It wasn't that long ago that detailed product information was required in one web shop only. To be successful today, companies have to offer their products to their customers on a variety of channels - that's when it's time to think about a dedicated product information management system.
Product information management systems are the "single source of truth" - the central database for all data describing your products. It's just a specialized database for product data..
It typically includes
Beside standard editing features, systems often include features to
So in short: PIM systems are made to collect existing data from multiple systems and bring them together at a central place. Allow users to manage products and then distribute it to markeplaces, Comparison Shopping Service (CSS), retailers or even internal systems like recommendation engines or newsletter marketing.
There are multiple and totally unrelated pain points, that can be solved by optimizing product data management. To summarize:
Customers will not click the buy button if there are unanswered questions. So you've paid for the lead, the visitor is milimeters away from buy button - but he'll not click it. So the challenge is to ensure great product presentations for all of your products. PIM system will help you to track the quality of your content and show you where optimizations could improve conversion.
Web shops need to look modern, fancy, unique, ... but requirements will change over the years and new shop systems and new version will be released. To make your web shop future proof, it should do what it's designed for: Sell products to customers. Do not connect every system or marketplace to your web shop just because it's the only place where you have complete product data. Doing so will make every shop upgrade a real pain and reduce your flexibility to react to new customer whishes and market requirements.
Really, copy and paste is not what we should waste our time with. It makes no sense to copy products to multiple interfaces manually or edit hundreds or thousands of products in Excel documents. Having a PIM system allows you to automatically connect other systems or manually export what you need in the right format. Better results, less work, mor time for coffee.
Most product data management solutions will allow you to manage translations and product variants too. Compared to web shops, these systems are typically more optimized for those management tasks and compared to ERP systems they offer much more detailed data attributes.
As always there are multiple products and vendors from open source PHP scripts to multiple 100thousand Euros solutions. And now?
Some solutions are optimized for brands others for retailers (and most will tell you they're good for everything).
Vendors targeting retailers might offer
On the other hand, solutions for brands may include
If you have a bad internet connection or high customization requirements, having your own server in your own rack is common. But just because there's a separate server, that's typically expensive. Vendors must update and support it which is additional work.
Life of SaaS providers is much easier. There's one pool of servers that works with a very high degree of automation. Having one customer more or less on such a platform makes no difference. The downside: You can't modify the source code. If you need a feature that's not available you can't pay someone to develop this feature - except of your SaaS vendor.
That's often a religios question but in general - and that's just the writers opinion - if you want it cheap: go commercial, if you're a multi billion doller company and need a lot of customization: think about open source. Why? SaaS vendors can offer very attractive packages for most common use cases. Doing the installation and maintenance on your own doesn't make it cheaper. On the other hand, commercial vendors often try to get as much as possible from "big companies" and hey, if you already pay millions for the development - then it should be your code or open code in the end. Of course, if you work for free and e-commerce is your side project, open source is a great option.
