Considering a more advanced PIM or DAM solution for your retail business, but too concerned about ROI to fully commit to a third-party solution? You’re not alone. When it comes to product management, many retailers are languishing in a “no man’s land” of indecision here – and one of the key factors hampering their progress is uncertainty around the signs that prove a business is ready to take the next step up.
How can you tell if you’re at the right stage of growth for a more sophisticated PIM or DAM solution? Let’s flip the question. How can you be sure your growth isn’t being hampered by the lack of one?
One thing’s for sure – you can’t scale with spreadsheets. When you consider the additional functionality and efficiency that a dedicated product content management system can bring to a business, the need to make a decisive move here is clear.
In this article, we’ll explore a few common problems that suggest your business may be hampered in its current state, and in the perfect position to accelerate with the right technological assistance.
1. Your Growth is being hampered by a complex onboarding process
A poorly structured product onboarding process strikes at so many areas of your operational efficiency. Aside from being a dispiriting and inefficient use of your team’s time, you also risk passing on issues to the front line of your customer experience, with products launching late, or with incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate information.
If assets are being gathered from a wide range of sources, without a clear workflow and process for onboarding, content degradation can also occur – leading to underperforming product pages that could (and should) be working harder for you.
You may even feel as though you need to hold back on extending lines due to a lack of capacity, restrictive complexity, or limited management bandwidth.
What’s The Solution?
By taking the leap and working with a dedicated product management solution, you’re able to streamline your onboarding process significantly. Smart automations help to accelerate and expand your capacity significantly. Working with the Effectus Content Platform, you’ll also have access to the dual syndication feature, which pulls digital assets directly from brand catalogs, ensuring content degradation is eliminated. Learn more about how ECP helps free your team from the “heavy lifting” of onboarding here.
2.You struggle to find the gaps in your product content
Ecommerce is a retailer’s dream: the ability to sell anything, anywhere, anytime. But this dream can rapidly turn into a nightmare, as online sellers struggle to keep close control of a wide range of products across multiple marketplaces and channels. Without a dependable solution in place, gaps in product content or poor content quality can quickly become an expensive problem.
When product content is incomplete or misleading, the associated pages and listings will underperform. What’s more, your return rate could be impacted, as it’s harder for buyers to make informed purchase decisions. With customers at risk of receiving goods that don’t meet their expectations, you are also exposed to poor reviews, a drop in valuable user-generated content, and a higher burden placed on your support team.
Manually trawling your product range to identify and improve underperforming product listings simply isn’t practical, but the consequences of leaving poor product content unaddressed are too impactful to ignore.
What’s The Solution?
Work with a content management system that enables automated quality scoring. Effectus Content Platform can scan your inventory for underperforming listings, making it easy to proactively address gaps in content as they are identified.
What’s more, the intuitive intelligence reports produced by ECP provide advice on the “next best step” to take when it comes to improving your product content, so you can always feel confident that you’re making the best use of your time.
3.Your product management team struggles with workflow
As you scale, and your range expands, your product management team may struggle to establish effective workflows that can accommodate the pace of growth. Issues you might start to experience include loss of brand control, poor product ownership, ineffective product taxonomy. You might also run the risk of poorly performing channel partners if they find they don’t have the assets they need to sell your product effectively.
What’s The Solution?
Thorough management of metadata, content attributes, product rules, and channels is essential, and this can be made more accessible through an intuitive product management interface that encourages collaboration (and can accommodate any number of users as your team scales.)
Effectus Content Platform can help here, with the automation of many repetitive tasks, including onboarding, importing assets from supplier catalogs, performance reports that include recommendations for improvements to workflow. A single source of truth for your team also facilitates better product taxonomy, control, and instant access to digital assets. Everyone has access to what they need, as they need it!
Is Your Business Ready For A PIM / DAM System?
If you’re looking to scale, the importance of having effective control of your product information and digital assets cannot be overstated.
Any problems you currently experience when it comes to product management will only compound as you scale. Work with a platform like Effectus Content Platform, which can pair your ambition and growth with the functionality and control needed for a successful ongoing enterprise.
