Redesigning an e-commerce site: what role can PIM play?

Finally validated. The project of the year (or even the following ones), the one on which the company is betting to grow and renew itself: new e-commerce site, migration to a new platform, upgrading your existing site or, more structurally, a change of ERP. This large-scale project will impact the entire company and all of its businesses, but is also particularly long and costly. Once started, other projects will be difficult to launch in parallel with this one.

But are you completely sure that the time/cost ratio of this type of project is absolutely profitable for the company?

Implementing a PIM to address structural issues will enable you to move much faster and more efficiently on future projects. In the meantime, PIM is not a "project". On the contrary, it's a solution that can be put in place quickly, and will generate ROI for the company. From quick wins to long-term growth, find out why some companies have prioritized PIM over their IS and e-commerce projects?

Reasons for an e-commerce redesign

There are many reasons why a company might choose to overhaul its e-commerce and/or IS.

• Designing your website. Your website may have become obsolete and no longer meets the trends of your business sector and certain standards for website design. It's not as responsive as it should be, and the web design is out of date.
• Improve user experience (UX). Navigation on your website is not fluid and your users have difficulty finding their way around, finding products and their content and/or placing orders. All this can lead to a loss of business as well, by lowering the conversion rate. The user experience can be improved by focusing on ergonomics, site usability and navigation.
• Mobileadaptation. More and more users are browsing websites from their mobiles, and a redesign may be necessary if the site is not responsive to the tools used: mobile, tablet, computer, etc.
• Optimizing your site's performance. Several elements can have a negative impact on your site's conversion rate: load times that are too long, features that aren't responsive...
• Optimizing your SEO. Best practices and trends in search engine optimization (SEO) are changing fast. So, to keep up with the search engines, it's crucial to maintain an optimized website that can improve search results and increase your brand's visibility online.

To understand the reasons behind a company's decision to overhaul its e-commerce and IS systems, you also need to understand who the teams involved are, and what is the reality of their jobs on the ground.

E-commerce redesign: the reality for business teams

Product, marketing and e-commerce teams are the ones who manage content on a daily basis by enriching and distributing product information. They are directly impacted by the issues of limiting tools and ecosystems that limit their productivity. At Quable, we talk to these employees and we know that they are the first to be convinced of the interest of prioritizing PIM in the company's future investments. This would finally give them the means to work better with the data on a daily basis - which also becomes more consistent across the various sales channels - while gaining in productivity and avoiding errors. And if an easy-to-implement solution exists to improve their productivity today without impacting the company's structure, why not use it?

The reality of decision-making teams in an e-commerce overhaul

On the other hand, the alignment between strategic choices and operational needs is not always obvious and arbitration is sometimes complex. Decisions are therefore sometimes made in favour of "front-end" solutions (e-commerce overhaul, unified commerce solution, etc.). Projects seem to be the solution to all ills.

However, it seems pointless to re-roof a house when its foundations are in danger of collapsing: a brand new sales channel does not erase the problems of data structuring and quality. It is essential to equip the teams in charge of enriching it so that they can be more productive while bringing more qualitative data to your sales channels.

"Do you have to wait a year for a project to be completed when you can get all the benefits of a PIM in a month? »

PIM is about productivity. Productivity is ROI!

However, productivity remains the sinews of war. Faced with the temptation to move towards a project based on solutions closer to the end customers, some brands have chosen to prioritise the PIM. Implemented in less than a month, the solution goes beyond the framework of a project lasting several months/years and therefore offers many quick wins that bring ROI:

• Data structuring improves the ROI of your future projects - sound data in a sound IS means time saved in the implementation and future efficiency of your IS and eCommerce projects.
• Time-to-market reduction - Jennyfer has reduced it to only 24 hours following the implementation of the PIM
• An average saving of 60 man-days per year - reinvested in strategic, value-adding areas;
• Increased agility to open and develop new sales channels and markets more quickly: Delsey has opened 4 markets in just one year;
• Internationalisation has finally become easy thanks to the multilingual enrichment of product sheets and their automatic distribution in the right language to the right channel;
• Reduction of return rates: you offer better, reliable and rich product information allowing customers to you can offer better quality, reliable and rich product information, allowing customers to be properly informed before purchasing.

Recasting projects: in what order?

Given its promise of rapid productivity gains and its role in a company's growth, PIM is fast becoming a must. But in what order is it most appropriate to structure your major projects?

The PIM

The PIM is not a project for the company and should be launched as soon as the signs of organisational difficulties and the need to maintain the rate of product file enrichment appear.

By creating the basic structure of your entire product repository, which will govern all information exchanges with your sales channels, PIM is the foundation of your on and offline business strategy. It will allow you to structure, organize and enrich your product information to perfection to set up and develop an ultra-efficient omnichannel sales strategy over time.

ERP overhaul

The ERP is the indispensable foundation for all processes: creation of the first product entries, the first data, the hub interconnected to all tools... Crucial.

Generally, two cases motivate the launch of an ERP project:

• It is no longer functional and becomes a handicap for your activity
• It is out of date and does not match your strategic ambitions (digital, business, omnichannel, etc.)

However, it is not necessary to go to the end of this ERP project, which will last between 1 and 3 years, in order to implement a PIM that will bring you quick wins (immediate ROI, better productivity of the teams and improvement of the quality of product information). Once your new ERP is delivered or improved, simply connect it to PIM using our API.

Unified commerce solutions / Marketplace flows

It is up to you to choose a solution according to your needs: deploy sales channels, connect to marketplacesHowever, these solutions like to rely on a PIM in order to be based on reliable data that is easier to manipulate. It's a good thing you prioritized it earlier.

E-commerce redesign

The e-commerce site is the first element visible to your customers and yet the last step to prioritise in a redesign. Ergonomics and the purchase tunnel must be well thought out to correspond to uses and needs but are of little use if :

• The products have incomplete or incorrect data, misleading the customer or pushing them to a competing site,
• Your time to market is too long and several weeks or months pass between the availability of a product and its release on the channels,
• Your products are not visible because they are not distributed on all the channels where your customers are.

Conclusion

If the "front" or "back" redesign is generally indispensable at some point in the transformation of the company, it is essential to ask the right questions in order to build this project in a way that is relevant to the business. Quable PIM and DAM is the solution that can be implemented quickly and offers an immediate productivity gain. It is recommended to prioritize it upstream in order to operate a redesign on sound bases: improve the content before the form.

Would you like to boost your e-commerce business with PIM ? Ask for your free demo.