Product information management (PIM)
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.