What Is Product Information Management (PIM)?

It is not known who first used the term. The oldest analyst definition on record is Gartner's from December 2005: a PIM creates a single view of the product for the whole enterprise, stores master data and product attributes, and can act either as the system where the data is created or as the system other applications look it up in. Gartner described PIM as the key technology that had emerged for managing product content and data, so the term was already in circulation.

The website of an early vendor shows how the name replaced an older one. Heiler Software, founded in Stuttgart in 1987, described itself in 2003 as a supplier of electronic catalog management solutions for SAP environments. By 2008 its page title read Product Information Management, Catalog Management and E-procurement. What had been catalog management was now PIM.

• 1987. Heiler Software is founded in Stuttgart, one of the first catalog software vendors.
• 1998 and 1999. Fraunhofer IAO and the University of Essen publish BMEcat 1.01, a format for exchanging product data and catalogs between businesses. Version 1.2 is developed with BME, the German purchasing association. The current version is BMEcat 2005.2.
• 2000. The ECLASS association is founded in Cologne to maintain a product classification that follows ISO/IEC standards. Contentserv starts in Germany the same year.
• 2005. On December 30, Gartner publishes its first Magic Quadrant for PIM and finds no clear leader.
• 2007. In June the second Magic Quadrant puts software revenue at about 214 million dollars in 2005 and over 300 million in 2006.
• 2013. Akeneo is founded in Nantes. On June 5, SAP announces it will buy hybris, and Informatica reports that it owns all of Heiler.
• 2024. The EU adopts the Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, which creates the digital product passport. In December the General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988 starts to apply, with fixed information requirements for online offers.
• 2025. In February Centric Software, part of Dassault Systèmes, acquires Contentserv. In November Salesforce completes its acquisition of Informatica.
• 2026. On October 12, Gartner publishes a Magic Quadrant for PIM solutions with 16 vendors. Syndigo, one of them, calls it the inaugural edition, although Gartner had published PIM Magic Quadrants in 2005 and 2007.

A PIM takes in data from several sources, organizes it in a data model, enriches it and delivers it to each channel in the format that channel asks for.

Import. Basic data such as the item number, internal name and cost can come from the ERP. Suppliers send spreadsheets or BMEcat files, and marketing or an agency supplies copy and images. The PIM assigns every value to a product.

Data model and classification. Each product belongs to a family, and each family has its own attributes: a drill has voltage and torque, a T-shirt has size and fabric. The key that links all the data on one item across the supply chain is the GTIN, the GS1 number for any product that is priced, ordered or invoiced. So that a reseller can read the attributes without re-keying them, the product is classified against a standard: ETIM for electrical and installation products, ECLASS in industry, or the GS1 Global Product Classification (GPC) in consumer goods.

Enrichment. Descriptions, translations, images and documents are added to the technical data. Images can sit in a digital asset management system (DAM), with the PIM holding the link to each file.

Approval. Before anything is published, a workflow checks that every required field for the channel is filled and that someone has reviewed the copy. Akeneo, for example, sets required attributes per product family, locale and channel and shows what percentage of them has a value.

Syndication. Each channel gets its own version: the online store, marketplaces, a product feed for Google Merchant Center, a BMEcat file for a B2B customer or a print catalog. The same data feeds schema.org/Product markup, with fields such as gtin, mpn and sku, and through it reaches AI shopping assistants (agentic commerce).

Source: compiled from the vendors' websites (accessed 07.11.2026).

Worked example, with no data from any real company: a tool maker adds a new cordless hammer drill.

In the PIM, the product gets its 13-digit GTIN, an internal item number, the brand and its ETIM or ECLASS class. The drill family has twelve attributes, among them battery voltage (18 V), maximum torque (60 Nm), chuck capacity (13 mm), weight with battery (1.6 kg) and number of speeds (2). The sales copy and the data sheet exist in English, German and Spanish, and four images are linked from the DAM.

