Imagine having the capability to store your products safely and securely in one centrally hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution and then publishing those products out to multiple channels and marketplaces at once, automatically. That’s the dream for every multi-channel retailer out there (which is, these days, just about everyone). This is exactly what a product information management system (PIM) can do.
PIM systems are built specifically for modern omnichannel environments, and they are becoming increasingly important for mid- to large-sized businesses as part of their efforts to streamline workflows and create more sophisticated information management stacks. It’s been my observation that most SMBs who sell physical goods and have SKU counts larger than 500 could benefit from a PIM.
Most SMBs with SKU counts larger than 500 could benefit from a PIM.
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That said, we’ll be diving in today to outline the capabilities and benefits of a PIM, what it can do for your business and how a robust and open API is central to ensuring proper data transfer and streamlined workflows.
First, what is a PIM?
A PIM system is a middleware software solution that abstracts and protects your organization’s unique product data, including SKU data, product photography, merchandising meta-data and pricing information from any particular underlying commerce platform or ERP system.
In short, a PIM is used to provide your overall modern ecommerce infrastructure with flexibility. Consider the following example: products for your online store are often mastered directly by hand inside the Bigcommerce admin console (or another, similar web-based management tool). While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it presents multi-channel publication challenges which become increasingly important for retailers who want to sell product in their physical brick-and-mortar stores, via Amazon or eBay and through a variety of alternative online stores that may be branded differently or contain products that are meant for different consumption audiences (such as B2C vs. B2B customers).
How a PIM Works and Solves for the SaaS Issue
Once your products are added, barcoded, photographed, categorized, merchandised and lit up to various portals or publication channels inside your PIM, automation rules are created that publish to a limitless number of platforms, including your Bigcommerce store itself.
A professional PIM can also be setup to aggregate sources from multiple inbound feeds.
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A professional PIM can also be setup to aggregate sources from multiple inbound feeds. Say, for example, as a retailer, you’d like to automatically create products that you can publish to your Bigcommerce store, while also setting rules so that your staff can go in and simply do the following:
Review the data that has come in from the inbound feeds or ERP ingestion pipeline
Massage the data a little bit, adding custom photos and pricing where needed
Setup merchandising rules such as categories, attributes, tags, promotions, sales, etc.
Define its publication channels (i.e. which stores does this product sell from?)
Define custom price groups & tiers or other override data like names or imagery depending on publication channel
Finally, decide which store(s) or output channels you’d like to publish to (and at what frequency) and the PIM takes care of the rest
I have clients who publish their content not only to Bigcommerce via our PIM, but also to third party professional search services such as Nextopia, Google Merchant Center (for remarketing ads), Amazon and eBay. Having your staff edit product only once, rather than countless times in multiple back-end admin consoles, is the only sane way to manage anything more than a few hundred SKUs, let alone tens of thousands.
Additional PIM Benefits
A PIM really shines, however, when connected to your inventory management system (IMS), such as JDA or MS Dynamics Navision. Many IMS systems don’t have awesome controls for managing rich media file types (i.e. HD product photography, 360° panoramic imagery, 3D mesh/wireframe data, videos, etc.) or multiple sets of product meta-data, nor do they contain advanced merchandising capabilities, such as the ability to specify complex outbound channel publication rules.
These publication rules determine which products should be published to each supported multi-channel storefront, and which should not. A PIM is used to build upon the IMS, then, by adding these capabilities.
Publication rules determine which products to publish to each multi-channel storefront.
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Additionally, the PIM can be setup to run an automated ingestion process against the IMS to bring in master product records. This can happen once daily, hourly or in real time. The greatest benefit in connecting an IMS to a PIM is to empower workflow enhancements, whereby staff no longer need to manually create products in the PIM at all, but rather they use it to simply manage the missing rich media that the IMS doesn’t support.
What’s more is that a PIM empowers sophisticated and extremely granular user access controls centered around the product data itself. This becomes important in keeping unauthorized staff away from pricing data in your ERP or IMS, as well as any other sensitive financial information from your accounting platform.
You can instruct the PIM to hide all pricing data from certain staff members, for example.
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As such, you can instruct the PIM to hide all pricing data from certain staff members for example. It’s incredible how many times I’ve seen junior staff with username/password access to the entire financial platform (including views of the balance sheet and income statement) just so they could update product descriptions for their bosses’ online store. This is not a safe practice.
Another nicety of a PIM is that you can train your staff on one administrative console to use, instead of having to train them on multiple. This minimizes staff workflow and training efforts, and also avoids the process of manually publishing product data to various storefronts one-by-one via copy-and-paste; reducing the margin for error in the process and maintaining the overall integrity of your product information.
Publishing Products from Your PIM to Bigcommerce Enterprise
Now that I’ve detailed what a PIM is, and hopefully articulated some of the unadulterated sanity in using one, let’s outline below what was involved in connecting Jasper Studios’ PIM to the Bigcommerce API.
Our PIM was developed atop the increasingly popular Laravel MVC framework and the original prototype was developed specifically against the Bigcommerce Product API in April of 2014.
We ran a creation test against the Bigcommerce API involving an estimated 150,000 SKUs.
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The first goal was to ensure that our PIM could support a significant number of SKUs that would doubtlessly come from a professional ERP/IMS source or multiple inbound feed sources via automation. That necessitated, in our case, running creation tests against the Bigcommerce API involving an estimated 150,000 SKUs. Yes that’s correct –– 150,000 SKU’s.
That’s more than any single product data entry clerk could ever hope to accurately manage manually, even if they had fifteen lifetimes to do it in.
