How Can PIM Help You Enter New Markets?

With international eCommerce sales expected to explode in the next year or so, now is a good time for your business to consider selling overseas and entering new markets.

“45% of online shoppers will purchase products internationally on the web by 2020” – Accenture

Preparing & customising your product catalogue to get your business in a good position to enter international markets requires a lot of planning, not to mention time. Your product information will need to be translated and localised to fit each regional market, a process which can become very time-consuming.

Akeneo is an established PIM software provider that can help your business reach more markets through cross-border commerce. Akeneo centralises product information, allowing it to be efficiently translated, localised and put into context for each location and sales channel.

Below are four ways PIM can help grow your business to enter new markets:

1. Prevents your products getting lost in translation

When selling internationally, it’s important that your products are translated and converted properly to stop the information getting lost in translation.

Akeneo’s PIM solution integrates many popular translation agencies and tools including translations.com and textmaster to help retailers manage 3rd party translations within the PIM.

Akeneo will automatically track items and fields that need to be translated so that no incomplete records are published.

2. Localises product information

Localised content is crucial when selling in other countries as you don’t want your products to be poorly presented in the native language.

For example, if you are a British company selling to the US market, it’s best to spell ‘colour’ as ‘color’ and ‘favourite’ as ‘favorite’ as this could confuse your customers.

It’s not just spelling words correctly that’s important, you also need to think about converting clothing sizes, shoe sizes and product measurements, so they are relevant to each market.

Clothing sizes differ massively globally for example, a women’s UK size 12 is a US size 10 and a European size 40. Converting these metrics to what your customers understand will mean they will be more likely to buy from your website.

Akeneo includes features to easily localise product data for international markets. Users can perform bulk actions to set US shoe sizes in US channels and European sizes in European locales and channels.

3. Simplify processes

Before translating and localising your product information, you need to know what you are changing it to. Luckily, Akeneo has automated processes in place to make these changes.

Akeneo ensures that those who are responsible for translating and localising product information only see and edit the information that needs to be edited.

Not only is this an extremely useful feature as it takes less time to edit product information, but it also means that the time-to-market is a lot quicker than having to make these changes manually.

4. Feed the right information to the correct locale

Now you’ve edited your product information, you need to feed the localised information to each locale your business sells in.

Using Akeneo’s export profiles, you can easily distribute localised product information to the appropriate eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, catalogues and other channels or storefronts using a variety of connectors available on the Akeneo marketplace.

The ability to export the right information to the correct locale and channel using PIM software streamlines the product information management process to meet the demands of cross-border commerce. Thus, giving your business a better time to market and opportunities for sales growth to customers all over the world.

Ready to grow your business internationally?

As Akeneo PIM partners, iWeb can help you consolidate all of your data into one easy to use solution to help your business grow. Better product information means more purchases and fewer returns.