What is a PIM (Product Information Management)?
A PIM (Product Information Management) is the system where a company gathers, completes and approves its product information, such as attributes, copy, images and translations, to then send it to every channel where it sells: its online store, a marketplace, a printed catalog or a feed. The PIM prepares the product data; the store and the other channels publish it.
Key takeaways
- A PIM is the source of product information that every channel draws from: the store, marketplaces, feeds and the printed catalog.
- It organizes products into attribute families and measures completeness by channel and language.
- A complete product is one with a value in every required attribute, not one with the right values.
- The PIM does not publish: the store and the feeds show what they receive, and a field two systems write is overwritten by whichever syncs last.
- Before connecting anything, you need a map of which system rules each field.
If someone at your company says "that gets changed in the PIM", they mean the system where product information lives before it reaches the store. PIM stands for product information management, and it has nothing to do with the personal information managers of old electronic organizers, which share the acronym. For a store it matters for a practical reason: when there is a PIM, the published product page is the last stop for a piece of data that was decided somewhere else, and if nobody knows which system rules each field, the changes made in the store vanish at the next sync.
How it works
Every PIM has its own vocabulary, but the pieces repeat. We explain them with Akeneo's documentation, a PIM whose public help defines each concept separately.
Families. A family is a set of product attributes shared by the products in that family, and a product that joins it automatically inherits all its attributes.[1]Akeneo Help Center. What is a family? Sneakers have size, drop and sole type; backpacks, capacity and material. The family is the data's template, just as the theme template is the page's template.
Channels. A channel is a selection of products and information to export, and it can be a website, a printed catalog or a mobile app. Each channel has its own category tree, languages and currencies, and its own completeness: a website may require 50 attributes and an app, 30.[2]Akeneo Help Center. What is a channel? It is the PIM's central idea: the same product is prepared differently for each destination.
Completeness. It is the percentage of required attributes that have a value, calculated by family, channel and active languages. A product is complete when it reaches 100%, that is, when all its required attributes have a value.[3]Akeneo Help Center. Understand product completeness It is the metric a catalog team uses to know what is missing before publishing.
Distribution. The PIM does not sell: it sends. Its job ends when the data reaches each channel, whether the store platform, a marketplace or Google Merchant Center. Merchant Center, for example, accepts products by file, by Google Sheets, by its API, from ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, or by reading the site's structured data.[4]Google Merchant Center Help. Create a product data source Each destination has its own rules: a product title in Merchant Center takes up to 150 characters and the description, up to 5,000.[5]Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification That is why a PIM often keeps several versions of the same field, one per channel.
The connections change. Connectors that use each destination's API break when the destination changes. Google retired the Content API for Shopping on August 18, 2026, began returning progressive errors from September 1 and asks you to migrate integrations to the Merchant API.[6]Google for Developers. Latest updates (Merchant API) If your PIM sends products to Google by API, ask which API it uses today.
In a store
What a PIM forces you to decide is who rules each field. A fictional example: an outdoor gear store with an ERP for prices and stock, a PIM for product content and the store on Shopify:
| Field | Who writes it | Who receives it | What happens if it is edited in the store |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price and stock | ERP | PIM, store and feeds | The next ERP sync overwrites it |
| Name and description | PIM | Store and feeds | The next PIM export overwrites it |
| Attributes (size, material, capacity) | PIM | Store, feeds and markup | The next PIM export overwrites it |
| Images | PIM or its image manager | Store and feeds | Depends on whether the export includes images |
| Meta title and meta description | The store | Only the store | It stays, if the PIM does not export that field |
| FAQs and JSON-LD | An enrichment tool | Only the store | It stays, unless another system writes over it |
The last column is the one that gives people a scare. When two systems write the same field, the last one to sync wins, and the platform does not have to warn you. If you use a tool that publishes to the store, ask what it does in that case. Clione, for example, flags the product at the next sync when the platform or a PIM overwrites a field it published, with the date and the exact fields, and republishing is your decision.
What gets mixed up
That a product at 100% completeness is ready. What completeness measures is how many required attributes have a value,[3]Akeneo Help Center. Understand product completeness and a value can be filled in and be false: a capacity copied from another model counts the same as the right one. It also counts only the attributes someone marked as required for that family and that channel.[1]Akeneo Help Center. What is a family?[2]Akeneo Help Center. What is a channel? Completeness says what is missing; whether what is there is correct is something only a review can say.
How to check it
- List your channels. Store, marketplaces, Google feeds and other destinations' feeds, printed catalog. With a single channel, a PIM has little to distribute; with several, it is where you decide what each one gets.
- Write the field map: for each field, which system writes it and which ones receive it, as in the table above. A field with two systems writing it is a field overwrite waiting to happen.
- Pick three products and compare them in three places: the PIM, the published product page and the feed. Name, price, attributes and description have to match.
- Review completeness by channel, not overall: a product can be complete for the website and incomplete for Google.[2]Akeneo Help Center. What is a channel?[5]Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification
- Ask how the data reaches Google: if it is by API, make sure the integration uses the Merchant API and not the Content API for Shopping.[6]Google for Developers. Latest updates (Merchant API)[4]Google Merchant Center Help. Create a product data source
Related concept: product catalog
The product catalog is the set of products the store has set up on its platform, the one you see in the Shopify or BigCommerce admin and the one that gets published. The PIM comes before it: it is where the information that ends up in that catalog and in the other channels is prepared. A store without a PIM edits its catalog directly on the platform; a store with a PIM edits in the PIM and lets the platform's catalog receive. Mixing the two ways of working without a field map is what makes changes disappear. Improving that data, wherever it comes from, is catalog enrichment.
To keep going, the catalog and entities reading path lays out the rest of the terms.
Synonyms
- English
- product information management, PIM system
- Español
- gestión de la información de producto, software PIM
Sources
- [1] Akeneo Help Center. What is a family?. Accessed . ↑ ↑
- [2] Akeneo Help Center. What is a channel?. Accessed . ↑ ↑ ↑
- [3] Akeneo Help Center. Understand product completeness. Accessed . ↑ ↑
- [4] Google Merchant Center Help. Create a product data source. Accessed . ↑ ↑
- [5] Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification. Accessed . ↑ ↑
- [6] Google for Developers. Latest updates (Merchant API). Accessed . ↑ ↑
Change history
- First English version.
This definition is published under CC BY 4.0. Reuse this definition freely, crediting Clione with a link to this page.
Related terms
Product catalog
What a product catalog is, what data it keeps for each item, which system is in charge of each field and how it differs from a product feed.
Product attributes
What product attributes are, where they are stored, how filters, Merchant Center and schema.org read them, and which attributes create variants.
Catalog enrichment
What catalog enrichment is, what data it completes on each product and how to tell original data, inferred data and the human decision apart.
Google Merchant Center
What Google Merchant Center is, how your product data gets there, where Google shows it and how to check that the feed and the product page match.
Product feed
What a product feed is, which fields it carries, how Google Merchant Center and ChatGPT receive it and why it has to match the published product page.
Field overwrite
Field overwrite: an app, a PIM or a sync overwriting a product value another system wrote, how it happens and how to catch it.
Make your catalog easy for bots to read
Clione fills every product page with what bots read best: the JSON-LD graph with its structured data, the meta description and the FAQs. You review and press Push; then we check your live store so it all stays published.