Expanding into international markets offers great potential, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Managing multilingual product information and ensuring your content resonates with diverse cultures can be complex. Keeping product data accurate and consistent across all channels is essential but often overwhelming.
A Product Information Management (PIM) system simplifies these tasks. Acting as a central hub for managing all your product information, a PIM helps your business scale efficiently while maintaining accuracy and relevance in every market.
Accurate product information is key to success when selling abroad. Inconsistent or incorrect data can confuse customers and harm trust, leading to missed sales. A PIM ensures your product data is always up-to-date and consistent across sales channels, so you can confidently provide accurate information to customers in every region, improving their experience and increasing your chances of success.
Without the right systems in place, businesses can quickly become overwhelmed by the complexity of managing multiple countries, languages, and marketplaces. A good PIM system will help you manage your content efficiently across all platforms.
Lucas Kuijken | From “Breaking borders: essential insights for expanding your business abroad”
To make this happen, a PIM offers several powerful features that are designed specifically to drive global sales. Let's explore how these features make managing international markets easier and more efficient.
A PIM system centralizes all your product information—descriptions, images, translations, and specifications—into one platform, ensuring consistency across all markets. With everything in one place, updating product information becomes quick and easy. Whether it’s adjusting a description or adding new translations, changes can be implemented globally in real-time, saving your team from repetitive manual tasks.
As your business expands into new markets, this centralized approach allows you to scale efficiently. You maintain complete control over your product data, ensuring it remains accurate, up-to-date, and tailored to the specific needs of each market, all from a single source.
One of the biggest hurdles when selling abroad is managing product information in multiple languages. Each new market comes with its own language and cultural nuances, and simply translating product descriptions word-for-word won’t cut it. Your content needs to be localized, not just translated, to resonate with the local audience and build trust.
With a PIM, handling multilingual data becomes much simpler. A PIM allows you to store and manage all language versions of your product information in one centralized place. This means you can easily switch between languages, make updates, and ensure that every region gets the most accurate, market-specific content. Plus, with the ability to automate workflows, you can save time while still delivering high-quality, localized product information that speaks directly to your customers—wherever they are.
One of the standout features of PIM tools is the ability to manage multilingual product specifications seamlessly. When you're selling in multiple markets, each with its own language requirements, manually translating and managing product specs can be time-consuming and prone to errors. A PIM system, like KatanaPIM, removes this burden by allowing you to set up product specifications in advance, so when a product is created or imported, the specifications are automatically translated into all the required languages.
As seen in the screenshots, the multilingual specs feature provides a clear, organized view of the product details in various languages. When you create or import a product, KatanaPIM automatically applies the pre-translated specifications, ensuring your product data is accurate and ready for each market. This feature not only saves time but also guarantees that your product information is consistent across all languages, helping you maintain a professional, trustworthy presence in every market you enter.
Managing a large volume of products and channels can make it increasingly difficult to keep track of translations and maintain a clear overview of what's happening and what’s missing. The Translation View feature in KatanaPIM simplifies this process, making it easy to manage.
The Translation View provides a clear overview of your translation progress, showing the completion status for each language with a progress bar. This allows you to quickly see which languages are fully translated and which still need attention.
As shown in the screenshots, clicking on a language opens up a detailed view of the product's fields—both translated and untranslated—giving you complete control over the localization process.
This feature is perfect for teams working on global product launches, as it ensures nothing is missed, and every market gets high-quality, localized product information. By having this structured and organized view, you can confidently manage translations and maintain consistency across all languages, making it easier to launch and succeed in new markets.
A PIM system allows businesses to distribute product information efficiently through customizable feeds or by leveraging marketplace integrators. With feeds, product data can be formatted correctly for each platform, ensuring seamless delivery across multiple channels.
Marketplace integrators offer an even greater advantage by automating the synchronization of your product information with various international marketplaces. This direct integration ensures that your product data stays consistent, accurate, and compliant across all platforms, without the need for manual updates. As a result, managing your international sales becomes simpler and more efficient, allowing you to focus on expanding your business globally with ease.
Expanding into international markets requires a well-coordinated approach to managing product information across different regions. A PIM system is the key to overcoming these challenges, helping businesses centralize, automate, and streamline their product data. With features like multilingual data management, seamless marketplace integration, and centralized product control, a PIM ensures that your business can scale efficiently and maintain a consistent brand presence globally.
By leveraging a PIM, you gain the tools to manage complex international sales operations with ease, enabling you to focus on growth and expanding into new markets confidently. Whether you're managing product information for a few markets or a dozen, a PIM equips you to handle the complexities of global sales, keeping your product data accurate, localized, and market-ready.
Ready to scale your business abroad? Try these powerful PIM features for free and see how easy managing your global product data can be.
Discover key insights on global expansion from our interview with Lucas Kuijken, manager of the Global Customer Success team at ChannelEngine. Learn the latest ecommerce trends, strategies, and tools to help your business succeed in international markets.
Discover how PIM tools enhance team efficiency by centralizing data, streamlining workflows, and improving communication. Learn about common collaboration challenges and see how KatanaPIM helped TipPoint Trading boost productivity and reduce errors.
Get KatanaPIM to manage and distribute your product data without the hassle.
Start working with PIM for free