What is a PIM?

The problem a PIM solves

Take stock for a minute: where does the information about your products live today? Probably a bit everywhere. An Excel file called “catalog_2026_v2_FINAL.xlsx” on Sandra’s computer. Photos in a network folder. Descriptions typed straight into the online shop’s back office. Prices in the ERP. Translations in a Google Doc nobody has opened in eight months.

The result: when a price changes, you have to remember to change it in four places. When a customer reports a mistake, nobody knows which version is the right one. And every new sales channel (a marketplace, a print catalog, a new website) multiplies the problem.

A PIM answers this with one principle: a single source of truth. All product information lives in one place, structured, translated and illustrated, and it is from that single place that it flows out to your sales channels.

“But I already have Excel…”

Excel is an excellent tool, and it is probably what runs your catalog today. The problem is not Excel, it is what we ask of it once the catalog grows:

• Excel does not know your rules. Nothing stops anyone from typing “rde” in the color column, leaving a cell empty or entering text where a number is expected. A PIM knows that “Colour” is picked from a list and that “Weight” is a number in kilograms.
• Excel only handles one version. One description for the website, a shorter one for the marketplace, a third one in French? You end up with columns or tabs that keep multiplying. A PIM handles languages and channels natively.
• Excel does not tell you what is missing. How many of your products have a photo, a description AND a price filled in? In a PIM, that question has an instant answer: it is called completeness.
• Excel does not warn anyone. Who changed what, and when? On a shared file, nobody knows. A PIM tracks every change.

The good news: your Excel files are not lost. They become the starting point: cocoPIM imports them to build your catalog (we will do it together in the “Importing your data” module).

PIM, ERP, DAM, MDM… who does what?

These acronyms look alike and are often mixed up. Here is how the roles split, in one sentence each:

• PIM (Product Information Management) describes what you sell: product pages, their texts, their characteristics, their translations. That is cocoPIM.
• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) runs your back office: stock, purchasing, invoicing, accounting. The ERP knows how many units you have left; the PIM knows how to talk about them to the customer. The two complement each other and can talk through an API.
• DAM (Digital Asset Management) handles media files: photos, videos, PDFs. cocoPIM includes a media library that covers this need for your products, with no separate tool.
• MDM (Master Data Management) handles the reference data of the whole company (customers, suppliers, products…). It is the “large group” version of the subject; for the product catalog of a small or mid-sized business, a PIM is enough.

How a PIM works: the life cycle of a product page

Whatever the tool, the PIM logic always follows the same cycle (you will find it throughout the training):

• 1. Structure: decide which information describes your products; that is the job of families and attributes (“Families & attributes” module).
• 2. Centralize: bring in the existing data (import of your Excel/CSV files, adding the photos).
• 3. Enrich: complete, correct and translate the product pages, with help from AI if you wish.
• 4. Check: verify completeness. Does each product page have everything it needs to be published on each channel?
• 5. Publish: send to your channels (Shopify sync, exports, API).

This cycle is not linear: you enrich and publish continuously. But step 1 (structure) is done once, at the start, and shapes everything else. That is why the “Families & attributes” module is the most important one in this training.