Why use Pimcore as your next ecommerce solution of choice
Pimcore is an open-source platform that is taking over the world by light speed. It has become extremely popular in Europe but also in different parts of the American continent and Asia. Big companies like IKEA, Audi, and Intersport are using Pimcore in their everyday work and are amazed by it!
As a mobile and web development company, we got immediately interested in Pimcore. Today, we have a separate Pimcore team that is constantly expanding. More and more clients are choosing Pimcore development as their ecommerce solution.
p.s. Here is a great way to learn Pimcore with examples for beginners!
Thus, in the rest of the article, we will try to explain why you should be one of them!
Table of contents
- What exactly is Pimcore?
- Why is Pimcore becoming so popular among ecommerce businesses?
- How other Pimcore components affect your eCommerce business?
- MDM – Master Data Management
- CMS – Customer Management System
- DAM – Digital Asset Management
- eCommerce
- What are the ecommerce benefits of using Pimcore?
- eCommerce comparison
- Example of a great Pimcore solution for eCommerce business
- Choose wisely your eCommerce platform!
Let’s start by defining Pimcore and how it became a great ecommerce solution!
What exactly is Pimcore?
According to the official Pimcore documentation:
Pimcore is the leading open-source platform for managing digital data and a fully integrated software stack for CMS, Digital Asset Management, Product Information Management and Commerce. As a platform, Pimcore provides a solid foundation with generic functionality for all kinds of web applications and therefore allows rapid application development and building customer solutions really fast. Its API driven approach makes it easy to develop with Pimcore, allows integration into every IT infrastructure and makes it easily extendable. Even headless execution of Pimcore is possible.
So, Pimcore will help you to easily maintain all product information, multi-channel publishing, editing and managing content as well as creating a catalog, price sheets, etc.
It is an open-source platform you can adapt to yours and your ecommerce needs. If you’re still not sure about Pimcore, check out a more detailed article: what is Pimcore and what are benefits of using Pimcore solution.
Since Pimcore integrates CMS, DAM, PIM/MDM and ecommerce, it’s a perfect wholesome solution for your business. As ecommerce is just a part of the whole story, you can choose to also develop different parts (CMS, DAM, etc.) of your business on one platform and integrate it with your ecommerce.
In this article, we’ll talk about one part of Pimcore – ecommerce and see how other companies integrated Pimcore ecommerce into their business and what are advantages of Pimcore ecommerce solution among others.
Why is Pimcore becoming so popular among ecommerce businesses?
We think you can guess why Pimcore is gaining popularity as an ecommerce solution. It’s perfect for big ecommerce businesses that have lots of products that need to be managed.
Let’s take IKEA as an example!
With hundreds of products displayed at their ecommerce, they use Pimcore platform as a solution for managing content, promotions and special offers. IKEA’s marketing team can easily and quickly manage their ecommerce with the help of Pimcore. The end result is, of course, an increase in sales!
So, it can be concluded that Pimcore is becoming popular among ecommerce businesses because of it:
- provides an easy-to-use solution
- provides a centralized place for all business activities
- has a wide range of functionalities
Thus, it is safe to say that Pimcore will continue to see the rise in popularity and usage!
Why is open-source the best choice for your project?
Our Pimcore developer, Tomislav Buljević says:
“Pimcore is a custom web developer’s dream. It enables rapid prototyping, is flexible enough for most if not all data models, and is built on top of a framework which has proven itself again and again: Symfony.”
It’s a perfect ecommerce solution because:
- It’s well-suited for all types of web applications, from the smallest ones to the largest ones
- Its e-commerce solution is easily implemented
- The changes in the data model can be made without too much of a hassle
- The page builder portion of Pimcore allows for rapid prototyping of pages
- Management of assets is intuitive and easy
How other Pimcore components affect your eCommerce business?
There are many ways you can utilize Pimcore as your ecommerce solution of choice depending on your ecommerce needs. Let’s look at how you can use different parts of Pimcore to make a wholesome ecommerce solution.
MDM – Master Data Management
Master Data Management will allow you to manage all different data in one centralized location. In this way, with Pimcore, you can configure a complex multi-domain data model and combine data from different sources as well as formats.
CMS – Customer Management System
According to Pimcore’s official pages, Pimcore’s headless Customer Management System (CMS) uses its content-as-a-service (Caas) feature, which delivers content through an API driven enterprise solution architecture, whether it is for online marketplaces, mobile apps, rich web apps, social platforms, IoT devices, native apps, kiosks, and the likes. This creates tailored buying experiences from any customer touchpoint, without increased infrastructure costs.
