All about
AmberEngine is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focused Product Information Management tool (commonly called a PIM). Their secret sauce is the scoring and flagging what they are doing within their tool to make it easy for your team to ensure that every product is properly structured.
Get your own data in order. Manage all the different versions of your data that you want to send out to your various channels, partners, re-sellers, wholesalers, etc.
You can easily set up functions that manipulate your fields (product name, pricing, etc.). For example, if the product name contains the brand name, perhaps we want to remove the brand name, or put it at the end of the product name, etc. Or if you want to adjust pricing for products you sell on a certain channel, that can be automatically done - converting from inches to feet, bulk editing shipping costs and dimensions, etc.
They have an assets library that allows you to assign images and assets to 1 or more products, as appropriate. So if that Christmas lifestyle photo with 5 products in it becomes outdated, you can one click delete it and it will remove it from all 5 products, as opposed to having to go to each product and delete the repeat photo over and over. They automatically allow you to store your highest quality images, and when exporting that data, you can select the quality of the export you want, the file type and size, and the export will automatically be configured appropriately.
With their channel features, you can easily drag and drop channel templates from your channel into their system to instantly understand the conditions that you need to meet when sending information over to that channel. You get a score based on those conditions, and flags that show you which fields aren’t matching the conditions. For example, if you sent 37 colors over to Wayfair, but they only allow 25 values, you can see the flag, adjust the existing values to meet conditions, like setting the “Amber” color to “Gold,” and from there all future imports of “Amber” will automatically transform to “Gold.”
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
PIM tools are a pretty mature industry, but that kind of means that many of the solutions have been around for 20+ years and have a sort of under-impressive design, they can be clunky… AmberEngine is built intuitively, which makes it easy to get work done. You can adjust fields directly from the master catalog, and you don’t even have to click in. Many other PIMs require a lot of “Pre-work” in spreadsheets before importing. AmberEngine designed their PIM to resemble Excel (without being as clunky) so that you can make many of those transformations and manipulations within their system, which makes it easier to track and iterate from. They’ve had the luxury of building this tool from scratch over the last few years.
Every PIM is going to improve operational efficiency over what you might be doing with spreadsheets right now. This is of course saving you resource costs, perhaps by allowing your head of operations to focus on other activities, or maybe even from slimming down the size of your operations team. By simplifying your operational workflow, AmberEngine will also help you optimize listings, which can boost SEO and conversion rate by opening up your time to focus on things like improving product imagery, copywriting, and other aspects of simply getting your products up for your channels.
Time to market and time on-market. How quickly can you get a new product into Walmart? If it used to take you 4 weeks and now it takes you 1 week, you’ve got 3 more weeks of sales.
You have trickle down benefits from improving product descriptions, which will typically lead to better reviews, lower returns, and overall greater profitability by simply setting the expectation to the consumer with the right information up front.
PIMs are very serious and resource-intensive tools. You can get started within a day, importing unstructured data and start messing around, but to get fully up to speed, depending on the size of your SKU count and channels, you will likely have a reasonably large setup time of between 4 to 8 weeks. You'll work tirelessly to import all of your data to the PIM, transforming it appropriately, setting up rules and conditions, importing channel templates, learning the ins and outs of the system, etc., etc. The goal is to get to clean data and then push it to your channels.
PIMs are often managed by the eCommerce or operations team. Buying a PIM may require you to bring in all aspects of the business, from merchandising to marketing to the C-suite, to IT - for vetting for security and some forms of API or implementation - to sometimes legal (for legal messaging components). The sweet spot is the marketing and eCommerce/merchandising.
Most importantly, the number one factor for needing a PIM is your SKU count. The more SKUs you have, the more information you will need to manage and manipulate and the more a PIM will save you time and get your products to market faster. Brands with changing SKUs such as fast fashion, will benefit more from a PIM.
The second most important factor is really who is spending time managing product information - probably an operations manager or head of eCommerce - and how much time are you/they spending on managing their product information today? If it’s a lot, you are on track for needing a PIM.
AmberEngine is better for retailers and merchants selling across multiple channels, even though you could just use it for your own store, that is just less common.
AmberEngine starts with a decent price tag, so you’re not going to want to use it as a starting store. As you get closer to the $1 or $2 million mark, that’s when you will get enough value to justify the tool. And of course, if you’re at $10mm, $20mm, or even $1+ billion, this tool can work great for you.