That one record produces three outputs:

• The product page in the online store shows the long title, the sales copy, the four images and a table with the twelve attributes in the visitor's language.
• The feed for Google Merchant Center carries the fields Google requires for every product (id, title, description, link, image link, availability and price), plus brand and GTIN. The title may not exceed 150 characters, so the PIM keeps a short version.
• The BMEcat file for a distributor holds the item number, the GTIN, the ETIM or ECLASS class and the attributes as standardized features, without sales copy.

If a product revision changes the weight, the manufacturer corrects it once in the PIM, and all three outputs pick up the change with the next export.

Source: own compilation; completeness follows Akeneo's definition (required attributes per family, locale and channel).

Figures on how product data affects buyers, with a known sample, are scarce. Syndigo, a PIM vendor, surveyed more than 8,500 consumers in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Brazil and Mexico in 2025. According to its report, 21% had returned a product that did not match what its product content promised, and 44% had abandoned a purchase because there was not enough information. It is a vendor study, and the full method is only in the download.

Source: own assessment.

Source: own compilation; DAM and MDM after Gartner's glossary, PIM vs MDM after Informatica.

Source: vendor websites, accessed 07.11.2026; alphabetical. All except Sales Layer appear in the vendor list of Gartner's October 2026 Magic Quadrant.

A PIM organizes data; it does not create it. If a supplier sends empty or wrongly measured attributes, the PIM distributes them as quickly as correct ones. Completing and checking records remains work for people, and it can cost more than the software.

A second difficulty is deciding which system leads on which field. If the price or the product name can be changed in both the ERP and the PIM, two versions of the same value appear. Before rollout, each field needs one agreed source system.

The market itself has changed a great deal. In 2005 Gartner warned of immature products and of the risk that small vendors would not survive, and it forecast that IBM, Oracle and SAP would hold more than half of PIM license revenue by 2009. None of the three is among the 16 vendors on the 2026 list. Many early names no longer exist as independent companies: Heiler went to Informatica, hybris to SAP and Contentserv to Centric Software.

For products sold in the EU, the General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988 has required since December 13, 2024 that every online offer shows at least the manufacturer's name with postal and email address, the responsible person in the EU where the manufacturer is based outside it, information identifying the product including a picture, its type and any other identifier, and the warnings and safety information (Article 19). The Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 creates the digital product passport: once a delegated act requires one for a product group, those products may only be placed on the market if the passport is available, including in distance selling (Article 9), and the possible data includes the GTIN, the customs commodity code and the declaration of conformity (Annex III). The Commission's working plan of April 2025 schedules these acts for iron and steel in 2026, textiles and tires in 2027 and furniture in 2028. The Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 requires a separate battery passport from February 18, 2027 for electric vehicle batteries, light means of transport batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh.

• Count what you have: items, languages, channels and the suppliers who send data.
• Decide which system leads on each field: price and stock in the ERP, description and attributes in the PIM.
• Choose the data model: product families, attributes per family and your industry's classification (ETIM, ECLASS or GPC).
• Define the required fields per channel, starting with those of Google Merchant Center and each marketplace.
• Give every item its GTIN and check that it is unique.
• Pilot with a single category and measure completeness before and after.
• Connect the channels one at a time and clear the disapprovals of the first feed before adding the next.

• Store each value once and let the channels pull it from the PIM.
• Use standardized units and values (60 Nm, not "60 newton meters" on one item and "60Nm" on the next).
• Link each image to the product by GTIN or item number, not by file name.
• Translate inside the PIM, so that a change to the original flags the translation as outdated.
• Review completeness per channel and disapproved items every month.

• Choosing the classification after the data is loaded and having to rebuild the attributes.
• Maintaining the price in two systems at once.
• Copying supplier descriptions unedited, so that every reseller ends up with the same text.
• Measuring only whether a record exists, not whether it has every field each channel requires.
• Buying the software before deciding who will maintain the data.

This entry was written in November 2026 with AI assistance. It started from an analysis of the top ten search results in Spain, the US and Germany, in order to cover what they leave out: the GTIN and classification, the Google Merchant Center feed, the digital product passport and a metric with a formula. The dates come from Gartner's reports, archived websites in the Internet Archive and the official texts on EUR-Lex. It was reviewed before publication and contains no client data.