Why Product Information Management (PIM) is Vital for B2B Selling

Whether you’re a distributor, wholesaler, or manufacturer, you rely on your master catalog of product data. It’s your lifeline. It’s how you communicate and work with your partners, both resellers and retailers.

But do you currently manage your master catalog the best that you can? Is your data quality where you want it to be?

It’s probably not. You know you need to improve it. In this post, we’ll discuss how a Product Information Management (PIM) system can significantly improve your master catalog and help you seize new selling opportunities. (more…)

Why You Should Use a PIM as Your Item Master

When you started your eCommerce business, just selling on your webstore was enough. But, then you were successful and grew. You added new webstores or new sales channels like Amazon or eBay. That introduced some complexity.

Merchandising (managing product information) in a growing, multichannel business is one of the most important areas of your business to improve. Your ability to do it well has a direct impact on your ability to sell more products.

You probably managed your product data in your eCommerce platform to start. Doing so doesn’t work well as your business expands to new sales channels. You need a Product Information Management tool that is specifically suited to the task.

In this post, we’ll discuss why you need to use a Product Information Management tool as your item master instead of your eCommerce platform.

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Shopify Multiple Stores: How to Overcome Common Challenges

(This post was last published on May 17, 2019. We’ve updated it for accuracy and completeness.)

Shopify sellers shouldn’t feel limited to selling through one storefront. Instead, you can use multiple storefronts to diversify your brand.

However, managing multiple Shopify stores comes with its own set of challenges. To some merchants, the idea of managing two unique stores sounds overwhelming and difficult.

We don’t want you to feel that way! It shouldn’t keep you from expanding your business.

In this post, we’ll explain why you should sell on multiple stores, the challenges of doing so, and best practices to be successful.

B2B eCommerce: Native B2B Platform Vs Repurposing B2C

(This is a guest post from our friends over at OroCommerce, the first purposefully built from the ground up open source B2B eCommerce platform.)

The eCommerce software market is full of excellent solutions which can make it difficult to decide on the right tool for your business. If you’re selling to manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and resellers, you may start your search with a purpose-built B2B eCommerce solution. However, there are many resources suggesting that, with enough B2B plugins and integrations, you can quickly make a typical eCommerce system B2B-capable.

In this post we will analyze if there is a grain of truth in these suggestions.

Common Challenges of eCommerce Catalog Management and How to Improve

(This article was last published on March 30, 2016. It has been updated for accuracy and completeness.)

A difficult part of selling online is managing your product catalog. You could have hundreds or thousands of SKUs to publish across different sales channels like your webstore and marketplaces.

It’s easy then for your product data to become messy and inconsistent. It can be tedious and time-consuming to normalize for all your use cases. This is why many merchants end up settling for subpar product information because it’s simply too much to handle. However, poor product information can lead to other issues like incomplete product listings online.

Here are some common challenges that merchants face with eCommerce product catalog management and what you can do to improve it.