Role of Akeneo PIM in Multi Channel eCommerce

Akeneo streamlines the data enrichment and localization process for your multichannel e-commerce software. Thus allowing merchants to easily populate their products on various channels and increase sales.

The widely used Product Information Management platform centralizes your products in one place. To manage, enrich and distribute product information to eCommerce stores, marketplaces or print media.

Selling your products on various eCommerce channels and marketplaces is like a sure-shot mantra for your e-commerce business success. But the process does not seem easy as it sounds.

One cannot ignore the role of Akeneo Multi Channel eCommerce for catalog managers and marketers.

Managing Product Information

If you have just started your eCommerce store and say, you have 1000 products at max, it’s easy to appoint a person who can help you in categorizing your product. But what happens when you start to grow?

Managing a catalogue of 1000SKUs is fine, but when it comes to millions of SKUs, it surely becomes a pain. In addition to that, what if when the single product has multiple variants and attributes? You really don’t want to mess with the situation.

Source: Akeneo

Whether it’s 100SKUs or millions of SKUs, Akeneo has got your back. Gone are the days when you are using spreadsheets to manage your product information which over a period of time becomes hectic and a never-ending process.

Akeneo with its centralization process and easy-to-use user interface allows you to easily manage your product information. You can enrich your products with various attributes and variants so as to provide your customer with a detailed description of the product that can pump up your sales.

Product Enhancement in POS

If you are a retailer who is selling both on eCommerce stores and offline, you can use various modules or APIs to connect the e-commerce platform with POS for inventory management and syncing product.

The problem arises when you have to manage the product information for POS, as on POS due to small screen size information is not properly displayed and an expert person needs to be available in order to search for the product and proceed with the payment.

Thanks to Akeneo for saving you yet another day. You can create a POS channel on Akeneo, enrich the imported products with descriptions and images and then export it to the POS system.

This not only simplifies the product view but also helps the easy understanding of the product to the person working on POS.

Multi-Channel Integration

Selling on multi-channels may seem like a common strategy for every retailer. But what happens when you go global where it becomes important to translate product content into the respective language?

Source: Akeneo

You can easily customize your existing platform or use modules for that, but doing that on your existing store requires greater changes and you can’t risk system failure which can crumble your existing store.

With Akeneo, you can easily create various sales channels like e-commerce platforms, marketplaces, mobile, print media etc and once the product information has been successfully fed, it is automatically exported to the respective sales channel.

Localization and Translation with Akeneo Multi-Channel eCommerce

Product information can be easily translated and localized using akeneo and then push them to respective sales and eCommerce channels. To manage 3rd party translations, akeneo easily integrates with translation agencies and tools like Translations.com and Textmaster.

Akeneo PIM as CRM

Just like a CRM, where client data is centralized in one place to provide a seamless experience to both prospects and customers, Akeneo serves the same kind of foundational base for its customers.

Source: Akeneo

By connecting various systems like ERP, Databases, and Spreadsheets for the product data consisting of texts, images and videos in one place, enriching the product information and then delivering to various channels, Akeneo has become an overall utility tool.

Bulk Upload to eCommerce Platform

It’s not advisable to perform bulk uploads on your e-commerce platform. We all are using the monolithic system architecture to perform operations.

Performing such operations on your systems increases CPU and RAM usage which can further slow down the system and even crash your live website.

Akeneo helps you to better manage product information. PIM handles the varied amount of data coming from multiple sources and product information within the interface before sending it to ERP and e-commerce platforms.

Akeneo Process Flow

An asynchronous communication protocol technique called Message Queue is used in Akeneo for interprocess communication. Basically, the sender and receiver do not have to interact with the message queue at the same time.

Like in an email, whenever we transmit a message, it does not affect the sender’s work even if there is no response from the receiver. In Akeneo, daemon processes need to be launched to execute one job from UI which is then pushed into a queue in order to be processed in the background.

The property of the daemon process is it cannot execute any other job until the end of the current job. If you want to launch multiple exports to various channels at the same time, several daemon processes can launch to execute multiple jobs in parallel.

Akeneo uses Supervisor for Process Control System to run a daemon process.

Boost to B2B Commerce

Sales Rep plays a major role in any B2B commerce and for them, Print Media is a major driving factor for both online and offline sales. There is still a major fraction of the population who looks at print catalogues before making the purchase online.

Using Akeneo PIM, you can automatically update print catalogues with the product information before being ready for print.

The module Akeneo Web To Print module, in fact, allows you to integrate Akeneo PIM with Adobe Indesign and fetch the product information on the print catalogue as designed by you.

You can easily send product catalogues to your customer by email informing them about the new products going to arrive with a detailed description which can greatly increase sales.

Let us know your thoughts on leveraging Akeneo’s Multi-Channel eCommerce capability to drive sales. If you are a retailer, facing issues in handling a large number of products, drop us a line in the comments below.