The sheer number of choices ecommerce businesses have when building their tech stack these days is incredible. From the platform your store will live on, to your CRM, ERP, CX tools, and more, it’s difficult to know which apps work best for your business and when you even need to start adding new tools to your stack to begin with.
If you’re at the point where you feel like you need help managing your store’s product data and are starting to consider implementing a product information management (PIM) system, you’re likely realizing that the choice isn’t an easy one.
In this article, we’ll argue that implementing Akeneo’s PIM is the best choice for growing ecommerce businesses looking to streamline operations, reduce time-to-market, and build compelling customer experiences with minimal effort and complexity.
What is Akeneo PIM?
Akeneo PIM is a software platform that simplifies how businesses manage and enrich their product data. It's purpose-built for retailers and brands with extensive product ranges or large volumes of product information. By acting as a central repository for all product details (attributes, descriptions, images, technical specs, etc.), Akeneo provides a single source of truth that everyone at your company can rely on.
Companies selling across numerous channels (websites, marketplaces, print catalogues, social media, etc.) benefit from Akeneo’s ability to handle multi-channel and multi-language requirements. The system supports cross-border commerce by managing localization across countries and languages without duplicative manual work. This means you can prepare product content for global markets in one place and ensure each channel gets the correct data.
Despite its capabilities and extensive feature set, Akeneo offers an intuitive interface that requires minimal training. Teams can quickly learn the tool and focus on enriching product content rather than wrestling with complex software. Under the hood, Akeneo still provides enterprise-grade features and flexibility – so as your catalogue or business grows, the PIM scales with you. Simply put, Akeneo is easy to use but powerful enough to optimize even the most demanding and complex product information processes.
The Pitfalls of Managing Data Without a PIM
When deciding to leverage a PIM, it’s important to realize that not every business needs to jump onto the PIM train and integrate one into their stack from the get-go. That said, if the following issues sound familiar, you might need to start looking at a PIM solution like Akeneo to work on improving your store’s product data quality and team workflows:
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Fragmented Systems: Data trapped in spreadsheets, ERPs, and CMS often leads to duplication and errors.
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Inconsistent Omnichannel Experiences: If you’re noticing an increase in returns when your Amazon listings didn’t match their website descriptions, for example, you might need a PIM.
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Manual Workflows: Many product listing errors stem from manual processes. Eliminating as much manual work and verification as possible is the best way to improve your overall data quality.
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Scaling Challenges: It’s hard to grow when your workload grows with you. When your SKU catalogues become unmanageable, and you have no solid processes for handling bigger workloads, you’ll lose any steam you've built.
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Localization Hurdles: Want to expand to a new market? Adapting all your content manually can take months, whereas using a tool to do it for you can take hours, if not minutes.
Understanding what you might lose if you don’t use a PIM can help you decide whether you’ll need one sooner rather than later.
How Akeneo PIM Elevates Product Data Quality
Now that we’ve broken down what a PIM does and why you might need to consider setting one up for your ecommerce business, it’s time for us to make the case that Akeneo is the best choice for stores looking to improve their product data quality as efficiently and easily as possible. Akeneo PIM benefits and features for ecommerce include:
Data Quality Insights & Scorecards
One of the best Akeneo PIM features for data accuracy is its Data Quality Insights dashboard and quality scoring capabilities. This dashboard gives a clear, quantitative view of your catalogue’s quality – for example, each product can receive a quality score (A, B, C, D, or E) based on the completeness of information/attributes.
The tool will tell you if any products are missing things like completeness or need further enrichment, will spell-check for you, and more. Using these insights, your team can immediately spot where data is lacking or inconsistent and take action.
Akeneo’s Spring 2025 update also added sentiment insights to the tool, so users can directly see customer sentiment around products in the PIM to better inform processes and strategies.
Automated Validation & Error Reduction
The platform includes automation features that help catch errors or omissions in product data before they become customer-facing problems. Akeneo can enforce rules (for example, flagging when a product is missing a required attribute or when an image isn’t attached) and automate certain data enrichment tasks.
With these tools, businesses can systematically identify and rectify inconsistencies, incomplete data, or errors in their product listings, ensuring that all information is accurate and reliable. This proactive approach dramatically reduces the chances of publishing products with wrong or missing details.
Consistent Data Across All Channels
You inherently improve consistency by using Akeneo as the single source for all product information. Any update made in Akeneo is pushed to all channels that consume that data. This means your online store, marketplaces, and social media are always in sync. The centralization eliminates the common mistakes that come from updating one platform and forgetting others.
