Ibexa DXP v4.0 New Feature Preview: Product Catalog – With the Power of a PIM
The upcoming release of Ibexa DXP v4.0 introduces our brand new Product Catalog feature, a DXP-native Product Information Management (PIM) component built from scratch to help our customers manage a vast number of products distributed to various online sales channels. Businesses will benefit from moving all their product information management activities to an Ibexa DXP-based environment, enabling an end-to-end B2B commerce solution with management of content, product data, personalization, and e-commerce from a single platform.
This is the first in a blog series offering a sneak peek of new features included in the upcoming launch of our latest software version, Ibexa DXP v4.0. The second preview blog post in this series presents Ibexa’s redesigned user interface (UI).
Displaying products online is typically the first step of a B2B company’s digital transformation, usually followed by an incremental digitalization of the sales processes to further enhance the customer experience. Our PIM solution: Product Catalog, a feature that is launching with Ibexa DXP v4.0, has the power to significantly simplify the management of product information and product marketing for B2B companies at all stages of their digital transformation.
What is a product catalog?
Let's start with the basics. A product catalog is exactly what the term implies: a catalog presenting a company’s product offering, including imagery and product details such as description, features, custom pricing, dimensions, weight, color, availability, bundles, volume discounts, and more.
Before the age of digitalization, product catalogs were physical, printed at least once a year and distributed to many audiences, such as customers, resellers, and partners. There are no benefits to printed product catalogs compared to digital, other than providing a sense of satisfaction to those who appreciate the look and feel of glossy printed matter.
In the early days of digitalization, online product catalogs typically did not offer more functionality than the printed ones apart from appearing on a screen and being searchable to some degree.
Today, the digital product catalog is a key marketing asset that promotes a company’s products in online channels, and it can be enriched with supporting assets such as product videos, customer reviews, and downloadable documents and files of all sorts.
A digital product catalog is typically powered by a Content Management System (CMS) that serves as the centralized product content hub and enables you to create, edit and publish product catalogs, filter content, standardize prices, and integrate with payment systems. However, a traditional CMS does not offer the capability or tools needed to address the complexity associated with product information management, especially to businesses that operate with hundreds or thousands of unique SKUs.
Ibexa’s new Product Catalog is a DXP-native PIM that enables management of hundreds of thousands of unique SKUs.
Ibexa’s new Product Catalog is a powerful, DXP-native PIM
Product Catalog will offer capabilities way beyond enabling structured product presentations across digital channels, markets, and languages. To manage a vast number of products can be cumbersome and it is challenging to get all the details right. Not all your stakeholders should be exposed to the entire product catalog, you need to filter and segment according to your target group profiles. Pricing adds another dimension of complexity, because B2B buyers rarely pay the same price for the same product – you need to segment further and make sure that you display the right contractual price to the right buyer.
“That is why Ibexa’s new Product Catalog has introduced the capabilities of a Product Information Management (PIM) system. It enables you to execute an omnichannel strategy by collecting, enriching, and distributing product data, creating dynamic and personalized catalogs for all your sales channels,” says Sylvain Guittard, Director of Product Management at Ibexa.
Soon to be delivered natively in Ibexa DXP, Product Catalog centralizes the management of potentially hundreds of thousands of unique SKUs and provides greatly simplified product data management for content editors and product owners. Product Catalog gives you full control of your product data and pricing, as well as enabling you to improve the search and filter opportunities for your customers.
Product Catalog's custom pricing capability enables well-structured management of pricing policies in an intuitive interface that provides full overview.
You will be able to store complex product information, edit product parameters and define product variations and product bundles that can be used to attract buyers. Custom pricing strategies can be defined to differentiate prices based on your market segments, buyer’s organization or the end-users’ individual characteristics.
“Marketing and sales departments will be able to manage content, product data, personalization, and e-commerce from the same platform, comfortably and with the flexibility that segmentation capabilities provide,” Sylvain Guittard states.
Different attributes (product specifications) or attribute groups can easily be assigned to product types with the straightforward drag and drop interface.
The benefits of a DXP-native PIM
Many businesses deploy third-party PIM software to manage their product data and fuel their product catalogs, but the PIM market is fragmented, making it difficult to pick the tool best suited to your needs. The new Product Catalog has been developed to make our customers able to create a truly frictionless buying experience, and the redundancy of an external PIM system will save them from costs connected to integration, hosting and maintenance. As a native part of Ibexa DXP, it will enable them to create intuitive and relevant customer journeys from a single platform.
Ibexa’s CTO and Head of Engineering, Łukasz Serwatka, highlights additional benefits of a DXP-native PIM: “Our customers’ time to market will be significantly reduced when pure product information is combined with rich marketing content and empowered by Ibexa DXP’s features for workflows, multi-site creation, and translations. Product Catalog will be intuitive for editors to use as they orchestrate all marketing activities from a single platform, in a single voice – in real time. Comprehensive, segmented, and highly searchable product catalogs can be created and published quickly across brands, geographies, and markets.”
Read why Ibexa’s Bertrand Maugain believes that PIM is too important to be stand-alone >
Intuitive product information management: Combine marketing content and media assets with product data in a structured and easy manner.
Manage all aspects of product complexity and B2B commerce from a single instance – Ibexa DXP
Ibexa’s mission is to deliver the most versatile DXP for B2B companies, supporting our customers' need to transform their sales set-up and create superior customer experiences across all channels. Ibexa DXP is being developed to address the needs of businesses at different stages of a digital transformation, with the scalability and customizability to meet new and more comprehensive needs as the organization matures digitally.
With Product Catalog, we further strengthen the capabilities of our end-to-end B2B commerce solution, enabling our customers to manage the core attributes of their digital channels from a single platform. Product Catalog will be launched with Ibexa DXP v4.0 in early 2022 and will be delivered as an integral component with all Ibexa DXP products; Ibexa Content, Ibexa Experience, and Ibexa Commerce. New capabilities will be added to Product Catalog in subsequent versions.
Ibexa DXP simplifies time-consuming business processes, automates workflows, and drives efficiencies in sales and marketing, leaving you more time to spend on your customers. Regardless of which Ibexa DXP product you go with, you will benefit from our continuous product development and the feature enhancements delivered with each new version of the platform.
If you would like to discuss how you could leverage your product portfolio on an advanced Digital Experience Platform, please do contact us.
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