefits of using a PIM with Shopify Plus, as well as the finest solutions available. Hire the best Shopify development company that specializes in building ecommerce stores from the ground up and integrating them with various software.