Our clients always ask us for our secret to success in a competitive commerce market. Without question, choosing the right partners is a critically important part of the journey. This week, we chatted to Akeneo’s Northern Europe & APAC Sales Manager, Tanguy Meriadec, to discuss the platform, return on investment, and global expansion.
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Tanguy, tell us more about Akeneo!
Hi! Akeneo is an open source Product Information Management (PIM) solution designed for retailers and brands looking for a more efficient way of solving the challenges of multichannel commerce. Our solution focuses on collecting product data, enriching and improving product data quality, and then spreading that data to multiple channels. We’re a young, fast growing company based in Nantes, Düsseldorf and Boston, and eWave acts as our partner in Australia!
What are the benefits of a PIM solution?
Akeneo PIM was made to deal with large volumes of product information: hundreds of thousands of SKUs, hundreds of attributes and variants, as well as displaying and managing product images from digital asset management systems. You can manage up to 210 different languages and our connectors can hook into virtually every platform, so you can efficiently keep your product information consistent across channels and borders.
What is Akeneo’s unique point of difference?
We designed Akeneo PIM for non-technical marketing users. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface as well as a workflow capability that makes product information management much more efficient compared to any other solution. The fact that we’re open source means everyone can contribute and improve the solution, and our API makes it easy to develop connectors to integrate with any third party systems. Many of our partners have developed add-on modules that are available in our marketplace.
What’s new with Akeneo 2.0?
Akeneo PIM 2.0 provides an even more elegant and intuitive user experience, with an optimised navigation to improve efficiency. While the user interface has been improved, the system functionality remains the same to ensure ease of use and continuity. We’ve also simplified and streamlined our catalog modeling to more easily manage products with variants in the same way as other products. The logic has evolved to improve workflows on product catalogs and streamline the way retailers work with product information.
How can the platform help brands grow globally?
Whether you are working with third party or internal translators, Akeneo drastically speeds up localisation efforts by providing workflows to easily translate your data. Your product information is ready for market faster, and with a higher quality, even when you are addressing multiple channels and regions. Better product information means more purchases and less returns, and Akeneo users have seen conversion rates improve as much as 56%!
What should we expect from Akeneo in 2018?
Many surprises! Expect more features, a growing team all around the world, and new solutions to address our customers’ greatest PIM challenges. Stay tuned, 2018 will be a big year for Akeneo!
With the support of Akeneo, eWave is helping brands efficiently reach new customers and enter new markets. Our project teams are experts in the implementation of PIM solutions, speak to us today to globalise your brand.
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Michael Mason
Michael is a Digital Campaign Strategist at eWave. With a passion for connecting brands with innovation in the commerce space, he has a focus in AI, Omnichannel Strategy and Marketing Automation. Follow his work here or connect with him on LinkedIn.
