What is Pimberly?

Pimberly is a leading cloud-based SaaS Product Information Management (PIM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and workflow platform for digital commerce. As a PIM platform, Pimberly lets you enrich, approve, automate, validate, log/audit, and transform product information. Its customer base consists of various leading global manufacturers, distributors, brands, and retailers, helping them accelerate their growth online.

Pimberly is a certified member of the MACH alliance, showcasing its commitment towards an API-first and Headless solution. 

What is Pimberly used for?

As highlighted earlier, Pimberly offers businesses a strong PIM/DAM and workflow solution. The software has APIs that help with automated data streams from many internal and external data resources. It accommodates the storage of product hierarchies and relationships, which are fully customizable to meet your business requirements. You don’t even have to worry about having a robust automated system, as Pimberly takes care of this through its powerful workflows and lifecycle changes.

Interestingly, Pimberly lets you improve your Average Order Values (AOV) by allowing you to create unlimited product relationships, kits, and bundles. 

Despite this, Pimberly 

Who uses Pimberly PIM?

Pimberly is a leading PIM/DAM platform with a large customer base worldwide. Let’s take a look at some of its customers.

• Interflora: Established in 1923, Interflora has become one of the world's most extensive and renowned flower-delivery networks. Before adopting Pimberly, the company's product management process was a bit of a mess, filled with manual entries and scattered data fragments. The solution? You guessed right! Pimberly. The PIM solution helped the Interflora team with automation. As well as full product data and digital assets visibility. This ensured Interflora achieved product data completeness and accuracy across its multiple sales and e-commerce channels. Read the case study.

• Aldridge: Aldridge is a leading distributor of top-notch security brands throughout the UK and Ireland. It is among the most substantial global distributors, offering select brands like Evva and Silca. Aldridge manages over 290 brands, and quite frankly, managing that amount of customers with vast data types for different product ranges will certainly be daunting, even for a leading distributor. Pimberly came into the picture and helped Aldridge take control of its product data through its rich automation functionalities and powerful workflows. Read the case study.

• Sigma Surplus: SIGMA Surplus, a subsidiary of SIGMA Group, stands as one of the foremost providers in America for surplus maintenance, repair, and operations parts, specializing in Automation, Electrical, and Industrial Parts. Previously, the company worked with a 15-year-old product system. The issue was the lack of new technologies and digital transformation. A problem for its global e-commerce. Pimberly helped the Sigma team upload 160,000+ assets at once. Also, the developers at SIGMA are now employing Pimberly in an advanced way, leveraging the APIs and webhooks to make their processes event-driven. This ensures that products are routed to the appropriate sales channels almost instantaneously, optimizing sales opportunities.  Read the case study.

Why Is Pimberly a Good Choice for Brands?

Let’s look at why Pimberly is trusted by brands worldwide for their PIM/DAM offering.

Why is it good for Business?

• Improved E-commerce Conversion: The system's product record feature allows users to effortlessly view and manage associated imagery and other assets, making the creation of compelling product content quick and straightforward. This is crucial as enriched and accurate product data can significantly influence the purchasing decisions of potential customers, leading to improved conversion rates. Pimberly seamlessly stores and disseminates product information from a single central hub. This centralized approach streamlines product information management and allows businesses to tailor the information for multiple use cases and customer demographics, ensuring that product information is as relevant and appealing as possible to diverse consumer bases. By maximizing the appeal of products through personalized product experiences, Pimberly PIM ensures that consumers receive the most relevant product information, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and increased conversion rates in commerce. This personalized approach to product information management enables businesses to effectively meet their customers' varied needs and preferences, fostering a more engaging and satisfying shopping experience.

• Increased Average Order Value: Pimberly PIM plays a crucial role in enhancing the eCommerce experience by guiding customers through their purchase journey, which is fundamental to effective eCommerce. Pimberly can increase the business Average Order Value (AOV) through well-defined product relationships. These well-structured product relationships in Pimberly enable businesses to encourage customers to augment their purchases. This can be achieved by offering bundles that provide savings or by suggesting complementary products, thereby adding value to the customer's purchase.

