What is a PIM, and when does Excel stop being enough?

Almost every ecommerce catalogue starts the same way: in Excel. And for a while it works, because Excel is flexible, everyone knows how to use it and it costs nothing. Starting there isn't the problem; the problem is not noticing when it stopped being enough.

What a PIM is, in one sentence

A PIM (product information management) system is the single source of truth for your product information: product records, variants, attributes, images and translations live in one place, and from there they are published to each channel in the format that channel needs. We have a complete guide to what a PIM is.

Five signs Excel has reached its limit

1. There is more than one "final catalogue". If there's a catalogue_FINAL_v3_good.xlsx in someone's inbox and a different one on a colleague's desktop, you no longer have a catalogue: you have several.
2. Variants are managed by hand. Size and colour multiply rows, and mistakes are only a matter of time.
3. Every channel wants its own file. If every export is an afternoon of copy and paste, you're paying for a PIM in hours without having one.
4. Languages lag behind. Without a system that measures completeness per language, "almost done" lasts forever.
5. A bad import has cost you a weekend. In a PIM with history and rollback, you undo the whole thing.

What the team gains with a PIM

• One record per product, with its variants hanging from it.
• Measurable quality: completeness by channel and language, and a "ready to publish" indicator.
• Publishing by channel: the same catalogue feeds PrestaShop and Shopify.
• Traceability: who changed what, when and from which file.

When you DON'T need a PIM (yet)

If you have 80 products with no variants, one language and one store, a well-kept spreadsheet will do. A PIM pays off when two or more of these apply: thousands of SKUs, variants, more than one channel, more than one language or more than one person working on the catalogue.