For large Amazon sellers, managing product listings is a full-time job – sometimes several full-time jobs.
Content management is labour-intensive. Even when large brands invest in Product Information Management (PIM) software, catalogue management still requires continuous human effort to ensure listings are perfect and information is consistent across all marketplaces.
Here’s a quick guide to the benefits of PIM software for content management – and why you probably need a team to manage it.
PIM software for content management: it’s about consistency
PIM software provides a single source of truth for product listings. No matter how many marketplaces you use – Amazon, Walmart, AliExpress, Cdiscount, Fnac, brick-and-mortar – if your listings are all contained within one platform, they’re more likely to be pushed to these endpoints with the exact same information, spellings and prices.
This matters because consistency leads to trust, building authenticity that your customers can believe in. In this day and age, when AI-powered copycat brands are rife, this is really important to ensure conversion – particularly if a shopper is shopping around, and might notice inconsistencies in your branding and product information from store to store.
PIM software for content management aids global expansion, too: a single source of truth in several different languages, being pushed out to different marketplaces in multiple countries, is possible and much easier with PIM software.
As an example, we have a client, a big name in homeware in France, with 11,000 ASINs. They’re selling the same products across several countries and on several online retail platforms, not least Amazon.
Ensuring consistency across all of these marketplaces is crucial: Accuracy and consistency in the product information, spellings, messaging, fonts, imagery and pricing goes a long way in promoting a brand’s trustworthiness and professionalism.
While it's usual for agencies of our size or bigger to offer these services, I really doubt they have the knowledge mix that we offer, especially that PIM and Account Management combo.
PIM software for content management saves time
The more obvious benefit is that PIM software saves you time. In just a few clicks, you can push out reams of product information to lots of different endpoints; PIM software is usually programmed to automatically format your product information into the fields required by each marketplace.
You can also duplicate content for different variations of the same product.
And if you need to make a change to your content, you only have to do it once, to the master copy.
Using PIM software for content management allows our client to consolidate all their information in one central database, and push it out to the various endpoints simultaneously when necessary. Our client uses Salsify, which e-Comas’s team is fully trained in.
Antonio Vicedo, e-Comas’s Head of Content, says: “A PIM tool is a must for any brand with a big catalogue, and Salsify is, in my opinion, the very best and most complete.
“Salsify is able to store all product information (text, image, video, zip, etc.) in a user-friendly way, automate its syndication to any endpoint, and generate very interesting reports: such as comparing the content displayed to customers and what we upload. It saves our client masses of time and effort.”
So why hire a PIM team?
Despite the huge time-saving benefits of PIM software, brands with large catalogues still require plenty of human resource to manage content.
Ideally, the brand’s own content management personnel should be backed up by agency help. An agency like e-Comas can provide a multilingual, multi-specialist team with expertise across many marketplaces to ensure PIM software is used smartly, and the data is harnessed, analysed and used.
They can provide everyday support to fix problems as and when they arise, have great contacts within Amazon and other global eCommerce sites, and are trained to use the software’s many functions, ensuring the brand gets the highest return on their investment.
PIM software for content management often produces amazing reports. Salsify, for example, allows you to generate a report comparing the content you’ve uploaded at the back end to the content that’s displayed to customers.
By employing a team to look after PIM, large brands can ensure the data that’s available is read, analysed and used to create better content, and drive higher conversion rates.
Several teams in one handling PIM software for content management
An agency team also has a greater breadth of expertise: e-Comas’s team work together to bridge gaps in each other’s knowledge. We deal with Amazon and other marketplaces every day; between us, we know and we learn everything there is to know about effectively marketing products online.
For a huge catalogue, hiring an agency avoids having to set up dedicated teams for both Amazon account management and PIM management.
By using e-Comas to handle its PIM requirements, our client avoided having to set up at least two dedicated internal teams: one for Amazon account management and one for the PIM management. The client has Amazon-focused employees, but they don’t have the same inside-out knowledge of Amazon that our 30-strong team have, and they don’t have the time or resources to manage content for 11,000 listings.
They also have no specialist knowledge of PIM – which is one of e-Comas’s specialties. Antonio says: “While it’s usual for agencies of our size or bigger to offer these services, I really doubt they have the knowledge mix that we offer, especially that PIM and Account Management combo.”
Creating a house style
PIM can’t automatically create consistency. With different teams across the brand creating and uploading content, for different product lines and locales, it’s important to ensure tight management and a style guide.
That’s where your agency comes in. For our client, we helped to create a centralised document setting out the best ways to optimise their content for Amazon’s algorithms.
We used our team’s vast knowledge of Amazon content best practices, and wrote it specifically geared to this client’s business.
The resulting style guide sets out:
- How to write an Amazon title and description
- How to optimise keywords
- How to monitor content performance
- Amazon’s content policies and standards
- Content features and how to optimise them
- Each content feature’s relative impact on conversion rates
- Precise instructions for how images and other visual elements should be uploaded
- Precise guidance on writing titles, bullets and other text elements
- Full style rules and technical requirements for the brand’s A+ content
- Creative requirements and permitted variations
- Tips and tricks for liaising with Amazon Support.
Want to know more about how to manage your content on Amazon? Drop us a message and we’ll send you our free white paper on content management.