• Reduced time-to-market: Customers utilizing Pimberly are experiencing notable reductions in time-to-market by centralizing and automating their product information processes within the platform. This centralization and automation streamline the entire process, from product conception to market release, ensuring that products are directed swiftly and accurately through the necessary channels. By optimizing these processes, businesses can respond more rapidly to market demands and capitalize on sales opportunities, staying ahead of the competition.

Why is it good for Marketers?

• Improved global presence with Localization: Pimberly PIM aids in enhancing global presence through localization, a crucial feature for businesses aiming to expand into new international markets. Pimberly allows marketers to translate product data for multiple locales. This means businesses can quickly adapt their product information to meet different markets' languages, cultures, and other locational requirements, thereby maximizing their reach and relevance in those areas.

• Customizable Lifecycle Stages: Pimberly PIM allows marketers to customize the product lifecycle stages, allowing them to adapt and align the stages with their unique marketing strategies and business goals. This customization is crucial for managing products effectively through their various phases, from introduction to growth, maturity, and decline.

• SEO Availability: Pimberly makes the creation of optimized product content straightforward. It allows the marketing team to have a centralized location to refine content, ensuring consistency and relevance in the presented information. This centralized approach facilitates the creation of high-quality, optimized content and ensures that the best quality product data is disseminated across various sales channels. By doing so, Pimberly aids in enhancing the online presence and discoverability of products, ultimately contributing to improved SEO outcomes and increased traffic.

• Strong DAM for Marketing: Pimberly's DAM serves as a central repository for digital assets for displaying product information and marketing purposes. It allows users to easily find and identify data, preventing unnecessary duplication and increasing efficiency. Having assets in the same PIM system allows for easy searches via existing attributes, categorization, and product data, saving time and money.

• Powerful Add-ons: The suite of add-ons offered by Pimberly enables you to tailor your PIM stack to accommodate the demands of your expanding business. This customization aids in leveraging your product data to facilitate exceptional experiences across all your channels. Some of Pimberly’s add-ons include; automated product specs, data sheets, customer portal, Pimberly AI, Catalog, auto-sizing charts, and more.

Why is it good for IT?

• Integration and Scalability: Pimberly offers robust APIs and webhooks, enabling seamless integration with other systems and platforms. This ensures that IT can connect Pimberly with existing infrastructure, reducing integration hassles. Additionally, the platform is scalable to accommodate growing data volumes and business needs.

• Enhanced Data Security and Compliance: Pimberly prioritizes stringent data security and compliance measures to safeguard personal information against unauthorized access and improper use. The company employs technical and organizational security measures, restricts access to personal data to authorized personnel, and adheres to legal protocols for data transfer outside the UK and the EEA, ensuring equivalent protection through legal and IT safeguards. Pimberly also supports  Single Sign-On (SSO) to ensure high-level security.

The cons of using Pimberly?

Despite being a great PIM/DAM platform, Pimberly has some issues that have been made public on software review platforms. These are some of the concerns raised:

• Bugs: Some users have reported that Pimberly can be buggy, with issues such as data loss and performance problems. A buggy system can end up being costly, especially with loosing customers and slower times to market. A user on G2 had this to say:

"The demo and features seem great on paper, but the software is extremely buggy and lacking in many areas. If there is a bug, which there are many - the software often deletes your data."

• Complex System: Pimberly can be complex to set up and use, especially for businesses with large product catalogs. Here is what a user from the Pimberly customer support forum says:

"Pimberly can be complex to set up and use, especially for businesses with large product catalogs."

• Bad Customer Service: Pimberly isn't well known to provide the best customer service. Let’s hear from the horse's mouth (Pimberly g2 customer):

“Our onboarding, which we were told and anticipated to take just a few weeks, stretched to nearly 2 years before being ultimately scrapped, the Pimberly team leaving us high and dry after causing a disaster yet insisting on keeping the majority of our money. Bug fixes and upcoming features we hoped to make use of were *always* delayed by months. Repeatedly we were told that they were working on linking with other popular technology integrations we use, but for example after a year and a half of onboarding I was informed they had only the last week purchased a license for the most critical integration to do that work and testing.”

Should you Opt for Pimcore Instead?