Akeneo’s Syndication capabilities auto-format data for platforms like Amazon and Shopify, ensuring compliance with channel-specific rules. Customers will no longer see different descriptions across sites; it’s the same high-quality data everywhere, without ever having to manually update or change anything other than directly in the PIM.
All teams, such as marketing and product management, use the same centralized system for product data. This eliminates the version-control nightmares of spreadsheet-based management and ensures everyone is on the same page. Akeneo removes the chaos and confusion from siloed data operations by having a unified workspace. Team members don’t have to chase each other for the latest info – they know Akeneo is the go-to hub for everything.
Quality Control for Digital Assets
Akeneo’s Asset Manager helps maintain high standards for product visuals. For example, you can ensure that every product has the required number of images at the correct resolution and that outdated images are replaced across the board. Having complete, high-quality images and documents attached to each product enhances the overall data quality and the customer experience.
Asset Manager now offers API endpoints to retrieve third-party media, allowing users to build their own middleware to retrieve data from their Digital Asset Manager (DAM), media storage, or other external sources without uploading anything directly to Akeneo’s asset library.
With Akeneo’s Spring 2025 update, the Asset Manager now offers AI-powered enhancements to further automate tasks, such as image adjustments and asset distribution from Akeneo Product Cloud, without manual work.
Workflow Automation & Approvals
As of the Spring 2024 update, Akeneo provides configurable workflow tools for larger teams. Admins can set up custom approval processes (e.g., a junior marketer’s changes must be approved by a senior manager before publishing) and notification triggers. These workflows ensure that every product goes through proper quality checks and that tasks don’t fall through the cracks. The structured process speeds up teamwork because everyone knows their part, and the PIM tracks the progress.
In the same vein, Simultaneous Work Capabilities gives team members real-time visibility into content changes others are making in the PIM, reducing conflicts and further improving collaboration. Now, everyone can see what everyone else is working on, so less time is wasted determining who works on what and when.
Scalability & Efficiency
One thing Akeneo does incredibly well is handling large, complex catalogues. Getting products with hundreds of variants loaded up in the PIM is no longer a time-consuming, repetitive task.
Ecommerce teams often need to make large-scale updates, such as updating pricing across an entire category or adding a new attribute to thousands of products. Akeneo excels at bulk handling: you can update or import thousands of records with a few clicks.
For example, using import profiles, you might ingest a supplier’s spreadsheet of new products, or, via bulk edit, append a promo phrase to all relevant product titles. Automating repetitive tasks saves immense time and reduces human error compared to updating items individually.
AI-Driven Enrichment & Validation
Akeneo PIM benefits a ton from AI enhancements. From generating SEO-friendly product descriptions, tailoring content for channels, writing romantic copy, and translating it into over 50 languages, to using AI to improve the product collection/enrichment process, Akeneo’s AI capabilities reduce the risk of errors, improve data quality and copy, and speed up time-to-market.
More recently, Akeneo has added support for custom AI prompts to improve the PIM’s translation accuracy and content specificity. This allows users to ensure the content generated by these AI tools matches their brand’s tone and style, in line with their company’s guidelines.
Easy Integrations
Akeneo’s integrations, via APIs or connectors, pull in and push out data to your other key systems, including ERPs, DAMs, and ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce. If your PIM is synced with your ecommerce platform, ERP, or DAM, your team doesn’t need to manually copy data between systems.
For example, when Akeneo sends updated product info directly to Magento or Shopify Plus, your ecommerce managers don’t have to re-enter that data on the web store, freeing them up to focus on merchandising and strategy.
The Bottom Line: The ultimate impact of better data quality is increased customer trust. When shoppers consistently find accurate information and correct images, it builds confidence in your brand. They can make informed purchase decisions, reducing the likelihood of returns or dissatisfaction due to “item not as described.” This also enables growth in other ways, such as improving your brand’s entire omnichannel experience (or helping you get started with omnichannel commerce as a whole).
Conclusion
Investing in Akeneo PIM transforms your ecommerce operations by drastically improving product data quality, streamlining workflows, and ensuring consistency across all your channels. With Akeneo, you'll reduce manual errors, accelerate product launches, and build customer trust, setting your business up for scalable, sustainable growth.
As a trusted Akeneo partner for almost a decade, we at Blue Badger have the skills, knowledge, and experience you need to get started with Akeneo. Whether you need a full-on Akeneo implementation or someone to support and maintain an existing integration, we set you up for success with a PIM. Contact us today to learn more about our Akeneo services.
