DEV Community: WebSteR102

Pimcore or Akeneo as your best e-Commerce solution

WebSteR102 — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 13:21:24 +0000

The value of comprehensive product data management has grown enormously in recent years. Managing product information and optimizing it in digital commerce is now crucial as it helps tailor the experience to better engage and retain customers and encourage better shopping behavior. Better synergies between the PIM system and the digital trading platform are now more important than ever to adapt the experience to the user’s context. In fact, increased business demand for personalized experience with relevant offerings has led companies to seamlessly integrate the PIM system with their digital commerce engine.

Therefore, companies should not fail to test and select appropriate PIM solutions for their e-commerce initiatives. Here we discuss which PIM platform to choose between Pimcore and Akeneo

Why you need a PIM

First, let's understand why you need a PIM platform. The PIM solution offers a simplified way of organizing, consolidating, enriching and publishing high quality product data on different channels. IT enables marketing, trade and product teams to create, maintain and use unique, reliable and shared versions of rich product content and digital assets for multi-channel marketing and unified commerce

A PIM platform enables you to:

Organize and govern product data and rich product catalogues with custom hierarchies, modeling, versioning, enriching, and multi-channel ready publishing capabilities
Create a link between product data, digital assets, master data, content and commerce, and customer data
Automate operations to optimize performance and improve product data quality and accuracy
Improve data quality, data governance, and management
Increase the speed of new product launch
Multi-channel publishing for digital, social, and print for consistency and accuracy
Personalize the digital experience for any touchpoint in real-time
Drive compelling and personalized digital experiences for positive brand experience and improved customer loyalty
Amplify product proliferation and personalization

About Akeneo

Akeneo is a leading global provider of Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions that help retailers and brands deliver a consistent and enriched customer experience across all sales channels, including e-Commerce, mobile, print and retail.

Product Features:

Content Syndication
Data Modeling
Data Quality Control
Digital Asset Managementv
Documentation Management
Version Control

Key Strenghts

Akeneo PIM makes it is easy and simple for retailers and brands in B2C and B2B markets to collect data from any source, enrich and control the quality of product information, and distribute it to multiple channels such as e-commerce, mobile, print, and points of sale.

About Pimcore

Pimcore is an Open Source digital platform that aggregates, enriches, manages enterprise data, and provides up-to-date, consistent, and personalized experiences to customers. It offers a centralized solution for PIM, MDM, DAM, CDP, DXP/CMS, and digital commerce in a seamlessly integrated platform

Product Features

Content Syndication
Data Modeling
Data Quality Control
Digital Asset Management
Documentation Management
Master Record Management
Version Control
Custom Portals
Digital Experience Platform (DXP/CMS)

Key Strenghts

Pimcore's consolidated platform empowers enterprises with a single 'trusted view' of information (product, asset, and customer) to eliminate data silos, optimize operational efficiency, improve customer experience, and minimize IT costs.

Conclusion

Pimcore is a very flexible system, open-source without any license cost. The key features customers love about Pimcore is its completely flexible and extensible data model that allows creating complex data models with ease. Akeneo is also open source. It has simple implementation with powerful functionality, but customers suggest that it needs to enhance UI interactions.

Read full comparison of Pimcore and Akeneo here.

Choosing the right CMS for your company

WebSteR102 — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 10:47:20 +0000

In this article, you’ll find everything needed to decide the winner in the Pimcore vs. WordPress showdown! You’re thinking of implementing a PIM or a CMS system, and you’d like to know which platform can set you up for success?

What is Content Management System (CMS) and Product Information Management (PIM)?

Both product information management and content management system are extremely useful systems, but they are some key differences.

CMS and PIM are generally different systems. CMS is a system used for creating and managing content, including content publishing and distribution across selected channels. PIM, on the other hand, handles data. It centralizes all of the product data in a single source, making it easily accessible and useful for your marketing and sales teams.

How can a business benefit from using a CMS?

Almost any business can find massive value in owning a content management system (or CMS for short). Its main purpose is to manage all the content, enrich it, and publish it so it can be distributed across various channels.

CMS enables any non-technical user to create functional pages and to get involved in the content management process without the need for help from a developer. Having an understanding of programming languages may be useful, but far from necessary to successfully operate a CMS.

In the image above, you can see the channels handled by a CMS. It gathers information from various sources, enriches it, and distributes the finished content across multiple channels. Channel limitations vary from one CMS to another, so you’ll need to ensure that you choose the right one.

Pimcore vs. WordPress - the comparison

Both Pimcore and WordPress have CMS capabilities, but WordPress lacks in any other area. Regarding the overall capabilities of a platform, Pimcore easily outshines WordPress, but let’s move on and compare these two platforms’ features and performance!

Both platforms enable you to:

-Manage content
-Optimize content for search engines
-Translate content into new languages
-Integrate 3rd party apps
-Automate marketing activities (WordPress can with plugins)
-Personalize content (WordPress can with plugins)
-Fully customize the website
-Prepare content for web-to-print (WordPress can with plugins)

There are many differences between these two platforms. So, let’s see in what ways can WordPress help your business:

-Easy to use for non-technical personnel
-Availability of useful SEO plugins
-Multilanguage support through plugins
-A wide range of free website templates
-Simple content publishing and media management
-Easy to install - reduces implementation time
-Built-in comment section

On the other hand, Pimcore provides you with a wider arsenal of features and benefits needed for any modern-day business:

-Product feed management for all channels
-Marketplace integration
-Connecting any external system to Pimcore
-Easy data import from any data source
-In-built photo editor
-In-built SEO management dashboard
-Elimination of data silos
-Easy creation of product catalogs
-Strong personalization capabilities through behavioral targeting
engine
-In-built analytics dashboards
-A complex pricing rules engine
-Creating and managing complex workflows

Pimcore vs. WordPress - who’s the winner?

Regarding data management, WordPress falls short. It lacks in-built features for integrating with external systems such as ERP, CRM, BI, and others.
Small businesses tend to choose WordPress over Pimcore due to its simplicity and ease of use, and it often perfectly fits their business needs.

On the other hand, if you’re tackling a complex project with a large number of stakeholders, data sources, and output channels - Pimcore may much better suit your needs.

Finally, if you’re looking for a partner to help you implement PIM or CMS system into your organization, we’d like to give you a helping hand! We’re experts in Pimcore development, and we’re ready to take on any development challenges that come your way.

Reach out to us anytime and let’s discuss how we can help you turn your ideas into successful and profitable projects!

To book your Pimcore consultation click here.