Is your PIM strategy outdated?

For decades, the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) had been the lynchpin in Product Information Management (PIM); from e-commerce listings to inventory control. It provided retailers with a way to maintain a single source of truth while playing a crucial role in helping them manage, organize, and distribute their product data across many different channels.

In the e-commerce space of today, however, ‘digital’ is no longer an extension of the customer journey — it has become the foundation for it. As such, consumers have come to expect hyper-personalized shopping environments and content-rich experiences. 

All of this means that the SKU-centric model is no longer as fit-for-purpose as it once was. However, many brands are still wedded to this traditional approach and therefore run the risk of alienating, disappointing, and frustrating their customer base.

Read on to discover why SKUs are no longer the star of the show, and why brands need to adapt sooner rather than later to an experience-led PIM approach.

The problem with the SKU-centric approach in PIM

The traditional PIM system was designed to help companies centralize and manage their product data in a structured way; anything from color codes and sizing details to weights and prices. 

These platforms can still handle this task very well, but the problem is that buying behaviors have moved on a great deal since then. Your customers don’t shop for SKUs; they shop for products that can solve a problem for them or enhance their life in some way.

The problem is that the older style PIM solutions are very limited in their ability to help businesses satisfy these current buying behaviors.

• Rigid taxonomies mean that the way data is structured does not match up well with how consumers actually shop.
• Enriching content with rich media or storytelling often has to happen outside of the legacy PIM solution (for example, in a digital asset management (DAM) platform) because there is no provision for an ‘layer’ of experience-related data to be built within that platform.
• Hardcoded SKU associations mean that implementing strategies like product bundling and personalization is simply not an option.
• Modern tech stacks, an increasing number of which are now composable, can struggle when it comes to integrating with a PIM platform that’s firmly SKU-based. Ultimately, this can cause APIs to break at the point they try to translate ‘rigid’ product data into a dynamic digital customer experience.

In short, a traditional PIM system wasn’t built to factor in the flexibility, adaptability, and context needed in order to cater for the modern shopper.

Why has e-commerce shifted to being more experience-driven?

Several trends have converged over recent years, and these have accelerated the need for e-commerce brands to move beyond the traditional SKU-centered thinking:

1. Direct to Consumer (D2C) brands and personalization

D2C brands like Temu, Dollar Shave Club, and Casper thrive because of their ability to tailor their customers’ digital experiences.

It means that, beyond one rigid SKU, contextual, flexible product data is now needed to ‘feed’ those personalization engines, headless commerce setups, and AI-driven recommendation tools.

2. More demand for customizable products

From customizable nursery art prints to configurable furniture sets, product variants are not necessarily pre-defined by the manufacturer or seller anymore — they’re customer-defined — and a single SKU doesn’t reflect this level of product ‘fluidity’.

3. The delivery of consistent experiences for omnichannel

Today’s e-commerce brands are under constant pressure to deliver consistent, compelling shopping experiences across different consumer touchpoints; from apps and marketplaces, to bricks-and-mortar retail stores.

Delivering this level of consistency calls for an omnichannel narrative that goes beyond syncing of SKU data; it requires a unified product story across all channels.

What an experience-centric model looks like

The e-commerce brands most likely to succeed in future are those that can make the leap from a product-centric PIM approach to an experience-centric PIM approach — and it requires a complete organizational rethink about how your business’s product information is stored, structured, managed, and distributed.

An ‘experience-led’ approach to PIM means:

• Utilizing a modern PIM platform that leaves inflexible category trees behind. Instead, editorial content, rich media, and experiential assets are fully leveraged, and products can be grouped in other ways besides ‘product category’, such as ‘use case’, ‘lifestyle’, or ‘compatibility.’
  
• Harnessing content to create additional data, which then allows for the introduction of semantic models that properly cater for the consumer behaviors, e.g. search behaviors.
  
• Enabling more dynamic relationships between product page and consumer — for instance, presenting related products that appear in response to a customer’s browsing behavior.
  
• That your PIM platform has the native capability to integrate seamlessly with other martech, via APIs. Smoother integrations with platforms like commerce engines and a DAM platform can power the creation of better online shopping experiences for your customers.

What this means for your next PIM strategy

Experience-centric PIM is quickly emerging as the new standard. It’s a necessary evolution, and the businesses that embrace it will be the ones that survive and thrive in this next era of digital commerce.

This change in approach requires your PIM practitioners, sales, digital, and e-commerce teams to embrace not just a change in mindset when it comes to technical aspects, but also to the philosophy behind your brand’s approach to PIM.

For instance, your teams will need to decide how product data governance should work going forward. Who will own certain categories of data, like the data that’s specifically tied to customer experience? And how should your teams collaborate on any decisions that involve taxonomy?

How data is treated and thought of needs that mindset shift too. For example, structured data isn’t just there to be validated — it requires creative context and enhancement through high-quality digital assets and enriched content.

Real-life customer story: Fetim Group

Fetim Group, a Dutch home improvement goods manufacturer, implemented Inriver PIM to help create a robust system for managing complex product data (80,000 items and 15,000 active SKUs).

Powered by Inriver PIM, Fetim Group were soon able to streamline their product data management process, which resulted in improved efficiency, better product data quality, and an enhanced ability to meet the evolving needs of its online customers.

“Working with Inriver is a huge step towards controlling our own data while creating new customer journeys.”
— Nathan de Haas, Fetim Group

Make the shift to experience-centric PIM with Inriver

SKUs aren’t going to completely disappear anytime soon, but its dominance in terms of PIM has reached an end. 

For brands that want to survive in a world where customer experience is the main differentiator, they’ll need to let go of the product-centric mindset and make the shift to one which is led primarily by ‘experience’.

Inriver PIM is a dynamic platform that can help power better customer experiences; by empowering brands to embrace a richer, more contextual, creative data model that supports the digital buying journey — at every customer touchpoint.