What is BLUESTONE PIM?
If you are looking for a strong PIM solution that adheres to MACH principles, Bluestone offers that on a platter of gold. You don’t need to worry about going composable to stay ahead of the curve. Bluestone makes this transformation seamless for you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Bluestone PIM?
Bluestone is the first and only Microservice, API, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless (MACH)-based enterprise PIM software. Bluestone has been a member of the MACH alliance since 2021, making the MACH architecture a foundation for the platform's development.
Bluestone supports composability, allowing brands to choose the best-of-breed solutions for their business ecosystem. Bluestone’s API-first and microservice architecture offers seamless integration into other eCommerce platforms and marketplaces, such as Amazon.
Leading analyst firms like Gartner recognize the platform as one of the most flexible and innovative PIM systems worldwide.
What is Bluestone used for?
Bluestone PIM enables retailers, brands, and suppliers to manage and organize product information, such as product descriptions, media files, technical product cards, and product attributes. Bluestone also helps to distribute accurate product data across all marketing and sales channels, leading to a better customer experience, increased traffic, and higher conversion rates.
Bluestone brings powerful features and benefits to the table, such as product data syndication, an app marketplace, advanced filters, data visualization, bulk editing, a customizable dashboard, PXM, and many more.
With support for a composable architecture, Bluestone ensures your business is agile and completely scalable.
Who uses Bluestone PIM?
Over 40 brands and suppliers (eCommerce specialists and managers, marketing managers, product managers, and more) use Bluestone to store, manage, and distribute product data efficiently. Let's take a quick look at some of these companies.
Modino: Modino is a top distributor of mobile phones and accessories. According to Anders Fornebo, an IT Director from Modino, “Bluestone has the product mix we need, and it delivers the customization and configurations we are looking for. They have a really good team with a lot of knowledge and experience.”
Wilhelmsen Ships Service: Wilhelmsen Ships Service is a maritime organization that offers products and services to merchant ships. The company provides crew and technical management services to some of the world's largest and most complex vessels. Bluestone helped the company manage product-related information efficiently and reliably. As well as providing a unique customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints.
Neumann Bygg: Neuman is a large Norwegian-based building materials distributor. After researching different PIM vendors, the company decided it was best to go with Bluestone due to its easy user interface, advanced data modelling, and SaaS delivery.
Joakim Solem, eCommerce manager at Neumann, said, “We have integrated Bluestone PIM with our content management system Sitecore, and it all works very smoothly. Bluestone has proven to be a solid partner and enabled us to increase our digital business volume dramatically.”
Read More about Bluestone customer success stories.
Why Is Bluestone a Good Choice for Brands?
Being a world-recognized PIM software, and part of the MACH alliance, there are many benefits the platform offers to brands. Let’s look at some of those benefits.
Why is it good for Business?
Composable Commerce Ecosystem: Bluestone’s composable architecture allows brands to customize their tech stack and choose the most suitable components (CMS, DAM, and other commerce features) to meet business needs.
With over 500 APIs, you can integrate your IT components and tech stack with Bluestone, allowing unlimited flexibility, modularity, and greater agility.
Microservices and Cloud-based Technology: As a microservice platform, Bluestone lets small and large businesses break down a software application into smaller components. These components communicate with each other using an API.
Bluestone also uses the latest cloud-based technologies. For instance, Bluestone integrated DAM support for AWS Rekognition to tag every image automatically.
Bluestones’ cloud-native approach ensures that brands will never again have to spend time and internal resources performing updates manually. Bluestone utilizes all the benefits of a cloud-based system, such as storage, unlimited scalability, hosting, and automatic updates.
Why is it good for IT?
API-First: The PIM solution has dedicated API developer documentation to help you start with integrations. Bluestone has a public API and a management API. The Bluestone PIM public API consists of endpoints designed to serve large quantities of data to numerous external systems efficiently. Its purpose is to facilitate read access to data, as it does not offer any data maintenance or logic-related endpoints. The public API is made public for software developers to access. The management API, on the other hand, is your secret API when using Bluestone. The management API is the general API for authentication, integration, and diverse functionalities on the platform. Some functions of the management API includes adding and updating product attributes, adding matrix attributes to products, uploading assets to DAM, creating and connecting variants, finding a product, and more.
Headless Solution: Bluestone's headless architecture supports multiple frontends, This is because each frontend can use the same backend API, allowing for greater adaptability and scalability across various platforms, devices, and channels. Bluestone PIM, being a headless software, can act as an engine for improving product data and maintaining high product quality using APIs.
Security: Bluestone takes product data safety seriously. Using Bluestone to store product data means that your data is kept safe in secure data centers and servers operated by AWS. Bluestone data centers are ISO 27001 certified and SOC1/SOC2 compliant. Every communication in Bluestone is encrypted. Also, any API requests must undergo authentication and authorization procedures using OAuth2/OpenID Connect and JWT.
