You’ve decided you need to do something about your unfit-for-purpose product data management. You’re suffering from high bounce rates and excessive returns, leading to irate customers creating a daunting backlog for your customer service department. Unsurprisingly, revenue is shrinking.
You may even be aware that selecting the Product Information Management (PIM) solution best suited to your needs isn’t just a software decision. It’s a strategic commitment which is likely to shape how your business progresses from now on:
- The quality of how you manage product data
- The internal collaboration
- Enhanced internal collaboration
- Consistent product experiences across every channel
- The associated increase in customer satisfaction and brand allegiance
So, if you get it right, the PIM will become a growth driver. Get it wrong, and you condemn yourselves to years of technical debt, workarounds, and frustrated teams and inexorably decreasing revenues.
We’ve written this short guide to help you cut through vendor noise, anecdotal information, and misconceptions about what PIM actually does. We’re confident that this will enable you to address your PIM selection with structure, clarity, and confidence. Our format follows a step-by-step approach to getting yourselves in a position to do so.
Step 1: Diagnose your real product data problems
Before evaluating platforms, understand why you need PIM. The most common organisational triggers include:
- Fragmented product data scattered across spreadsheets and systems
- Chronically inconsistent information across eCommerce, marketplaces, and sales teams
- Sluggish product launches and manual correction of bad data (as well as enrichment work)
- Habitual problems managing variants, assets, or regulatory data requirements
Be specific. “Our data’s a real mess” is not a requirement. “We aren’t capable of launching a product in under eight weeks without manual fixes” is.
Step 2: Define your core use cases
Not all PIMs are built for the same purposes. You need to have clarity regarding what success looks like for your business, in areas such as:
- Complex product hierarchies or high volumes of SKUs
- Multichannel publishing (D2C, B2B, marketplaces, print)
- Supplier onboarding and data validation
- Localisation, compliance, or sustainability reporting
- Tighter integration with ERP, DAM, eCommerce platforms, or marketplaces
Drilling down into granular detail at this stage helps to avoid the risk of overbuying features which you’ll never use. Or even worse, underbuying, failing to configure what you actually need.
Step 3: Map your data model and governance needs
Your PIM needs to reflect the reality of your product structure. Therefore, give due diligence to assessing:
- Your product types, variants, and relationships
- Product attribute complexity (such as technical, marketing, regulatory)
- The procedures you have in place (or not) for workflows and data access and treatment approvals
- The rules and data quality thresholds you have in place
- Clarity of ownership (and thus, accountability for data quality)
If your data model is over-rigid, teams will invariably end up working outside the PIM, which defeats the whole object. Flexibility and governance need to coexist.
Step 4: Align your stakeholders early
PIM projects fail when treated purely as IT initiatives without meaningful input and involvement of interested parties, company-wide. Engage and involve those key groups early in the selection project. Different groups have different priorities:
- Marketing needs speed and storytelling flexibility
- Ecommerce needs channel-ready accuracy
- IT needs security, scalability, and clean integrations
- Operations needs control and reliability
Getting your ducks in a row here will prevent likely issues with user adoption once you go live.
Step 5: Decide on deployment and architecture
The large majority of modern PIMs on the market uses the cloud-native model as opposed to the on-premises installation of a monolithic software suite. This model offers faster deployment and lower operational overhead. Having said that, in certain instances, on-premises may still be relevant if you face strict data residency or legacy integration constraints.
Additionally, you need to assess whether you need:
- A monolithic suite
- A best-of-breed PIM integrated into a composable stack[1]
- API-first[2] architecture for future scalability
Step 6: Shortlist potential options intelligently
You’re now in a position to create a vendor ‘long list’ and then narrow it down quickly. Group potential options by their fit with your needs:
- Mid-market SaaS platforms for speed and usability
- Enterprise platforms for complex governance
- Composable solutions for headless commerce
At this stage, ideally, you’re looking at three to five serious contenders.
Step 7: Run specific scenario-based demos
Once you get to the stage where you’re getting vendor demos, don’t accept generic ones. Ask them to use your data and ‘real-life’ use case scenarios. For instance:
- Onboarding a new product
- Enriching content and assets
- Syndicating product information to your key channels
Pay careful attention to how easily vendors can adapt to these scenarios. When all’s said and done, intuition, flexibility, and clarity matter a lot more than fancy feature slides.
Step 8: Evaluate integration and automation capacity
As a merchant, a PIM will be sitting at the centre of your tech stack. Therefore, evaluate using criteria like:
- API maturity and pre-built connectors
- ERP, DAM, marketplace, and CMS integrations
- Capacity of AI-supported automation for areas like validation of incoming supplier data, product content enrichment, and channel syndication
In our experience, one of the most expensive mistakes with PIM implementation projects is weak integration with legacy systems.
Step 9: Compare total cost of ownership (TCO)
When using cloud-native solutions, licensing is only part of the cost. Factor in other costs:
- Implementation and onboarding
- Integration and connector fees
- Training and change management
- Need for internal resources (people, money, time)
You know the adage: “You get what you pay for.” Cheaper platforms can end up costing more in the longer term.
Step 10: Validate your choice with a proof of concept
Before you commit and part with your money, test the platform with real workflows. A short POC reveals what sales PPTs never will, such as gaps in usability, data modelling limits, and friction when attempting to integrate with your stack.
Final words
Just like any high-value purchase, the best PIM is not the one with the longest list of features – it’s the one your teams will actually use with confidence, which fits your data reality, and that can scale with your business and fulfil your strategic aims. Our structured, step-by-step approach converts your PIM selection from being a leap of faith into an informed, mindful, and confident strategic decision.
It’s a high-impact decision, and a potentially costly one if you make the wrong call.
So, if you’re about to shortlist vendors but your requirements, data model, and integration realities aren’t locked down, you’re taking on avoidable risk. Get in touch with us today to arrange to run a structured selection process. We’ll clarify use cases, define the target data model and governance, pressure-test demos with real scenarios, and help you choose a PIM that fits your operating model – not just one with an impressive-looking list of features.