Custom copy, a marketing edge is always good. Seek to differentiate your product offerings with good, solid marketing copy.

Product content, or product copy leverages Key Words.

Part numbers, manufacturer’s part numbers placed in product content and product description.

Key product attributes must be present.

A Product information management system can force proper proper attribution.

Attribute values need to be normalized.

Attribute values must be controlled using a central PIM system.

Vendor catalogs and supplier product data can be transformed into rich, persuasive product information using a PIM system.

Products can be provisioned for correct, rich attribution using a PIM system.

Pardon the strong suggestion that ecommerce sites will strengthen SEO and sales with a best of practice product information management system. Often I see companies running very fast trying to attribute products for web presentation. Images, videos, copy, descriptions, pricing, and other key attributes hide all over the ecommerce organization. Product information management hands all data to all users, now.

Sure you do, you and 20 colleagues skip through spreadsheets, copy and pasting fingers to the bone,am I wrong? And then searching for an image or several images pertinent to products and product assortments. And where are the videos, maybe hazmat information, documents, pdfs, delivery restrictions?

Delivery restrictions are interesting. Take a rifle scope seller. Best not deliver that night vision scope to China. Or gun powder to California and on and on. And on to labeling products, packaging to your business requirements and to your regulatory needs.

Then another hunting, shooting business sends me, once a year, this huge mail box stuffing book. With this big book of products, tons of products, is another smaller catalog. The smaller catalog, just a bit skinnier than the big book, contains new products. Why is this?

Because catalog production is akin to having a baby. Conception, to delivery takes nine months or more and many new products arrive during the catalog creation process. What to do? Add another catalog with new products. Silly at best, time consuming, sales killing painful at worst.

Now with modern technology can segment customers, segment products into hierarchies and deliver hot product data via catalog which will be bought a heck of a lot faster than irrelevant, out of date product information.

PIM or product information management, leading edge solutions, get, cleanse, transform and enrich product data fast. The best solutions use powerful workflow engines making product lifecycle management simple. A solid pim solution is a must have for manufacturers, distributors, retail and e-commerce enterprises. Product data, the life blood of any business, is made accurate, up to date and presentable to customers. The manual efforts are converted to governance of key processes. Alerts and notifications keep all owners of data and consumers of data, including ERP, CRM and data warehouses, all on same page.

Please see here: http://www.invesp.com/blog/ecommerce/how-big-is-ecommerce-industry.html

And more and more complexity bubbles up each day. Each day because new potential sales platforms pop up. Names like Amazon, Ebay, Google, and many, many more that can sell your products if you can hand them the product data.

And EMEA too. Getting product data in multi languages, with cultural flair, to offshore partners is not a snap, for most marketing folks. Mary Kay comes to mind. Biggest new markets are China, Russia. This I have been told. I wonder how many folks are transforming data to usable Chinese format?

And I ask to think about how fast markets change. How new entrant web sites are up in moments. How old school business fails. Just think about this.

Master data management, or MDM, is a set of processes and tools that defines and manages master data. This is non-transactional master data. MDM’s goal is to collect, aggregate, transform, consolidate, govern and distribute data within an organization to ensure consistency and to govern on-going data quality.

Project information management, defined, is a series of processes and technologies, working together, to ensure product information is accurate and most important, usable to all that need it. Creating a central repository for product information is a first step. All product information, or product truth, can be synchronized with systems, business users, and partners. This central repository can cleanse, store and enrich product information. Marketers, merchandisers and product managers are on the same page.

Product information, residing in a central repository, can be leveraged faster for catalog publishing, web content, trading pools, customer support and internal operations.