Multi-Tenant SaaS: Bluestone is a multi-tenant SaaS software. This means several users can share a single software instance while maintaining data isolation. This approach ensures the security and unavailability of your data to others while you also benefit from using the latest software without concerns about software updates.
Why is it good for Marketing?
Dynamic Updates: You can integrate Bluestone PIM seamlessly with your current IT elements or tech stack. This results in the perfect alignment of all your components and processes. Bluestone PIM enables the real-time sharing of product information with ERP and e-commerce platforms effortlessly. There's no need to endure delays caused by slow data transfers between systems. Your content is readily available whenever you need it.
Improved SEO: Bluestone helps you improve SEO for your product content to rank on Google SERP. Bluestone has an SEO Service app that helps you generate, store, and distribute SEO-optimized URLs and associated metadata among content management systems and API gateways. In Bluestone, you can generate optimized images that are appropriately sized and of high quality to enhance the loading speed of your product pages. The collaboration feature in Bluestone can be used to invite SEO specialists on the team to help improve product data SEO quality.
Dedicated Market Place: Bluestone has over 30 bespoke apps for powerful PIM functionalities on its marketplace. You can go to the marketplace and choose the apps that best fit your implementation. Some notable apps include campaign management, Google Shopping Feed, Voucher App, and more.
List of Features
Let's look at some of the features Bluestone offers.
Personalized Product Editor
The Personalized Product Editor (PPE) can be modified to meet your particular needs. With PPE, you can personalize the elements your users will engage with while using the PIM. Although, before they can access the PIM, you must configure the users individually.
There are many fields involved in the configuration process. Some include:
Category Access:
enables the user to explore a particular range of products or a catalog, including its subcategories.
Languages and Contexts:
users can choose or utilize one or more languages or contexts.
Attributes Edition:
This configuration allows users to edit specific attributes.
Workflow:
Workflows help in controlling data changes. For instance, you can designate a supervisor responsible for overseeing user actions and regulating product access.
Filtering Criteria:
you can decide which attributes can be used as filters (product name, number, and description).
Variant Attributes Overview:
On the Variant Group details page, the user can see up to five attributes in the Variants table.
Learn more about Bluestone PPE.
Rules Engine
Unlike Riversand, which has an out-of-the-box rules engine, Bluestone rules engine comes as a separate plugin. The rules engine empowers you to manage your workflows from a central location. Bluestone currently offers support for rules that enable automatic product categorization.
In Bluestone roles and permissions, only users with Rules Engine Read, Rules Engine Write, or Plugin Admin roles can have access to the rules engine. Let’s take a look at what each permission entails.
Rules Engine Read:
Provides read-only access to the full-page plugin and the rules engine tab.
Rules Engine Write:
Provides write access to the full-page plugin and rules engine tab to create, update and delete.
Plugin Admin:
Provides permission to access the full-page plugin and rules engine tab, along with the capability to create, modify, and delete rules without requiring the Rules Engine role.
Read more about Bluestone Rules Engine.
Product Details Overview Panel
The centralized Product Details Overview Panel presents a comprehensive display of all product-related data, such as attributes, categories, relationships, product issues, assets, tasks, history, language, and additional details. This wealth of information is thoughtfully structured into different tabs, ensuring easy accessibility.
Read more about Bluestone Product Details Overview Panel.
PDF Generator
Bluestone PIM has a unique PDF generation feature. With the PDF generator, you can generate PDF files for your products, given that you have PIM admin, PIM Write, PIM Read, or System Admin permissions. You can also create and manage PDF templates with Plugin Admin permissions.
Read more about Bluestone’s PDF file generation for products.
Support
Bluestone does something very unique with its customer support. As shown in the image, there are customer support representatives for various continents on the support page. These support representatives have their emails and phone numbers written on each profile, so it's easy to contact support.
Bluestone customer support is available 24 hours to help you answer questions and solve problems. According to a G2 reviewer,
“The team is responsive and listen to feedback for specific requirements.”
Bluestone has a plethora of resources to help you learn about the platform’s PIM benefits and features, including ebooks, whitepapers, blogs, API documentation, and user guides.
Pricing
PIM pricing is usually determined based on factors such as company size, number of SKUS, language requirements, and more. Bluestone pricing mode is based on usage, so you only pay for the features you use and nothing more. You get a customized price offer by sending your core parameters, like the number of SKUs, users, languages, and more, to the Bluestone team.
Other useful features of Bluestone PIM include:
Product Score Calculator:
The product score calculator lets you calculate your product score for product data quality improvements.
Sync/Publish feature:
With the sync/publish feature, you can seamlessly distribute product updates, ensuring they are accessible across external platforms.
WHAT DO USERS SAY?
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