Blog
September 17, 2025
Product Information Management (PIM) tools in retail are often expected to do it all. Today, these systems are tasked with data consolidation, quality control, enrichment, marketing text creation, translation, asset management, sales catalogue generation, and distributing product data to multiple sales channels, all while handling massive amounts of supplier input.
And while PIMs are excellent at managing structured data at scale, there’s one area where they consistently struggle: data onboarding, especially when incoming data is messy, inconsistent, or unstructured.
As the volume and complexity of supplier feeds grow, most PIM systems start to buckle under the weight of what they were never meant to handle. And the consequences ripple through your business.
What PIMs Were Meant to Do and Where They Struggle
At their core, PIM systems are built to store, manage, and distribute product data that’s already been cleaned and structured. While PIM systems are critical for managing product data, many legacy PIMs were originally designed for manufacturers with a small group of internal users, not retailers juggling thousands of messy, inconsistent supplier feeds. That’s where and why the breakdown often happens.
Supplier data rarely arrives in a consistent, ready-to-use format. It’s often incomplete, differently categorized, if at all, or in the wrong taxonomy altogether. And it takes a patchwork of tools, templates, and emails to wrangle it into something usable. Most teams rely on manual Excel uploads, inconsistent naming conventions, or error-prone coordination processes that burn time, cash, and energy.
When product data onboarding becomes this fragmented, the PIM is set up to fail. Not because it’s flawed, but because it’s not getting the structured data it needs to do its job.
Onedot: The Smart Data Onboarding Platform
Onedot was built to solve messy data chaos that PIMs can’t. Rather than replacing your PIM, Onedot complements it, acting as the intelligent engine that transforms unstructured supplier data into structured, validated, enriched content before it ever even reaches your PIM.
It ingests data from virtually any source, Excel, PDFs, ZIP files, supplier portals, even websites, and automates the most painful parts of the process: attribute extraction, content enrichment, classification, and normalization. The result is a flow of clean, consistent data into your PIM, ERP, or digital channels.
With Onedot in place, product data onboarding becomes faster, smarter, and dramatically more scalable. Teams no longer need to wrestle with formatting inconsistencies or chase down suppliers for missing content because most of that is handled automatically, with built-in validation logic and AI-powered enrichment.
The Real-World Impact of Getting Product Data Right
When you fix your data onboarding, the downstream effects are immediate. Retailers working with Onedot have seen:
- 5× faster time-to-market, with onboarding reduced from weeks to days
- Up to 70% less manual effort across data and e-commerce teams
- Fewer product returns due to better data accuracy and completeness
- Conversion rates increasing by 5–10% thanks to richer, more consistent product content
One customer processed over 1 million SKUs, enriching over 120,000 final products, automatically mapped to 4,000 categories and 8,000 attributes. That’s not a marginal gain. That’s a full-scale transformation.
What If You Could Stop Waiting on Suppliers?
Another notable advantage: Onedot reduces your dependence on supplier cooperation. With Content Mining capabilities, Onedot can extract product data directly from supplier’s public sources, such as websites, product sheets, and catalogs, even when suppliers don’t provide structured feeds.
This means your team can generate enriched, validated product records without waiting weeks for incomplete spreadsheets. It’s autonomy in action, and it allows you to move at the speed of commerce, not the pace of supplier email chains.
Built to Fit Wherever You Are in the Journey
Whether you already have a PIM, are planning to roll one out, or aren’t sure where to begin, Onedot meets you where you are.
- Already using a PIM? Onedot acts as your data cleanup and transformation layer — using product catalogues to extract, standardize, and deliver high-quality product information directly into your system.
- Want suppliers to deliver their data self-contained into your PIM? Use Onedot online or Excel templates into which they easily enter their data, validating it on the go.
- Planning a migration? Onedot prepares and transforms the data from your legacy system for your new stack, using the same structured process you’ll continue using for ongoing onboarding.
- No PIM yet? Onedot handles the onboarding to ERP and shop, with or without a PIM already in place, or makes it easier to implement a PIM.
Final Thoughts: Your PIM Doesn’t Always Need Replacing. It Needs Reinforcements.
It’s time to stop asking your PIM to fix and validate unstructured data. That’s not what it was built for, and forcing it to do so only leads to bottlenecks, delays, and missed opportunities. Onedot gives your PIM what it needs to thrive: structured, validated, enriched product content, ready for action.
If you’re drowning in supplier data chaos and manual work, the answer isn’t necessarily a new system. It’s a smarter process. And Onedot is where that process starts.
Learn how Onedot can help you turn product data into a competitive advantage, making PIMs stronger in the process: onedot.com