A plain-English guide to the terms you'll encounter when managing product data. No jargon, no fluff.
A system for centralising, structuring, enriching, and distributing product data. Instead of scattering your product information across spreadsheets, ecommerce platforms, and email threads, a PIM gives you one place to manage it all — descriptions, attributes, images, pricing, specifications — and push it to any sales channel in the right format.
PIMs range from lightweight tools like TidySKU to enterprise platforms costing £30,000+ per year. The right choice depends on your catalogue size, team, and channels. Read our full guide to what a PIM is and how it works.
A unique code that identifies a specific product variant. A blue T-shirt in medium has a different SKU from the same T-shirt in red or in large. SKUs are used for inventory tracking, order management, and product identification across your systems.
In a PIM, each SKU typically maps to a product record (or a variant within a parent product), carrying its own set of attributes, pricing, and stock data.
A hierarchical categorisation system for organising products. For example: Clothing → Men's → Shirts → Casual Shirts. Each level in the hierarchy can carry its own attributes — so all shirts might share a "collar type" attribute, while all clothing shares "material" and "care instructions."
A well-designed taxonomy improves product management, website navigation, and SEO. In TidySKU, you build category hierarchies with inherited attributes, so products automatically get the right fields based on where they sit in your catalogue.
The process of distributing product data to multiple sales channels from a central source. Instead of manually updating each platform, you map your data to each channel's format and push updates from one place.
A PIM typically powers channel syndication. You define how your attributes map to each channel's requirements — your "description" might become Amazon's "product_description" and Shopify's "body_html" — and export accordingly.
A metric that measures how "ready" a product's data is. Completeness scoring tracks whether required and recommended attributes are filled in, giving you a percentage score per product. A product at 60% might have a title and price but be missing images, dimensions, and a proper description.
This helps you spot gaps before products go live on your sales channels. TidySKU tracks completeness automatically, so you always know which products need attention before they're ready to sell.
A system for storing, organising, and distributing digital files — product images, videos, PDFs, documents, and other media. A DAM gives you version control, metadata tagging, and tools for transforming assets (resizing, cropping, format conversion).
Some PIMs include basic DAM functionality (TidySKU lets you attach images and files to products). Standalone DAMs are worth considering when you have complex media workflows, thousands of assets, or need advanced rights management.
A broader discipline for managing all critical company data — not just products, but customers, suppliers, financials, locations, and more. MDM ensures consistency, accuracy, and governance across all data domains.
PIM is a subset of MDM, focused specifically on product data. If someone mentions MDM in a product context, they're usually talking about the bigger picture of data governance that PIM fits into.
A layer on top of PIM that focuses on tailoring product content to specific audiences and channels. While a PIM manages the data, PXM adds personalisation, localisation, and experience optimisation — showing different content to different customer segments or adjusting product stories by channel.
PXM is most relevant for large brands with complex, multi-market operations. For most SMBs, a good PIM covers what they need.
The individual data points that describe a product: title, description, weight, dimensions, colour, material, price, barcode, and any custom fields specific to your business. In a PIM, you define attribute templates per category, so every product in "Electronics" automatically gets fields for voltage, wattage, and connectivity, while "Clothing" gets size, material, and care instructions.
TidySKU supports text, numbers, dropdowns, rich text, and media attributes, so you can model any product data you need.
Different versions of the same product, typically differing by size, colour, or material. A single T-shirt product might have 12 variants (3 colours x 4 sizes), each with its own SKU, barcode, and stock level.
A PIM understands parent-child relationships between products and variants, so you manage shared data (description, images, materials) at the parent level and variant-specific data (size, colour, SKU) at the variant level.
A simple, universal file format for tabular data. Each row is a record, each column is a field, separated by commas. CSV is the most common format for importing and exporting product data between systems.
Nearly every PIM, ecommerce platform, and spreadsheet tool supports CSV. TidySKU uses CSV for both import (with column mapping) and export (with channel-specific field mapping).
The process of improving product data quality: adding missing information, improving descriptions, attaching images, filling in specifications, and correcting errors. Enrichment takes product data from "functional" (a basic title and price) to "ready to sell" (complete, compelling, and accurate across every channel).
A PIM makes enrichment manageable by tracking what's missing, letting you bulk edit, and giving your team tools to collaborate on data quality. Without one, enrichment tends to happen in scattered spreadsheets with no visibility into progress.
The principle that all product data should be managed in one central location. The opposite is the reality most businesses live with: product information scattered across spreadsheets, ecommerce platforms, supplier emails, PDF catalogues, and people's heads.
Establishing a single source of truth is a PIM's primary purpose. When every team member and every sales channel pulls from the same data, you eliminate inconsistencies, reduce errors, and stop duplicating effort.
PIM (Product Information Management) focuses on centralising and managing product data. PXM (Product Experience Management) adds a layer on top, tailoring product content to specific audiences, channels, and contexts. Think of PIM as the data foundation and PXM as the experience layer built on top of it.
It depends on your needs. Many PIMs, including TidySKU, include basic media management — you can attach images and files to products. A standalone DAM is only necessary if you have complex media workflows with thousands of assets, multiple renditions, and advanced rights management.
A percentage per product showing how many required and recommended fields are filled in. For example, a product might be 75% complete because it has a title, description, and price, but is missing images and dimensions. TidySKU calculates this automatically.
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