Is It A Sign? How You Can Calculate ROI on the Next-Gen PIM

Return on investment (ROI) is a powerful data point. It simultaneously grounds you and triggers your imagination. It can compel a whole company to change a process or way of thinking. It can inform a leadership team that they’re due for an update. It can motivate a whole industry to do business differently in order to keep up with the competition.

Amber Engine has an ROI calculator built into the website because no software company’s big promises should go without an analysis of your return.

It’s that same ROI calculator that told one of Amber Engine’s clients, a brand called AutoExec, that they could save $150,000 in selling time and generate $75,000 more volume in e-commerce sales by implementing a PIM.

In other words, for the cost of a PIM, they could get 10X the benefits. That’s a 10X ROI that AutoExec got all its stakeholders on board with.

Then, there’s Legacy Furniture, another Amber Engine client. With a calculated $300,000 potentially saved in selling time plus $150,000 more in sales volume by implementing a PIM, the ROI for their investment was projected at over 19X.

Your own brand’s ROI is waiting for you on the other side of a few numbers. If you don’t have all those numbers available right this second, follow along with this simulated e-com brand and plug their numbers into the calculator. Watch for yourself what happens.

Meet Fine Signs

Oliver and Max sit on a Zoom call with their marketing manager. Their company makes all kinds of signs, from personal property to public pools and even hospital signage. The task before them on the call is simple enough: they needed a new variation of each product listing to test on Amazon.

The thing is, with a couple of thousand SKUs, even that simple task will be a beast to manage.

The meeting was to discuss the nitty-gritty of how the variations would be written, because Oliver had a total monopoly on the product data sheet. He said it was because he was the person who bore the final responsibility for the products, but really, it was because he couldn't trust anyone else to touch the data without creating more errors and inconsistencies.

Oliver and Max had been talking recently about a product information management (PIM) software, but the cost was a touchy subject. The industry average for PIM tools had climbed to $24K, and they couldn't decide if that was because of demand, inflation, or a rising need. It had become an endless debate between the company’s stakeholders, and no one wanted to own the success or failure of a PIM's implementation.

By the end of the conversation with their marketing director, though, both Oliver and Max felt heavy with the to-dos that had been dished out. The longing for an easier way to manage bulk product data resurfaced.

What Life Looks Like Without A Next-Gen PIM

It was decided that the marketing director would manage the tweaks to product copy with her team. She said they could turn around new descriptions for the whole catalog within about six weeks. Max would then review for accuracy, which would take another three weeks.

Then, of course, Oliver would be the one responsible for duplicating the product listings data in the master spreadsheet and then inserting the new copy and ensuring consistency.

Formulas in the master spreadsheet would be updated to automate as much of the work as possible, but most of the project would be manual.

The product photos would be updated, too, but the photo database was siloed away from their product data altogether.

“The Sign”

Oliver and Max were just about done with the call when Max had a haunting thought. He asked, “Oliver, with Market in South Carolina later this year, what timeline can we realistically plan for to get this new variable Amazon data up? When will our listings be live?”

“If we don't do it before Market,” Oliver replied, “the whole thing will be pointless.”

There was a pause. The marketing manager offered, a little uncertain, “my team could get the variable descriptions written in four weeks, possibly, if that would help.” She clicked pointlessly to the next slide of her slide deck pulled up on the screen, where a collection of the company's placard messages danced in silent animation.

“Is this a sign, Oliver?” Max asked. He was sure they were thinking the same thing.

“No, it's a decal,” Oliver answered sarcastically, the decal products still dancing on the screen.

The Calculator

Oliver and Max agreed that it was time to look seriously at the cost-benefit and ROI of a next-gen PIM software.

It would have to be a PIM designed for 2020s e-commerce, which is why they were only considering a next-gen option. How else could they get their data ready before Market?

Realistically, how else could they manage their growing product catalog at all in digital commerce?

The cost of the next-gen PIM had to be carefully measured. Fortunately, an ROI calculator was at their disposal to get to the bottom of the debate once and for all.

Plugging their numbers in looked something like this:

• The company had 2,000 product SKUs
• The average SKU value was $20
• Average sales were topping around 5 million
• E-commerce sales totaled more than 4.5 million of that sum
• The average e-commerce return rate was 7%
• And the cost as a percent of each SKU was 20%
• Returns were negligible at 2%
• And the average team member's salary was $75,000

The calculator returned its values. Could those numbers be right? Oliver and Max watched the cursor blinking at them in the final box, and neither knew what to say. For an investment of around $24,000 annually (depending on the PIM), the benefit could bring in $225K in increased sales volume, plus decreased time to market and enhanced collaboration (and operational efficiency).

With all the benefits, that was a 28.9X return on investment!

Onboarding and Results

Oliver and Max were sold on the next-gen PIM solution. As soon as they looped back around to their marketing manager, however, her reply was, “what's a PIM?”

Product data management has changed in the “roaring 2020s” of e-commerce. Oliver and Max found themselves explaining exactly what that meant for their day-to-day, and how collaboration had to change in order for the catalog data to be managed fast enough to keep up.

Omnichannel sales and lighting-fast launches to new e-commerce channels required the next-gen of data management. Compared with antiquated PIMs, this meant managing variations of product listings for each channel in one place where like attributes could be updated in bulk. This meant smart attribution mapping, too, so all sources of data could be merged once and for all. It also meant objective data scoring to direct teams to the data that needed the most work.

This type of next-gen PIM would ensure completeness as well as accuracy of product listings, not to mention top speed to market.

Scaling to any height was suddenly possible. Oliver and Max got the marketing department on board right away with the promise of product images stored in the same cloud-based system as the rest of their product data. Sales got on board, too, with the idea of one-click access to saved product groups and squeaky clean product data for their customer service department.

As for the owners of the sign company, the promise of such a mind-blowing ROI finally gave them the push they needed to get behind new, more ambitious e-commerce goals.

With the right tool, big ambitions were coming into focus.

Plug your own numbers into the ROI calculator to see what the next-gen PIM would do for your organization.