Every B2B platform pitch eventually arrives at "and you’ll want a PIM." Sometimes that’s right. Often it isn’t. A separate Product Information Management system is a real expense — license, integration, training, ongoing data ownership decisions — and we’ve helped a few clients walk back a PIM project that didn’t need to be a project. Here’s how we decide.
What a separate PIM actually buys you
Genuine PIM value comes from one or more of these:
- Multi-channel publishing. The same product needs to go to your storefront, Amazon, a print catalog, your dealers’ sites, and a mobile sales-rep app. Maintaining attributes in N systems is a nightmare; centralizing in a PIM solves it.
- Rich attribute taxonomy. You sell complex products with technical specs, regulatory data, multilingual descriptions, asset libraries (photos, CAD files, MSDS sheets). The ERP can’t express that, the storefront only needs a fraction.
- Editorial workflow. Product launches require copywriting, photography, technical review, legal sign-off, and a single “publish” gate. Spreadsheets don’t do this; ERPs don’t do this; PIMs do.
- Locale & currency-aware data. A truly multi-region B2B operation has region-specific product copy, units, and SKU mappings that need a system of record outside the ERP.
What the platform’s built-in product info already handles
The platforms we work with have grown serious product-info capabilities:
- BigCommerce has product modifiers, custom fields, complex SKU rules, and B2B Edition price-list awareness. For 1,000–50,000 SKU catalogs going to one or two channels, it’s usually enough.
- DynamicWeb ships with PIM as a first-class platform module. There’s no need to bolt on a separate one — it’s already there.
- Sana Commerce uses the ERP as the catalog source of truth. If your ERP’s item master is well-curated, that’s a perfectly valid PIM substitute.
The "do we need a separate PIM" decision tree
Three questions:
- How many channels does the catalog go to? One channel: built-in is fine. 3+ channels: a separate PIM saves real labor.
- How rich is your attribute model? Under ~30 attributes per product: built-in. 50+ attributes including multimedia and regulatory: a separate PIM.
- Does product launch require a multi-step workflow with reviewers? No: built-in. Yes: a separate PIM’s editorial features pay for themselves.
Two yeses out of three usually means a separate PIM is justified. One yes is borderline. Zero or one yes and someone is selling you a PIM you don’t need.
If you do need one
The vendor landscape is sprawling. The ones we’ve worked with productively:
- Akeneo — strong B2B-friendly editorial workflow, good ecosystem, can be self-hosted or cloud.
- Salsify — particularly strong for retail-channel publishing (Amazon, Walmart, etc.) but heavier than needed if your channels are all your own.
- Pimcore — open-source, also handles DAM and CDP, very flexible but takes commitment to run well.
- inRiver — mature B2B product, often the right answer for industrial / manufacturing catalogs.
For DynamicWeb projects, the answer is almost always "use the built-in PIM unless you have a specific reason not to" — wiring a third-party PIM into DynamicWeb adds integration debt without a clear payoff.
What we tell clients to do first
Before you commit to a PIM project, we run a one-week assessment:
- Audit the current product master (ERP + spreadsheets + sales-ops files)
- Diagram every channel that consumes product data
- Score the editorial workflow on the three questions above
- Estimate the ongoing data ownership cost — a PIM with no dedicated data steward is a PIM that decays
A meaningful number of those assessments end with "you don’t need a separate PIM, you need a discipline around the existing tools" — and that’s a six-week project, not a six-month one.
If you’re being pitched a PIM right now and not sure whether you actually need it, we’ll give you a real read — even if it costs us PIM-implementation revenue.