What a PIM Actually Does
A Product Information Management system is your central command center for everything product-related. Rather than managing product content across your ecommerce platform, your ERP, a spreadsheet, and various team inboxes, a PIM centralizes all of it in one system that distributes to all destinations.
A PIM manages:
- Detailed product descriptions (short, long, and channel-specific variants)
- Specifications and technical attributes
- High-resolution imagery and video content
- Marketing copy and SEO metadata
- Translations and localized content for international markets
- Technical documentation and compliance data
The key distinction between a PIM and your ecommerce platform or ERP: a PIM specializes in rich customer-facing content, while your ERP manages price, inventory, and logistics data, and your ecommerce platform handles transactions. In a mature stack, each system does what it's best at.
The Case for Adding a PIM
1. Multichannel selling at scale
PIMs deliver their clearest value when you're selling across multiple channels—your website, Amazon, eBay, wholesale platforms, retail partners. Each channel has specific content requirements: Amazon needs different field formatting than your Shopify store; a retailer catalog has different specs than your B2B portal. A PIM lets you manage one master product record and publish channel-tailored versions without maintaining separate data sets for each destination.
2. Team collaboration with appropriate access controls
Multiple departments typically touch product content: merchandising writes descriptions, marketing creates campaign copy, photography uploads images, compliance reviews technical claims, and agencies may contribute content directly. A PIM provides structured workflows, version control, and granular access controls—teams can manage content without exposure to sensitive financial or logistical data like pricing or costs. In your ecommerce platform admin, this separation is typically not possible.
3. External vendor collaboration
PIMs enable third-party vendors to contribute directly—photographers uploading images, content agencies creating descriptions, translation vendors adding localized content—with custom formatting and access controls. This is significantly harder to manage through shared platform admin access or email workflows.
4. Cleaner system architecture
A PIM acts as a hub between your ERP (managing price/inventory) and your customer-facing channels, allowing each system to focus on its core function. Without a PIM, your ecommerce platform often ends up as an accidental repository for data it wasn't designed to manage cleanly.
Reasons to Hold Off
Added complexity and cost
PIM implementation requires setup time, integration effort, team training, and ongoing subscription fees. For some businesses, this investment isn't justified by the problem it solves. If your product data complexity is manageable and your existing ERP integration with your storefront works reliably, an additional system may be redundant overhead.
Modern platform capabilities
Shopify and BigCommerce have significantly improved their native product management capabilities—custom fields, improved variant handling, metafield support, and content organization tools. For simpler catalogs, the platforms have closed much of the gap that used to make a standalone PIM essential.
The Decision Framework
Consider a PIM if you...
You probably don't need a PIM if you...
The Hybrid Approach
- ERP: Core logistical and financial data—price, inventory, costs, order processing
- PIM: Rich customer-facing content—descriptions, attributes, images, translations, marketing copy
- Ecommerce Platform: Pulls integrated data from both systems for presentation and transactions
This architecture lets each system do what it does best. Your ERP doesn't have to store rich content it wasn't designed for. Your ecommerce platform doesn't become an unstructured data warehouse. Your PIM handles the content complexity that would otherwise create a mess in both.
The Bottom Line
Deciding whether to implement a PIM is a strategic choice based on your current pain points and future ambitions. If you're spending significant time maintaining product data across multiple systems, experiencing content inconsistencies that affect customer trust, or finding your team is bottlenecked by product content workflows—those are signals that a PIM's overhead is justified.
If your catalog is manageable and your current setup works without major friction, adding a PIM now means paying for infrastructure you don't yet need. The right time to implement is when the cost of not having one becomes higher than the cost of the system itself.