You sell candles, ceramics or furniture. At first there are twenty products and they all sit in one spreadsheet. A year later there are two hundred, an online shop, two marketplaces and a wholesale buyer who wants a price list with photos. You change a price in four places and forget the fifth. That is usually the moment people first hear the word PIM.
What a PIM actually stores
The core of a PIM is the attribute. An attribute is one field that describes a product: color, weight, material, the burn time of a candle, the load a shelf can hold. A whole product page in a shop is a set of such fields plus photos.
A good PIM knows that different products need different fields. A shelf needs a maximum load and a candle does not. So the fields belong to a category: you say that every candle must have a wax weight and a burn time, and every candle where the field is still empty shows it as waiting to be filled.
Besides the fields, a PIM usually holds:
- SKUs and variants. One mug in three colors and two sizes is six variants, each with its own SKU, price and photos, but sharing one description.
- Translations. The name and description for a German shop kept apart from the English ones, with no copying of spreadsheets.
- Prices. Retail, wholesale, in euros and in dollars.
- Status. Draft, on sale, withdrawn. A half-finished product does not reach the shelf by accident.
- A link to photos and documents. Which picture belongs to which product, and which data sheet goes to a buyer.
Where the spreadsheet breaks
A spreadsheet is excellent while the products are few and one person works on them. It breaks in five places. First, copies: the price list for a wholesaler is a file somebody saved on Thursday, and by Friday it is out of date. Second, columns: every shop wants its own and you carry the right values across by hand. Third, languages: each new language is another tab. Fourth, responsibility: nobody remembers who last changed a weight, or why. Fifth, gaps: nobody can see which forty products have no dimensions.
An example. A ceramics studio in Melbourne sells sixty mugs and bowls in its own shop and on two marketplaces. A small change, a new glaze that means the ware can no longer go in a microwave, needs the text fixed in three places and in the wholesale price list. If one place is missed, a buyer gets wrong information and the studio gets a return. With a PIM the text is fixed once and every channel receives it together.
PIM, ERP and your shop platform: three different jobs
These three are mixed up more than anything else. The shop platform shows a product to a buyer and takes the order. An ERP knows how much of everything is on the shelves, what a batch cost and what a customer owes you. A PIM knows how the product is described. It answers “what is this product and how do we talk about it”, while the ERP answers “how many are there, what did they cost to make and who bought them”.
In large companies these are three separate programs that pass data to one another. In a small business that chain quickly goes wrong at the joins: a SKU is written one way in the stock list and another way in the shop, and the numbers stop matching. That is the main reason small makers look at systems that hold both the product and the stock in one place. The difference between a production program and an ERP is explained in MRP or ERP.
What a PIM does not do
A PIM does not keep stock, work out cost or issue invoices. It does not make your writing better: if a description is dull, it will be dull in the system too, just in one place. And it does not replace the person who decides what to say about a product. Its job is to make sure a decision you took once does not have to be repeated in every channel, and that nobody publishes a product with no dimensions.
What a PIM does for a small seller
- One description, many channels. Your own shop, a marketplace, a wholesale catalog and an advertising feed all read from the same place.
- Its own words where needed. A marketplace may want a long, keyword-heavy title and your shop a short one. A PIM lets a channel have its own text and shows where it applies.
- Gaps become visible. A list of products with empty required fields is a ready-made to-do list for the week.
- A check before publishing. New changes can wait for approval: a price or a name is not published until the responsible person confirms it.
- Less typing. AI can propose values for the empty fields from the name and description. You read each proposal and accept only the right ones.
When you do not need a PIM
The honest answer is that often you do not. If you have fewer than fifty products, one shop and one language, a tidy spreadsheet and the shop platform itself will do. Another program means another job: it has to be filled, and somebody has to keep it up.
Signs that the time has not come: you have never missed a price change, nobody but you needs your data and you plan no new channels. Signs that it has: you spend more than an hour a week copying the same thing, buyers complain about different data in different places, and a new colleague cannot find where the “right” version lives.
How to choose a PIM
Do not start with a feature table. Start with your own catalog and ask seven questions:
- How many products and variants do I have, and how fast will that grow?
- Where do I sell, and can the system send products there itself, or does it only hand me a file?
- How many languages and currencies do I need today?
- Who edits, who only looks, and do changes need approval?
- Can I load my own spreadsheet and see at once what is missing?
- Does the system also hold stock and production, or will I need a second program and a link between them?
- Can I take all my data back out as spreadsheets if I change my mind?
A short checklist before you buy
- I know in how many places I change a price today.
- I have listed the fields each channel needs.
- I tried the program with 20 of my own products, not the ready-made sample.
- I checked how to take the data back out as a file.
- I know who on the team will keep the catalog up to date.
How to start in a week
- Day 1. Tidy the spreadsheet: one row per SKU, no merged cells, nothing that says “see below”.
- Day 2. List the fields for each category: what is required and what is optional.
- Day 3. Load twenty products and check the result by eye. Fix mistakes in the spreadsheet, not in the system.
- Day 4. Load the rest. Look at the list of products with empty fields.
- Day 5. Connect one channel and look at what would be sent before you send it. Add the others only after that.
Do not try to fill everything perfectly. A hundred products with every required field is better than two hundred half-empty ones.
Where Keelvy fits
You can use Keelvy as a PIM on its own: fields by category, variants with SKUs from your own rule, draft and live statuses, translations, a channel’s own text and import from a spreadsheet matched by SKU. One thing that helps makers in particular is that the same place knows stock and recipes, so a SKU does not have to be reconciled between two programs. If all you need is the product description, that is enough too. More in Keelvy as PIM.
Keelvy as PIM
See how it works in Keelvy.