For a start, it's no news that businesses are moving towards digital transformation and are looking for an integrated-suite solution. Pimcore doesn't only offer you PIM/DAM & MDM capabilities - you also get a complete DXP solution with impeccable headless CMS features for enterprises. Come to think of it. How many PIM companies offer integrated MDM/DXP solutions? Very few, right? Hamari’s PIM comparison pages say a lot about this.

In fact, on GetAPP, Pimberly has a 4.4/5 rating with 20 votes, with users complaining about slow performance, delayed bug fixes, and a lack of new features. While Pimcore has a 4.8/5 rating with 22 votes, with most users satisfied with its services.

Now, back to the question. Should you Opt for Pimcore instead? The obvious answer is YES. Pimcore just does it better than Pimberly. Here is why:

• Highly Flexible and Scalable Platform: Pimcore is a highly flexible and scalable platform that can be customized to meet the specific needs of any business. This makes it a good choice for businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. Here is what a user has to say:

“Our company likes the flexibility and scalability of the platform. We were able to customize Pimcore to our exact requirements and connect it with a wide range of external systems. Over time, the platform has continued to grow with us, and we are far from reaching the limits of its functionality.”

• Ease to Use: Pimcore GUI is easy to use, even for non-technical users. Here is what a users has to say:

“In the digital asset management module the focal point feature helps a lot when publishing multiple image output formats from one single source. The graphical user interface for the data modeling helps non-technical people such as project managers and consultants to set up the system configuration without the need to code.”

• Powerful all-in-one solution with outstanding customer service and implementation partners: Pimcore offers an all-in-one solution with great customer support and trusted implementation partners like Hamari always ready to help you get started with Pimcore implementation, which is something Pimberly fails at. Pimberly doesn't have third-party partners to help with implementations, as everything has to be done by an in-house team. Here is what a user has to say about Pimcore’s all-in-one solution:

“1. The best part is enterprise-grade software is Open Source freely available for everyone 2. Best of bread WYSWYG CMS (Content Management System), WCMS (Web CMS) 3. Best of bread MDM - Keep multiple versions of the data at a central place 4. Strong ACL (Access Control List), RBAC (Role-based Access Control) 5. Easily extensable and can integrate with any system via webservice Enterprise-grade support and SLA also available on subscription (very reasonable and rational cost)”

Out-of-the-box DAM. No need for third-party DAM integrations

Easy to create and use as many APIs as you want

Advanced AI text generation

Easy creation of product set attribute types

Efficient workflow management

Out-of-the-box automation features

Easy to set up feeds and channels

Customizable UI

Ability to add hundreds (or even thousands) of product SKUs at one time across multiple marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, etc.

Strong SSO authentication

Software can be quite buggy

Lack of out-of-the-box connectors

All implementation is done by Pimberly. Not exactly a “self-service tool”, as there isn't any support for third-party implementation partners

Limitations with schema construction

Lack of MDM capabilities

It can be hard to get data out of Pimberly

List of Features

Let’s dive into some of Pimberly’s features.

Pimberly PIM

Pimberly’s PIM lets you quickly import data from multiple sources in any form (CSV, PDF, etc.). The platform can connect to all suppliers, manufacturers, and data feeds within minutes, enabling faster product onboarding with less effort. The platform also centrally manages all product information, attributes, and assets. It provides dashboards that give a clear view of product completeness. Some of its unique PIM features include:

Automatic data feeds

Pimberly PIM can connect to and import data from unlimited internal and external data sources, including ERP systems, CRM systems, and supplier feeds. This automates the product onboarding process and saves time and effort.

Automated Product Spec & Sell Sheets Functionality

Pimberly's Automated  Product Spec & Sell Sheets aims to increase product sales, reduce business risk, speed time to market, and enhance productivity. The automation allows for displaying complex technical information with configurable templates, ensuring compliance with relevant legislation by providing all the necessary data. It separates Spec & Sell Sheets from the product, allowing for quick modifications and redeployments, thereby reducing the risk of human error due to the automatic generation of revised sheets with updated information.

