Today’s e-commerce figures show an enormous opportunity for retailers who are willing and ready to take on new markets. But to develop your sales and increase your visibility abroad, you have to face a major challenge: scaling and managing your product information.
Product Information Management (PIM)
Product information management (PIM) is a central repository for managing product information across websites, e-commerce platforms, print catalogs, points of sale, mobile applications, and more.
Your product information is the core of your online business and it’s vital to keep all of your information neatly organized so that you stay on top of changes like new collections, promotions, and existing inventory. This is especially important when expanding to new markets, as you will need to manage multilingual versions of your data, as well as different currencies, measurements, tax rates, and shipping fees.
PIM enables the efficient scaling of your product and localisation teams across geographic and organisational boundaries. Solutions such as Akeneo can be particularly useful when dealing with crossborder issues.
Human-Powered Translation Software
There are two traditional ways to translate product descriptions:
- Manual translations: provide great “voice” and have high translation quality resulting in good conversion rates. However, these translations are very slow to market, expensive, and hard to scale or integrate with modern systems.
- Machine translations: are fast, cheap, highly scalable and easily integrated but result in poor brand voice and therefore generate very poor conversion rates. Machine translation cannot replace a person’s knowledge and expertise (at least for now!).
Both of these translation systems are highly inefficient compared to utilizing a hybrid system that integrates high-quality human-powered translations with computer pattern recognition and powerful automated workflows.
The combination of human expertise and technology appears to be the best option. By combining a network of expert translators with a wide range of translation tools and technologies, SaaS translation solutions enable you to translate your product catalog into a wide range of languages and fields of expertise.
The combination of a PIM and an online translation management platform allows you to take advantage of each of these tools. By integrating the API of a translation platform with your Product Information Management system, you can ensure that your products can be easily and efficiently distributed internationally.
Take a look at our guide dedicated to the management of international product information!
