Why your online shop needs a PIM: one employee's story

What this episode covers

The second episode tells the same story as the first, but from the point of view of the person who runs into it. The protagonist is Mariusz, an experienced employee at a manufacturing company who becomes product owner for an online shop launch. The story is drawn from real projects and serves one purpose: helping you recognise that the problem you have is called product data.

Key takeaways

• The first step towards an online shop is not choosing a platform. It is finding out where product data lives and who owns it.
• The symptom that gives the problem away: nobody can say how many images are missing or what share of descriptions is ready.
• Scattered data means no measure of the problem, and without a measure you cannot plan the work or win the budget.
• A pre-implementation analysis answers three questions: which system, how to structure the data in it, and what it will cost.
• The outcome is not only a shop on time. A PIM system reorganises how many people work and ends manual copying into spreadsheets.

Day one

Mariusz starts with what looks like the easy part: checking where the product data is and who looks after it. He assumed it could not be difficult.

On the first day it turns out every employee has their own way of organising things. It worked until now, because nobody needed all of it in one place. Now they do, because that data has to feed the shop. Mariusz gets lost in files, loses time searching and receives contradictory answers. The question “where is the file with product descriptions and features” has no single answer.

Then come the surprises anyone who has done this will recognise. Photos taken for only some products. Documentation that needs updating. Inconsistent values across documents. No English translations of the marketing copy.

The question with no answer

The most telling moment is the conversation with management. Mariusz wants to raise the problem and gets questions back: how many images are missing, what percentage of descriptions is absent, what is the scale.

That is the heart of it. Mariusz cannot answer, because with data spread across drives, inboxes and desktops there is nothing to count. It is not that he does not know things are bad. It is that there is no way to measure how bad, and without that number you can neither plan the work nor defend a budget.

The risk is concrete: either the launch slips, or the shop goes live with half of its product data.

How it ends

Mariusz finds the right lead: product data and its structure are the first step to launching a shop, and the best place for that data is a dedicated PIM system, with an integration feeding the shop.

The second half of the lesson is that he does not do it alone. He convinces the CEO to run a pre-implementation analysis with an implementation partner, and the analysis answers three questions: which system the company needs, how to structure data in it, and what the implementation will cost.

Afterwards Mariusz finally sees numbers: how much data is missing, what the priorities are, when to schedule photo sessions and documentation work. People stop pasting data into a spreadsheet whose every update caused problems. The launch date stops being at risk.

When to recognise yourself in this

If you are preparing an online shop, if you already have one and want to grow it, or if you are starting to sell in foreign markets and the volume of product data is growing faster than you can keep up, this is the moment. Get in touch and we will review your situation. More on our work is on the PIM systems page.