DAM – Digital Asset Management
Data Asset Management (DAM) allows you to manage, tag, enrich and share any amount of digital media assets. This comes in really handy to ecommerce that deal with lots of digital data that needs to be managed on a daily basis.
eCommerce
Last but not least, ecommerce module allows you to build and manage an efficient business that integrates great with the rest of the modules.
You can use parts of Pimcore based on your ecommerce needs. It is completely adaptable and this is the main reason why it’s a perfect ecommerce solution. Furthermore, as your business grows and the needs for more complex solutions rise, Pimcore will still provide the best solution. You will be able to easily upgrade your ecommerce and constantly improve it.
Thus, even though it is great for bigger ecommerce businesses, keep in mind your business will grow and you could save a lot of time, energy and money by building with Pimcore right away.
What are the ecommerce benefits of using Pimcore?
There are many benefits of using this open-source platform as your ecommerce solution. First, and obvious one is ease of use platform which allows you to:
- Manage a complex and multi-channel webshop
- Create and manage content that speaks values of your ecommerce
- Edit and manage content by yourself or your marketing team without the help of an IT department
- Multi-channel delivery automates publishing processes across devices and channels
- Manage Personalized Experience for your users
- Create product catalogs or price sheets in just a few clicks, with help from Database Publishing
- Have all the information about your products, vendors, customers in one hub
- Have workflow management which allows internal and external stakeholders to join processes and methods quickly
- Create Audit Trail for easily managing multiple versions of your data
- Use Data Quality which ensures your data matches your company guidelines
eCommerce comparison
Multichannel is the new normal, which requires different geographic and market segments. Every business needs to interact online and offline if they want to have satisfied customers. To help business in this dynamic ecosystem, we need to merge all activities.
Let’s see what Pimcore has in comparison with other popular ecommerce platforms.
The significant difference between Shopify and Pimcore?
Compared to let’s say Shopify, which is just an ecommerce platform that allows you to open a shop online for a monthly fee, Pimcore will provide more! Also, when you create a Pimcore project, you own the project. On Shopify, you have an online store only as long as you’re paying for the service itself. Not to mention that Shopify and similar solutions only deal with products.
Also, Pimcore enables you to create catalogs that are ready for print with Web 2 Print option. You can easily choose what products need to be in your summer/fall/wedding/sports catalog and prepare it for yourself in a few minutes and present it to your customers! With Shopify, you need an external app to do this!
Difference between Magento and Pimcore?
With Pimcore your marketing activities can be automated and your product catalog can be ready for print in a few minutes. Using Pimcore, you can include other Pimcore components and have all information needed for successful ecommerce business in one central place – there is no need to have many Excell, Word or any other documents on your laptop, dropbox or Google suite space.
See the next picture to see more about the comparison between Pimcore, Magento and Shopify:
Example of a great Pimcore solution for eCommerce business
Intersport is one of the leading sporting goods retail franchise with more than 5 500 stores worldwide! They sell different sports equipment for football, running, fitness, outdoor and indoor sports.
What were the problems?
With more than 50 years in the retail industry, Intersport expanded to different IT systems. All product data was saved in various systems and file formats which require manual work and time to find the right document needed at some moment. Maintaining the website required a lot of work and it was a huge problem for online marketing team; the content team didn’t have any connection with eCommerce, and the eCommerce team was handling the webshop with limited CMS possibilities.
How Pimcore solved all of these problems?
Connecting all the data in one centralized place
Intersport needed to identify and connect all data in one place. From dealer data, 300 000+ customer data, product information and all media asset for every product.
Moving from manual work to automated processes
Help for the online marketing team – products can be added via drag and drop to any landing page, all of content pages can be easily edited and with WYSIWYG mode, content team is able to see the look of landing page before they publish it.
eCommerce on another level
Multiple shopping feeds automatically export product data to external market places and shopping platforms!
How it all resulted?
All of these steps of integration resulted in online sales growth with more than 80% compared to the previous year!
Choose wisely your eCommerce platform!
Every business has its own ways, processes, requirements, and choosing the right platform depends on what goals are you trying to achieve.
To help you avoid rookie mistakes, choose wisely your development agency and definitely fit goals and ideas for your business.
We hope this article gave you an introduction to the Pimcore world, if you want to know more, please reach out to us!