There is no doubt that e-commerce is growing rapidly and is here to stay. These last years profoundly changed shoppers' habits, which brought to light some new challenges for sellers. With the sudden shift from brick-and-mortar stores to online shops due to the multiple lockdowns, companies have had to adapt and quickly change the way they approach customers, showcase their products, ship packages, and manage their teams and resources. And to do this, most of them had to invest in tools and software that could lighten and automate processes that otherwise would have been unimaginable to manage.

Thanks to the possibility of investing large amounts of money, established companies and brands have had no problem adapting. For small and medium-sized enterprises the situation was and still is different: investing in assets and tools is not always easy with limited capital. This is why it is always good to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment in advance.

The formula used to calculate the return on investment is:

ROI = (Net Profit - Investment Costs) ÷ Investment Costs x 100

Calculating PIM’s ROI is not always as simple, since the results of proper and improved product information management are not always immediate. Therefore, the best way to understand the return on investment is to take into consideration the long-term results. 

Lack of PIM

Companies that don’t have a tool that helps them manage their product data the right way, can often experience big challenges in their way of working.

Not having a centralized solution for product information means:

• Scattered data across spreadsheets 
• Multiple data files coming from multiple sources
• Duplicated content 
• Errors 
• Disorganization

Cluttered data, especially when having a large number of SKUs to deal with is time-consuming: finding, reorganizing, enriching and distributing the correct information to the right sales channel can become a real nightmare for you and your team. 

All of this results in piling up work, delays in publishing new products and updating new ones, stress within the company and unhappy customers at last.

Investing in PIM

More and more companies have relied on tools to automate work and save time; this requires an initial investment, which in the long run leads to considerable results. A PIM tool is not an exception and provides organizations with multiple gains:

• Time savings 
• Money savings
• More sales
• More upselling & cross-selling
• Increased customer retention
• Increased customer loyalty
• More channels (webshops and marketplaces)
• More reach abroad
• Fewer returns
• Fewer errors

Therefore, investing in a PIM tool brings numerous benefits, which can be divided into two types:

• Quantitative ROI
• Qualitative ROI

Let’s now analyze them.

Quantitative ROI of PIM

Fewer errors

As we have already said the lack of proper information management brings duplicate content and errors. By utilizing a PIM tool, various manual jobs are replaced by automated processes that make it possible to drastically reduce errors in sharing and synchronizing data between suppliers, partners, resellers and sales channels. All of this is a real stress and time saver for everyone in the company.

Fewer returns

The lack of errors in the product information makes not only the seller happy but also the buyer. SaleCycle shows that 65% of e-commerce returns are due to incorrect product descriptions. This is a huge number that can affect a business in a very bad way in terms of money, organization and time. Giving clients the correct information is a must if you want to reduce your return rate and make your customer happy with their purchase.

More sales

When your clients are satisficed with their purchase, it means that they had a positive experience with your products and they are more likely to buy your products again, resulting in more conversions. In addition, when having automated and streamlined content syndication you significantly reduce your time-to-market. This leads to quicker product launches and makes it easy to expand your catalog and sales channels, therefore increasing sales.

Qualitative ROI

Better customer experience

By giving your clients the information they are looking for, you make sure to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Complete and enriched product descriptions facilitate the purchase decision process, help improve your customers’ experience and let you get better product reviews on your sales channels.

Quality product data

By causing returns and complaints, poor and missing product information is nothing but a hurdle for your online business. By automating most of the work, your team will have more time to focus on tasks such as enriching and translating your product information and creating rich descriptions that sell. Thanks to advanced filter searches and completion tabs, things become easy: finding and working on missing information, easily adding specification groups to sell on multiple platforms with channel-required attributes and providing your products with multimedia files and assets, make it possible for you and your team launching products with complete and high-quality information.

Efficiency & productivity

PIM tools significantly reduce manual work by automating multiple processes. Thanks to user roles, permissions and assignment of tasks, teams can collaborate seamlessly in enriching and creating compelling product descriptions. By helping coworkers save time and organize their work, a PIM solution reduces stress and boosts productivity inside organizations.

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Investing in a PIM solution benefits your business on various levels: compelling information lets your products stand out from the competition; complete descriptions make your client's purchase decision easy; an organized workflow helps your team work faster and better. All these advantages can only have positive effects on your business: scalability and growth are definitely worth the investment!