Use PIMCORE for PIM

November 2022

Advanced eCommerce techniques for 2023. There are a lot new tools and new challenges for ecommerce and the problems that we’re trying to solve were not as visible in previous years.  GoldenComm has 30+ ecommerce clients and we focus on one client of this podcast (finelinens) – “I heard they had 35 people working on this website” which spawned the conversation. “What are of these people doing working on this website?”

The story is of a Magento 1.9x platform upgrading to Magento 2.x and a website that has over 1,000,000 skus.  That seems like an almost impossible feat, but not with a PIM (product information management) in place (we use PIMCORE).  

That’s where the title, “How do you move one million skus” came from.

Enter PIM (Product Information Management). A special type of software to help manage your products. In simple terms, it’s a database (it’s actually much more than that) but the primary function is storing and aggregating your products.

Once these 35 people enters all the data into the PIM (by PIMCORE) then all of the data is ready to go to the next framework.  In parallel, we had the second team building the new website (using Magento 2).
PIM is also used to power your multi-channels. It can feed Amazon. Your printer (if you’re still doing a print catalog). 

One of the advantages of a PIM is that you get all sorts of tools (e.g. connectors). It not only stores the data but makes it available to restful APIs, gateways, etc…

The end results is that no longer are 35 people working on it – job complete – mission complete. The site is working flawlessly and taking more orders than ever.