Seasonal Sales: Using PIM to Prep for the Summer Sales

• Better weather increases people’s spirits
• Well-earned vacations often trigger buying
• Summertime features a variety of celebrations that encourage gift giving and other shopping (graduations, weddings, prom, mother’s day, father’s day, etc.)
• Increased outdoor activities trigger the purchase of many goods (camping gear, swimsuits, sports gear, summer camps)

What’s more, some vendors order new and cheaper products just to include in seasonal sales. When the season is over the changeover of collections (especially in fashion and apparel) encourages businesses to empty stock as much as possible before their fall/winter collections are released.

Seasonal sales events provide retailers and eCommerce organizations with a great opportunity to generate a lot of profit and empty out their stock.

This stock changeover occurs across the globe, requiring organizations to be agile in managing product information and promotions. If your product information infrastructure isn’t ready for this tidal wave, you could lose business. You need a tool that can support complete and accurate product information across all sales channels.

Managing Seasonal Sales with Product Information Management (PIM)

Having the ability to quickly prepare specific product offerings and provide the most relevant information is the largest challenge/goal of prepping for seasonal sales. However, this challenge can be overcome by using a robust product information management (PIM) solution. PIM helps omnichannel companies organize, enrich, and publish relevant product data across all of their sales channels.

How PIM Helps

PIM creates an always-up-to-date product information database that can house summer-specific media, descriptions, and other product information. This streamlines the data enrichment process and ensures that all of your products look great across all of your channels.

• Simplify product selection: PIM makes it easy for product managers to select groups of products or add new products to the catalog for specific seasonal sales. Vendors can include certain products in these catalogs only for the time of the sale to create a limited-time catalog or product groupings.
• Make it easy to add and modify emotional data: Since consumer buying behaviors are largely driven by instinct rather than true need, having product data that appeals to those emotions is critical to maximizing conversions. PIM makes it is easy to add specific seasonal attributes like summertime pictures, evocative product descriptions, etc. Plus, by using a dedicated product grid, you can update the information only for the selected products that are relevant to the seasonal sale and quickly switch out the information as the seasons transition.
• Streamline workflows to get sales up and running: When it comes to seasonal sales, time is of the essence and organizations can’t afford to miss the seasonal window. A long enrichment process could doom your sale. PIM significantly increases productivity.

PIM makes it easy to manage and enrich specific product groupings for seasonal sales.

Example PIM Workflow

The best PIM solutions include tools that help streamline product enrichment. Here’s a sample product enrichment workflow that can be implemented using PIM:

1. Select products: Team members can easily select which products they want to enrich, update, or include in their summer sales using the intuitive product grid. Advanced search tools help streamline product selection by showing only the information needed.
2. Set up the project: Product managers can quickly set up enrichment projects with their teams using integrated project management tools. Managers can set due dates, while automated workflows keep all team members on track.
3. Bulk edit: Team members can quickly edit large product groupings with bulk editing. They can mass edit, editing several products at the same time for the same attribute values, or edit sequentially, editing several products in a row without returning to the product grid.
4. Verify product information completeness: The most robust PIM systems include completeness tools to make it clear to your team which products are completely enriched and which are still missing information. For specific seasonal projects to the system ensures completeness for specific attributes that can be defined for each product group in that project. These tools ensure that your products look great across all platforms and that your team members always know what to do next.
5. Publish: PIM makes it easy to publish complete product information across platforms, including the ability to publish different versions of product information based on specific locales or platform requirements. For example, you can publish summer pictures in the US and winter pictures in Australia at the same time. Or, you can choose to create channel specific promotions, like a web-exclusive sale, and publish product information only on that channel.

PIM Makes Managing Products for Seasonal Sales Easy Breezy

PIM is a productivity tool that makes managing your products for seasonal sales easy. It’s an automated solution for keeping all of your product information centralized, organized, and up to date. It makes it possible for you to seamlessly manage all of your last-minute sale changes and additions to the product catalog. Never again worry about copying and pasting product information from spreadsheets with the accompanying inevitable mistakes, missing information, and delays.

Prepare for seasonal sales with a PIM solution that accelerates time to market and increases productivity.

Of course, PIM is not just for summer sales. PIM gives you agility all year long whether you want to do a limited-edition collection or want to do a small specialty catalog for back-to-school. PIM makes seasonal and contextual sales easy all year long. Responding to customer moods and rapidly changing trends in a timely manner is critical.

Meet customer demand and boost sales with relevant product offerings all year long.

Ready to revolutionize how you handle product information and start boosting your seasonal sales or promotional events? Contact us for a guided tour.