HOW TO INTEGRATE A PIM SYSTEM WITH MAGENTO

All you need to know before, during and after the installation

(PLUS a successful case study!)

Authors: Pedro Moreno (Sales Layer), Curtis Harrington-Iñesta (Juice Creative) and Alma Words

If your company has chosen Magento services for the presentation of the online

catalogue, you’ll know that installing extensions on the platform involves some of the

most common challenges in day-to-day e-commerce business.

If you decide to add a PIM system to your company structure, this extension will organize

product information and services before distributing it to Magento or other similar

platforms.

For this reason, the integration between the two services is highly important and worthy of

a careful procedure at the beginning, which will save yourself and your business many

headaches.

E-COMMERCE PLATFORM EXTENSIONS

A PIM system, as an intermediate point between the business management tools and e-commerce, could be

adapted to the technical requirements of different platforms. But we could acknowledge that Magento is the star

platform nowadays among the medium-large size e-commerce. Almost a quarter of a million shops use

Magento, attracted by the reputation of an OSS (Open Source Software) platform which, in addition,

complements their experience with other technological solutions related to storage, management and retail.

In Magento Marketplace, the platform offers various accessories, categorized by

industry (from catering to fashion), and extensions that add more functions and

tasks to the work of the catalogue. Some of these extensions are endorsed and

monitored directly by the Magento team, but there are more than 150,000

developers serving different needs of the e-commerce experience: finance and

accounting, marketing, customer service, payment and security, sales, shipping,

content and customization through templates, analytics, site optimization and any

intermediate tasks that you are surely aware of from your own experience with your

company.

Why Magento?

You can foresee the advantages if your PIM vendor and Magento platform fit perfectly: your representatives and your customers will access the most updated catalogue information, which improves the shopping experience, it increases sales, and your company will strengthen an organized and efficient operation between different stores and sales channels, ensuring that the team is well coordinated and able to inspire confidence and loyalty in the customer.

One of the priorities for companies with an e-commerce business offering extensive and continuously

growing catalogues and variables is hiring a PIM service, which will streamline and automate the tasks of

updating catalogues using a storage system in the cloud. But choosing the right accessories for your e-commerce platform does not guarantee an automatic qualitative leap. That success will depend largely on

adequately deploying the integration process of the PIM supply and your e-commerce platform.

MINIMUM TIME RECOMMENDED iN THE LAUNCH OF THE PIM

EXTENSION with MAGENTO

PROOFS CONFIGURATION

Week 1WeekS 2&3

Before installing the extension, you should have a well-experienced senior team member who controls the Magento

platform and is responsible for managing the server, as thus he/she will perform and monitor the information syncs between

the PIM and Magento. Such professional must have technical knowledge to install libraries like cURL in order to be able to make

calls to the PIM system. Most of these reports are detailed in the FAQ included in the PIM extension, but it’s very important that a

team member is specialized in these kind of operations, as this will help to avoid misunderstandings and increase tasks for non-

technical staff.

In addition, a PIM system is a multichannel tool that doesn’t depend only on Magento. Choosing a PIM system or an

appropriate data structure by only taking into account the e-commerce platform is one of the most common errors at this stage.

Therefore, it’s recommended to take into account other factors such as:

• Whether more channels are added to the PIM system, such as mobile applications, intranets or catalogue management with

InDesign.

• The company’s business logic.

• Internal workflows.

1. Import the information of categories and products in the PIM system.

2. Create a Magento facility test.

3. Ensure that the same fields of the PIM database exist in Magento.

4. Create the PIM connection channel and give the fields the same name in the PIM system and in Magento.

5. Install the extension.

6. Perform initial tests with little information and just a few products.

7. Check that all data is synchronized correctly, especially images and custom attributes, which are often the

most problematic ones.

8. If the results are positive, gradually add more products until including the full catalogue.

9. Maintain a trial period of at least 15 days, and constantly alter field values to test integration.

10. Move on to final production.

Steps PIM+Magento Integration

When Magento announced the launch of the

second version of their platform in 2015, to

celebrate the advantages and improvements of a

service developed by the best technicians could

cloud the view over the adjustment difficulties that

businesses and their extensions faced. Magento 2.0

was good news (friendlier, faster, better suited to

emerging technologies, purchasing functions and

extensions), but only until the catalogues already

established in the first version of Magento needed

to face that they were ready for a change, while new

businesses needed to deliberate whether it was

better for them to start with the original version or

the latest model.

