If you run an e-commerce shop based on the Magento platform, you could probably hear from your team: Product management in Magento 2 is mainly staring at the loading icon. Of course this is quite an exaggeration, but let’s face it - there is a grain
The great majority of e-commerce systems have very simplified ways and methods of managing products through an admin panel. Product catalog management is only one of many business areas that Magento has. While it is not a small field, client relationships and order management are of greater importance and have the greatest impact on customer loyalty. Moreover, the e-commerce platform is mainly about the efficiency of "front-end" mechanisms, i.e. appearance and usability on the consumer side.
The area of preparing and managing a product catalog is therefore not the only one in Magento. In the Ergonode system, the opposite is true - the products, their language translations and the way of working with content management are the core of the platform.
A very common case of problems that occur in Magento Open Source are errors in product content that can be seen on the production version of the system. Admin has no knowledge about who and what changed and which of the existing processes could damage product data.
This significantly impacts the shopping experience and conversion rates of stores with a large assortment volume (several tens or several hundred thousand products). The shop staff may have no idea that there are critical errors in the production of many products and will probably find out about this only directly from consumers.
In PIM systems such as Ergonode, the history of product changes is the basis for functioning. The administrator knows exactly what, when and who changed the data. Additionally, thanks to the possibility to create and manage the workflow for content management, errors can be reduced to a minimum.
In Magento Open Source it is possible to create and manage only one category tree, this significantly complicates effective work (especially in the context of advanced access assignment).
For an extensive assortment structure and a large volume of indexes, a single tree is insufficient for effective multi-channel sales (multiple domains, subdomains, language locations, Amazon marketplace sales, eBay, etc.). A single tree can lead to numerous mistakes and result in real financial losses.
In Ergonode PIM, product categories are separated from tree structures. Each category can belong multiple times to different trees. It can also be placed in such a structure in a completely different way. This allows for much more efficient management of multiple product catalogs in different sales channels.
Magento 2 Open Source is a very flexible platform for online business, but this flexibility has some limitations. It is practically impossible to manage multi-select or swatch attributes with thousands of completed option values in the admin panel.
In Ergonode PIM, from the very beginning we focused on the efficiency of working with hundreds and thousands of attributes and their contents. This allows us to work extremely efficiently with extensive product structures.
Imagine a situation where 100 products in the Magento system use the same pictures in the gallery for some reason. This solution will cause that in the Magento system every picture will be copied to every product. So if there is a need to replace this photo for all 100 products there will be a problem. Additionally, copying products increases the use of hard disk resources.
In PIM systems, the images are placed in the resource management section. From there, they are linked to each instance. The exchange of a given photo for 100 products is easy and requires only a few clicks.
Because it is not possible to link product statuses with the completeness of product data in the Magento system, you never know if a given product is 100% ready for publication.
In PIM systems, data completeness is the basic functionality that ensures data integrity and security regardless of the later distribution channel.
Imagine having to prepare an administration product listing page with 15 columns generated from attributes, and filtering your assortment with an additional 5 specific attributes. In the Magento admin panel, getting this is a real nightmare and you have to take a long journey through store and attributes settings. It takes a lot of clicks, time and causes more frustration. Ergonode PIM is the total opposite and gives you the powerful grid views, where you can easily drag and drop every attribute, put it as the column or filter and share that view with other teammates. It is also possible to filter products with empty values of specific attributes and track the completeness.
No matter what kind of data you have on the grid, with inline editing you can update it in a few seconds.
Magento Open Source is a great system for sales in many markets. However, the level of complexity with settings of languages and versions of stores for local markets is very high. This results in many mistakes due to insufficient knowledge - how to set something - of people working in the administration panel.
PIM systems are mainly designed for easy management, product data handling and their further convenient distribution. As non-commerce platforms, they do not have a number of sales functions that complicate processes related to product data translations.
In the Magento system it is not possible to build product groups that automatically assign products to a group based on specific rules. This makes it much more difficult to prepare different marketing actions on the basis of selected product groups. It is difficult to organize a group of products in an easy way and then send it with a dedicated category tree to specific sales channels.
In Magento, managing changes off the product card is very time-consuming. This is due to both the application interface itself and the entire system architecture. Thus, in the case of large volumes of the assortment, there is often a situation in which the effectiveness of management and satisfaction of working with a product catalog is reduced almost to zero.
PIM systems are ready to work on large product catalogs.
In Ergonode PIM, working on a product card is extremely simple and intuitive, thanks to a dedicated Product Designer (where you can design the entire data structure simply and efficiently using drag & drop solutions).
Working with the product listing is also very intuitive, as Ergonode has built-in well-known Excel spreadsheet solutions.
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