Today’s shoppers buy from a store’s website, marketplaces, and a half dozen social media networks. And every point of sale requires product information.
For small businesses, ecommerce platforms are typically the primary source of product data.
Larger retailers, manufacturers, and brands have long trusted product information management (PIM) software to be “the single point of truth” for data such as descriptions, specifications, and photography.
PIM Use
PIM software remains the best solution for businesses with thousands of SKUs in multiple channels and languages or dozens of product feeds.
What has changed, according to Martin Balaam, the CEO and founder of Pimberly, is how some businesses use PIM for growth.
“In two years’ time, in three years’ time, how much larger would you like your business to be?” Balaam asked rhetorically during my July 2025 interview.
Martin Balaam
“How much more revenue would you like to be generating? And depending on how small the business is, [the owner] might say, ‘I like it to grow 10x,’” Balaam continued.
To achieve that level of growth, a business has a few options.
- Raise prices, which is unlikely to work.
- Add SKUs and maintain the same conversion rates.
- Sell more of its existing items.
- Selling more profitable items.
The business might try to achieve these ends by adopting smarter buying practices, improving marketing and advertising, or optimizing the way it presents products in each channel. PIM software helps with the last option.
PIM to Persona
Not every shopper buys a given product for the same reason. Not every feature is important to every buyer. Not every shopper uses that product in the same way.
Marketers know this and, for years, have used personalization and recommendation engines to show shoppers the items they are likely to buy.
Those personalized recommendations pointed to product detail pages that described an item in the same way for every visitor, regardless of why that shopper might be interested in the product.
Modern PIMs can store and manage many versions of a product description and use AI to generate even more.
According to Balaam, each set of product descriptions, specifications, and images defines a product persona of sorts. These personas can vary based on demographics, such as age and geography, use cases, including workwear versus party dress, and even emotional appeal.
This level of personalization requires an ecommerce platform capable of dynamically switching product information in and out based on user cohorts or profiles. But if executed well, it leads to hyper-personalization.
Channels and Markets
Merchants not technically ready for a PIM-powered personalization on their own website can still adapt product data to multiple channels and marketplaces.
This means meeting a platform’s requirements — e.g., what to call a description field — as well as optimizing the product data for that channel’s primary audience.
An apparel retailer that knows its typical customer on Facebook is a 35-year-old female could choose to send product photography that includes models roughly that age. In comparison, the same business might choose images featuring models in their 20s for its TikTok Shop.
Hence images, descriptions, languages, and units of weight or measure are all optimized for a specific channel or marketplace.
AI for Scale
Artificial intelligence transforms PIM software from a centralized product database to a growth tool.
For example, think about how merchants translated product descriptions a few years ago. A business wanting to attract Korean-speaking shoppers, for example, would translate the descriptions in a few steps.
A human would simplify the English source, removing cultural slang, difficult-to-translate phrases, and similar complexities. Another human would translate that simplified version into Korean.
This process was repeated for every product, a monumental task.
With AI, it is possible to generate acceptable translations for every version of a product description in minutes, unlocking PIM’s potential as a growth tool.
According to Balaam, AI is helping with many formerly laborious tasks, including:
- Cleansing and normalizing supplier data.
- Auto-generating product descriptions.
- Automatic translation.
- Recommending categories.
- Creating lifestyle imagery.
AI is also making product data accessible to bots, chat interfaces, and future buying experiences like LLMs.
Not for All
For all its potential as a growth tool, PIM software remains complex to integrate and primarily serves relatively large businesses.
Optimizing a PIM for growth would likely take an effort similar to integrating an ERP tool.
Thus PIM solutions are not for every business. However, companies selling a large number of SKUs across multiple channels and marketplaces may find that a PIM makes optimizing and targeting more feasible.