Choosing a PIM10 min read
What a PIM actually is
PIM is a three-letter acronym for something quite simple, wrapped in fifteen years of enterprise software marketing.
ReadPIM stands for product information management. It has accumulated fifteen years of enterprise software vocabulary on top of a simple idea, and the vocabulary now obscures the idea.
Stripped of it, a PIM does four things: it stores a structured record per product, governs who may change what, measures whether records are complete against rules you set, and distributes the finished record to wherever it needs to go. That is the whole category. Workflow, syndication, asset management and translation are all elaborations of one of those four.
Three misunderstandings cause bad purchases. A PIM is not an ERP — it holds information about what a product is, not how many you have or what you paid. It is not a storefront; it feeds one. And most PIM products do not create product information: nearly every product in the category assumes the data already exists somewhere in your business and needs organising. If your actual problem is that the data does not exist yet, because it is on your suppliers' websites, then organising is not your bottleneck.
The honest test for whether you need one: if you can currently answer "how many of our products are missing a datasheet" in under a minute, you probably do not.
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