PIM ROI #2: How PIM boosts revenue

Keywords

ROI

Welcome to Part 2 of our 3-part series detailing the return on investment (ROI) benefits of product information management (PIM) systems. In Part 1, we outlined productivity benefits and overhead savings associated with an Akeneo PIM implementation. Now, let’s see how implementing Akeneo PIM can reduce return rates, improve conversion, and simplify portfolio expansion to increase revenue.

Decrease Returns through Accurate Product Data

Product returns are a top pain point for online retailers, with some reporting e-Commerce return rates of over 25%. While logistical issues have an impact, a product detail page with accurate product data and rich product content increases buyer confidence and manages product expectations to help minimize returns.

Akeneo PIM enables digital marketers to consistently provide up-to-date, accurate, and detailed product content to your online platform. Akeneo features such as product completeness monitoring, combined with automated product enrichment rules and validation to, ensure that shoppers are more informed prior to purchase, which can decrease return rates by more than 20% according to Akeneo client data.

The revenue gains Akeneo delivers – through reducing restocking time, processing costs and return rates – is shown in the example below

Assumptions:

Average sale of $100
Rate of returns is conservative at an industry average of 25%
Value of items returned per order is conservative at 30%
Cost per return is conservative at $10

	no PIM	with Akeneo PIM	Net Gain
Transactions per year	200,000	200,000
Average Sale	$100	$100
Total Revenue	$20,000,000	$20,000,000

Rate of returns	25%	20%
Number of returns	50,000	40,000
Average sale	$100	$100
% items returned / order (in value)	30%	30%
Net Sale Loss	$1,500,000	$1,200,000	$300,000

Cost per return	$10	$10
Total Cost of Returns – Operating Cost	$500,000	$400,000	$100,000

Total (Operating) Revenue – After Returns	$18,000,000	$18,400,000	$400,000

Table 2.1. Cost Savings & Revenue Retention By Reducing Online Returns

Increasing Revenue By Improving Conversions

Shoppers are skipping in-store aisles and heading online at a growing rate, but they still demand an immersive shopping experience. Detailed online product information and documents, personalized content, and high-quality images & videos are required to compel website shoppers to convert at the digital shelf while providing essential content support across sales channels. Whether shopping through brick-and-mortars, catalogs, or talking with sales reps, customers expect to see and hear consistent product information across platforms and to instantly search online for product details. Akeneo’s flexible and scaleable PIM helps users manage rich product information across many channels and languages, which can contribute to a 20-50% increase in conversion. A conversion rate growth of 20% delivers a significant increase in revenue:

Assumptions:

Conversion rate based on 3.1% industry average
Conversion rate of Akeneo PIM based on 3.7% reported results from Akeneo PIM users
Average sale at $100

	no PIM	with Akeneo PIM	Revenue Gains
Visitors per/year	6,451,613	6,451,613
Conversion rate	3.1%	3.7%
Estimated transactions / year	200,000	238,710
Average sale	$100	$100
Total Revenue	$20,000,000	$23,870,968	$3,870,968

Tab 2.2. Revenue Impact of a Conversion Rate Growth of 20%

Increasing Revenue Through Portfolio Expansion

Akeneo simplifies the go-to-market process by streamlining product onboarding and content maintenance within a single environment across all products, channels, and translations. A change to the Akeneo environment is instantly populated across all sales touchpoints.

Contrast the ease of a single, centrally managed Akeneo environment with the outdated model of going to market with new products in new channels where each project is managed in a separate environment, with a separate process, by separate contributors working in silos. In the old approach, efforts are duplicated, opportunities for errors are multiplied, and man-hours are wasted on repetitive tasks.

Akeneo PIM revolutionizes the process of taking new products to market, managing a new collection or range of products and updating product details by providing one centralized, trusted source for product information. A centralized process improves resources allocation; to access more e-Commerce partners, increase catalog efficiencies, support faster language translation and improve ROI.

With Akeneo PIM, your team spends less time replicating efforts, and more time expanding the breadth of your catalogs and entering new markets. And Akeneo offers expanded capabilities and time-saving features including:

Advanced workflows and permissions to let internal and external collaborators participate
Jump-start new initiatives by sharing product data where replication is unnecessary
Safeguards that protect completed products with user restrictions and versioning rollbacks

Learn how Akeneo PIM helped one large local retailer launch over 70 e-Commerce channels here!

Akeneo PIM optimizes ROI across marketing and operations:

Increases buyer confidence and conversion
Lowers online return rates
Reduces cost of labor
Eliminates duplication of effort
Minimizes errors from multiple data entry points
Drives efficient product and market expansion

Part 3 in the ROI Of PIM series details how the Akeneo PIM – as the source and repository of authoritative data for every product across the retail ecosystem – – unlocks new ways to maximize profitability and growth in today’s multi-domain retail arena.

Ready to test-drive Akeneo, or need a free consultation? Contact us today!

<< Reducing Product Management Overhead – Part #1

Calculating Your Actual PIM ROI, Part 3 >>