PIM

Our approach

We implement and integrate product information management platforms so your catalogue lives in one accurate source of truth and flows automatically to every channel you sell on. The advice is straight: we will tell you which platform fits your catalogue, team and budget, including whether you need a PIM at all, which for a single-channel retailer is often the honest answer.

When a PIM starts paying for itself

The trigger is almost never SKU count, which is the number people reach for first. It is the number of places the same product has to be correct.

A retailer with 40,000 SKUs on one storefront usually does not need a PIM. A retailer with 2,000 SKUs selling through a storefront, a marketplace, a wholesale portal and a printed catalogue almost certainly does, because somewhere in that business a person is maintaining four versions of the same description, and the versions have already drifted.

Four signals that the threshold has been crossed:

• The same product is authored in more than one system, and nobody can say which one is right.
• Launching a new channel is a data project, not a commercial decision.
• Filters and faceted search work badly because attributes are inconsistent across products that should share them.
• Returns include “not as described” with any regularity.

What we solve

• Product data managed by hand in spreadsheets, with errors leaking onto the storefront
• Thousands of SKUs whose images, specifications and compliance data no one can keep current
• Every sales channel demanding its own format, fed by copy-paste
• Product content and pricing falling out of sync across stores and locations
• Channel launches that stall because the catalogue is not ready

What a PIM implementation actually involves

Four phases, and the first one decides the cost of the other three.

1. Taxonomy and attribute modelling. Deciding what a product is in your business: which attributes are mandatory, which vary by category, and what “complete” means for each channel. This is the phase clients expect to be quick and it is the phase that determines whether the system is usable in two years. It is also mostly a business exercise rather than a technical one.

2. Migration and cleansing. Getting data out of spreadsheets and the commerce platform and into a structure. The work here is proportional to how bad the data is, which is usually worse than anyone believes. We would rather audit it and tell you than quote around an assumption.

3. Integration. The PIM feeds the storefront and receives from the ERP. The engineering is rarely the hard part. Agreeing which system wins when two disagree is, and that is a decision someone in the business has to make.

4. Enrichment workflows. Approval flows, completeness scoring and channel readiness rules, so the catalogue stays accurate after go-live rather than decaying back toward the spreadsheet it replaced.

Choosing a platform

There is no best PIM, only a best fit, and the deciding question is who will operate it day to day.

• Akeneo, the leading open-source PIM. Strong for retailers who want control and extensibility and have someone technical to own it. We implement Community and Enterprise, model the taxonomy, and connect it to Adobe Commerce and Shopify.
• Salsify, enterprise PXM for brands syndicating product content out to major retailers and marketplaces. The right answer when your problem is distribution rather than internal management.
• SKUvantage, the Australian syndication platform used across local grocery and retail. We connect its feeds into your PIM and commerce platform so locally syndicated content lands automatically.
• A lighter SaaS PIM, often correct for a smaller catalogue where the real problem is that product data lives in spreadsheets. Paying for an enterprise platform to solve a spreadsheet problem is a common and expensive mistake.

What’s included

• PIM selection advice matched to your catalogue, team and budget
• Taxonomy design, attribute modelling, data migration and go-live
• Two-way integration with Adobe Commerce, Shopify and your ERP
• Enrichment workflows, approval flows and completeness scoring
• Ongoing support as the catalogue and channel mix grow

What bad product data actually costs

It surfaces in three places, and only one of them is obvious.

Search and filtering degrade when attributes are missing or inconsistent, because faceted navigation can only be as good as the data behind it. Conversion falls when a shopper cannot find the detail they need to decide. And returns rise, because a wrong specification gets discovered after delivery instead of before it.

The third is the expensive one, and it is almost never attributed back to the catalogue, it gets recorded as a logistics cost or a customer service problem.

PIM and pricing

A PIM tells every channel what the product is. Pricing is a separate problem with a separate owner, and conflating the two is how both end up wrong. Our Price Hub platform handles the pricing half for franchise and multi-store retailers; connected over API, the two give you the right product, the right content and the right price in every location.

Related work

Product data sits underneath most of the commerce problems we are asked to fix. If a replatform is on the table. It is worth reading what we look for before an e-commerce migration, a new storefront inherits a messy catalogue intact, and cleaning it first is cheaper than cleaning it twice. For the integration side, what ERP integration really costs covers the four questions that set the price.