Automation here was key and, while we assumed the Bigcommerce API was built for this sort of thing, we needed to run a battery of tests to corroborate the fact that the platform could stand up to our needs for timely and integral operation. Otherwise, we’d have been shopping around for another commerce platform.
Here’s what we tested and how it turned out.
Speed Test
Adding tens or a few hundred products via the API we postulated would predictably take seconds or minutes, but what would happen if we tried to add 150,000 products within the same hour?
Our first attempt in using the product API did take an unholy amount of time, unfortunately; an order of three days to complete, as we were also attempting to add as many as 35 custom product attributes to each product record. Product attributes are details such as color, size, SKU, series, brand, weight, height, condition, etc.
We were able to get the creation time for 150,000 SKUs down to a matter of 4 hours and 36 minutes.
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We needed to get the ingestion time down to something more palatable and thus opted to package all of our attributes from our PIM into a single product entity field known as a JSON object. Once we did that, we were able to get the creation time for 150,000 SKUs down to a matter of 4 hours and 36 minutes. That’s not altogether shabby, since we weren’t planning to add 150,000 SKUs every 15 minutes, or even every day. We just need to do this once when we onboard a new client during the initial load (or ingestion) process before a new store goes live.
Since we predicted that many of our customers would likely only peak at about 30,000 SKUs or so, we now have the initial ingestion time down to about an hour, which is absolutely reasonable.
Integrity Test
Coming from working with Magento Enterprise, where we had countless integrity issues due to its poor inner handlings of large product grid indexes, at no point did we encounter any integrity issues with the Bigcommerce API. Of course, you might be thinking, what else would we say on the Bigcommerce blog? But, let’s walk you through it as proof.
At no point did we encounter any integrity issues with the Bigcommerce API.
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An integrity issue is simply a case where we attempt to add or update a product by making a REST call to a function inside the Bigcommerce API, and the function call either:
Leaves the data in a corrupt state
Deadlocks or hangs the calling process
Crashes the server or bungles up the store or database powering the API
No such issues were encountered and thus we were able to move on with our final test.
Important Note: Integrity Tests are meant to give us comfort in a go-forward plan to execute with a given partner. If this test fails, our development team loses faith in the product and has no choice but to move its integration plans elsewhere.
Reset Test
The joy of using a PIM comes into play when you wish to make detailed wholesale changes to product content. At the time of writing, the Bigcommerce API doesn’t have the provision for search and replace functions of product data, i.e. modifying attributes with special prefixes or adding watermarks to all product imagery, for example. These are all things a professional PIM could support, but would require a wholesale reset of the products inside Bigcommerce.
We tested a wholesale catalog UPDATE and a wholesale DELETE. In both cases, the experiments produced satisfying results, at least for our purposes.
Why Enterprise Support Matters
Once our PIM had been developed and approved by our client, things were going along quite nicely leading up until the planned launch. We did encounter, however, some last minute challenges in using the API that was a result of bugs (i.e. faults) in the PHP Bigcommerce Library itself. The library, which was not maintained by Bigcommerce, hadn’t been updated on Github in about a year or so it seemed.
Bigcommerce Support to the Rescue
The Bigcommerce support experience from an enterprise integrator’s perspective is that of legend, at least, at the Tier 2 level. Having access to this Tier 2 support representative before a critical launch is essential to any solid project management planning efforts.
Often when we had worked with other commerce platforms on Tier 1 (or even Tier 2) support teams, they may have had the best of intentions, but they simply lacked the technical capability and perspective to provide cohesive insight that yielded rapid results during a crisis. Turns out, we had just such a crisis at a very sensitive time in our relationship with a newly beloved client. Two days before launch, our PIM publication engine was deadlocking in attempts to publish to the API. This meant, no product on the website. No products predictably would have meant very little sales, if you can imagine the stretch in this analogy.
Access to Tier 2 support before a critical launch is essential to project management.
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Anyhow, it’s often a frustrating process for system administrators to work with technical support reps, and my experience working with Bigcommerce support was unparalleled in the industry, for the following reasons:
The support rep answered the phone quickly, was empathetic and helpful.
The support rep wasted no time in putting me directly in touch with someone more technical, who was himself both pleasant and astute; with a mastery of English that was refreshing. The rep was very patient as I described in painstaking detail the precise symptoms as best we could tell from our diagnostics.
As soon as the rep realized he was out of his pay grade, he directed me to one of the engineers that was involved in mastering the API itself. Surely, if this individual didn’t know what the issue was, no one likely would.
The API engineer provided clear direction and we iterated over the phone on a number of attempts to solve the problem, until the solution was sorted out.
If you’re at all interested to find out what the integration issue specifically was (and how we patched the Bigcommerce library on our own) visit our website here. You’ll find a link to download an updated version of the PHP library on our website as well, should you so be inclined to use it.
In all, I found working with the Bigcommerce API to be a first-class experience. It’s well documented, functions with integrity and was speedy enough to handle more product SKUs than we’d have any need.
A PIM system is integral to the scalability and success of enterprise level ecommerce companies.
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What’s more important than that, though, is having a company and support team dedicated to world-class customer service. A PIM system is integral to the scalability and success of enterprise level ecommerce companies, and without such a robust API as well as speedy support, a SaaS solution for enterprise, like Bigcommerce, wouldn’t be an acceptable one for larger companies.
Thankfully, it is –– saving those companies more than $60,000 a year in expenditures. Of course, you can use this calculator to figure out exactly how much your own company could save.
The post The Benefits of a SaaS Solution for Enterprise Brands: Robust APIs, Speedy Support, Real-Time PIM Integration appeared first on The Bigcommerce Blog.