Auto Sizing Charts

Pimberly's Auto Sizing Charts functionality aims to enhance the online shopping experience by providing precise sizing information of products in the PIM. Providing exact dimensions eliminates guesswork for customers, reducing the need to buy multiple sizes and return the ones that don’t fit. This can decrease return rates, eliminate reverse logistics overhead for companies, and increase customer satisfaction, building brand trust and loyalty. Pimberly solves these problems with its auto-sizing chart feature.

Pimberly AI

Pimberly AI focuses on simplifying the management of digital assets through automatic tagging as they are uploaded to the DAM system. One of the key functionalities of Pimberly AI is its  Facial Recognition. Users can build a library of product model faces and associated full names within Pimberly.

Once this is done, images of the models will be tagged automatically with their full names and a name collection each time they are uploaded, aiding SEO efforts. Pimberly AI also used Deep Learning (DL). So, there is no need to train the AI from scratch, it already knows what to help you with. Just sign in and get started.

Pimberly DAM

Pimberly’s DAM features offer some powerful business functionalities. Here’s how the DAM works:

Automatic Previews

The Pimberly DAM feature has a uniquely designed interface for displaying digital asset previews in animated collage and grid views, making searches fast and easy. It supports all image and video types, PDFs, and Microsoft Office documents. Users can examine assets in more detail with a full-sized preview on the browser.

Automatic Publishing and Formatting

Assets can be published directly and automatically from Pimberly using various methods like FTP, SFTP, and Pimberly's own cloud CDN. It allows for resizing, reformatting, and renaming of images to match the requirements of the channel you’re publishing to and building SEO-friendly URLs for specific channels by referencing other attributes.

Secure Backup

Digital assets are stored securely and are backed up automatically in a scalable object storage platform. Since the data is held in the cloud, it is available whenever and wherever it is requested. 

Asset Tagging

Pimberly DAM makes tagging your digital assets with relevant keywords and metadata easy. This helps you to organize your assets and make them easier to find.

Version control

Pimberly DAM tracks all changes to your digital assets so you can easily revert to a previous version if necessary.

Pimberly Workflows

The Pimberly Workflow feature is designed to ensure that products are never launched with missing information through the use of product data automation. It provides flexible, configurable, and graphical workflows that allow users to work more efficiently and improve visibility. With Pimberly’s powerful visual workflows, users can design a simple flowchart to bring their product information and digital assets to market quickly. 

Pimberly Workflow Template: Source

From setting requirements to obtaining approvals and releasing products, the Workflow feature ensures that every step of the product launch process is covered, reducing the risk of launching products with missing or incorrect information.

Customer Portal

Pimberly offers a customer connect portal aimed at enhancing productivity and customer relations while ensuring data security and brand consistency. The Customer Portal enables dynamic relationships by allowing varying levels of data sharing. It empowers customers with the ability to self-serve by providing rich, accurate data in any format they want.

Pimberly also enables you to extend invitations to customers to join the Customer Portal via a secure and authenticated link, ensuring that only the intended recipients can view the shared data. Once in, these customers gain access to a secure platform where you, being a Pimberly user, have the authority to manage the accessibility of products, attributes, and assets they can view and interact with.

Vendor Portal

The Pimberly Vendor Portal is designed for companies managing supplier product data, aiming to control incoming product data in a pre-specified format. It is a powerful tool for vendors/suppliers, facilitating the onboarding of new product lines in a validated format and accelerating the time to market. The portal offers an easy-to-use interface for vendors and suppliers to introduce new product lines efficiently.

Users can utilize product enrichment requests to modify and enrich product data automatically. This feature frees up users’ time to enrich impactful product descriptions and assets, setting products apart from the competition and enhancing conversion rates.

Support

There are mixed feelings about Pimberly's support. While some customers have commended Pemberley's customer support, some have expressed utmost dislike for their customer service and poor documentation.

Nevertheless, the platform has available resources like blogs, whitepapers, and video content to help you navigate the platform easily.

Pricing

Pimberly Pricing: Source

Pimberly has a simple and straightforward pricing page containing all the pricing information you should need and expect. No hidden charges or contacting sales reps for price quotes (unless for the enterprise plan). The package starts with the Regular plan, which is $30,000/yr, and ends with the Enterprise plan, where you have to contact support for a quote.