Magento: Version 1 & 2

To simplify the process, and as in any adaptation to a new system to migrate a catalogue from version 1 to

version 2, it was recommended to test this new option. In theory, the migration should not cause any

problems because it is suitable for all extensions, but it’s very well known that the easy way does not happen

often and the only predictable thing is that something will go wrong. Whether your company continued with

the first version of Magento or has changed to the latest alternative, the installation of a PIM service is equally

feasible, although certain characteristics vary in the process of technical installation.

On the one hand, the management of product information has not noticeably changed. What is

remarkably different is the management interface and the management of product formats. While in

version 1 of Magento the format prices were assigned by formatting attributes, in version 2 of Magento prices

are assigned to the combination product, regardless of the assigned number of configurable attributes.

The extension structuring also varies significantly. In the second

version it can be accessible within the same folder so its programming is

faster and easier, while in the first version of Magento, the extension is

installed through Magento Connect Manager.

Prior to this step, if the combination of PIM and extension is good, it’s not necessary to structure

the catalogue in a special way, apart from however the business rules of the company dictate. The

detail that must indeed be taken into account is how the products and product variants are

structured: if they are structured as single products or as configurable products.

However, it is advisable to remember that the catalogue structure must be well organized and

simple, so that this has an effect on the user’s experience as they can easily find the products in the

online store. In addition, the product information should be as detailed as possible, as this will

help sales in a key way. Finally, and in terms of formats, to manage products with individual stock,

you’ll have to use the Magento configurable-simple product system where the configurable product

(also called parent) will have general information (such as description, SKU or state), while the simple

product (also called child) contains the information on prices and quantities, and their relationship is

determined with attributes such as color or size, for example.

Catalogue Structure

Usual Problems

• Lack of specific experience in this kind of integration within teams. Many clients of PIM providers do not

have a person in charge or with sufficient knowledge to manage the server with the installation of

Magento. This ends up generating a lot of questions about how to install and operate the PIM extension, or

how to find and manage information in Magento (for example, how to add new fields or a certain type of

information).

• Too long synchronization times for very large catalogues, due to the nature of Magento. To imagine this,

you just need to do the maths: while a category may take only a few seconds, a product may need

between 5 and 12 seconds, depending on the amount of information to be processed (including basic

information, attributes and images). Let’s imagine then that we are updating hundreds and hundreds of

products with dozens of different categories.

• Lack of a single centralized version for all customers that facilitates access as much as problem solving

during the installation process of any PIM system.

When choosing a PIM supplier integrated with the company’s e-commerce platform, it’s highly valuable to have an

extension for Magento available beforehand. If the extension does not exist, it would have to be specifically created -

this will require a minimum of 3 to 9 months work, depending on the expertise of the technical team within the

company.

The PIM systems in the market which currently offer an extension that is specifically developed to integrate with

Magento in their installation are:

AKENEO SALES SALSIFY MERCHANTR INRIVER

*3rd party *version 1.13

Magento Extensions

A Success Case of Integration

&

CATEGORIES

The Sales Layer PIM was used to feed over 3,000 simple products without formats into a Magento website.

We imported the products into the PIM from an Excel spreadsheet, made some modifications to the layout and formatting of the data (mostly in the area of custom image sizes and saved files) and then set up the Magento connector from the Channels area, linking each product field to the recipient in Magento.

CONNECTOR

Once all products were linked, we installed the connector on the Magento side, added the connector and private keys and then ran the initial synchronisation which pulled all of the products into the Magento installation successfully.

From here we were able to upload further Excel spreadsheets with bulk product modifications and run the PIM synchronisation from Magento to correctly transfer across all of the changes.

PRODUCT DATA

This has made managing a large database of products very easy and cost effective by saving time that would normally be spent in modifying the way the product data is saved so that it would work in a website database. We are now able to make single and bulk changes very quickly and display detailed information for all 3,000 products on our website for our customers to view.

LIST OF PRODUCTS

This ebook contains original designs, infographics and graphics for Sales Layer and icons designed by Mateo Zlatar, Nara Vieira da Silva, Christian Shannon, unlimicon, Sergey Demushkin, Arthur Shlain, Pedro Ramalho, Gregor Cresnar, Josh Deane, Richard Weam, arejoenah, Schmidt Sergey, Christoffer Skogsmo, il Capitano, Marek Polakovic, Oliviu Stoian, Maciej Swierczek, Marcelo López Santa, Chameleon Design, Joris Millot, Agarunov Oktay-Abraham, Gan Khoon Lay, Luis Prado and Brennan Novak from the Noun Project.

The copyright of the original graphic content and the texts in this ebook belong to Sales Layer and the authors. Any unauthorized reproduction or use of any of these contents is totally forbidden.