# Product information management (PIM)

URL: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/product-information-management/

## What is product information management (PIM)?

Product information management (PIM) is where product descriptions, attributes, images and translations are written, approved and kept before they go out to a website, a marketplace and a product feed. It does not hold stock levels or warehouse prices — that is what inventory software is for. PIM answers how a product is described outside the company, and whether it is described the same way in every channel.

**Example**

A distributor sells 6,000 products through its own shop, two marketplaces and a feed to a comparison site. The descriptions live in three systems and one shared file. When the manufacturer changes the dimensions of a model, the change has to be made in four places; in practice it is made in two, and a customer then receives a box that does not match the description.

With a PIM the description, the attributes, the images and the translation are edited once and travel out from there. If the rule is that a product only goes out with its required fields filled — image, material, warranty, translation — the 200 new products a month reach the channels when they are ready, not half-finished.

**Where the line with other systems runs**

Inventory software or an ERP keeps quantities, prices and documents. A PIM keeps how the product looks to the outside: copy, attributes, categories, images, languages and the relationships between products. The shop is a channel, not a system of record — it shows what it was given. With no product information system, that role falls to a file, and a file has no permissions, no history of changes and no way of showing what reached which channel.

**Why it matters for a business**

Complete, consistent information shows up in three places: fewer returns caused by a description that did not match, better ranking for searches that carry an attribute — size, material, compatibility — and fewer listings rejected by marketplaces that insist on particular fields. A new language or a new channel also stops being a project from scratch; one layer gets filled in instead.

**What to ask**

- Which fields are required before a product can go out, and who checks them?
- How are translations handled, and what happens to a product that has none yet?
- How does supplier data come in — file, spreadsheet, feed — and how much manual work is left?
- Who may change a description or an attribute, and is it visible who changed what?
- How do products reach each channel, and how long before a change is visible there?Once there is more than one channel, this usually runs alongside warehouse synchronisation, which carries the descriptions down the same path as the quantities.

- Services: [Warehouse sync and ERP integration](https://tnb-tech.com/en/services/warehouse-sync/)
- Glossary: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/