Enriching Magento’s product information management with Pimcore

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Collecting and managing high-quality content often causes major problems to businesses operating globally. Magento-based stores, thanks to Pimcore integration, can now easily manage content across multiple digital touchpoints.

Product Information Management, also known as PIM, is a system managing all the information required to market and sell products through various distribution channels. A PIM database is used as a central point from which retailers can deliver product information to media such as websites, print catalogs, ERP systems, and electronic data feeds to trading partners. PIMs are a vital element of any omnichannel strategy and retailers with well-performing product information management systems avoid many pains and gain a competitive advantage by building consistent and engaging communication across all customer touchpoints.

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PIM for Magento

Although Magento is an eCommerce platform rich in features, it lacks advanced product information management tools. That’s why B2B and B2C companies willing to deliver high-quality content to their customers or scale globally, for which implementing a product information management system is a must, look for external PIM providers. Pimcore is an excellent way to do so.

Pimcore, a leading open-source solution, specializes in product information and master data management. Adding it to Magento enables integrating, consolidating and managing any type and amount of digital data (including text, numbers, images, video, pdf, audio etc.). At the same time, Pimcore’s master data management enables control over a wide range of data assets – including product, customer, and vendor information.

To give an example – an online store selling technical products can manage various languages or versions of instruction manuals in Pimcore and then display them on one of the selected Magento online stores. Without such integration, instruction manuals would have to be added and managed separately for each language version of the Magento store.

Benefits of Pimcore PIM for Magento eCommerce:

  • adding Pimcore PIM will consolidate all your existing product data, organize them and efficiently process them throughout the whole company
  • with all data organized, you’ll be able to reduce time-to-market while launching new products or changing information about existing ones
  • enabling PIM will support your omnichannel strategy and deliver product information to multiple output channels in all required formats, quality standards, and product attributes

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Enabling Pimcore PIM in Magento

Magento eCommerce can be enriched with Pimcore PIM with an external connector. Available as two complementary modules, the set enables integration of the basic entities available in Pimcore and their synchronization. Supported elements include Pimcore’s product, category and asset integration.

After implementation, any product manufactures and category classes added previously in Magento can be used without any additional modification. This is possible thanks to an integrated mapper included within the connector.

When each new product or category (which meets Pimcore’s criteria – published, selected root tree, selected correct type) is created, the connector begins communication with the Magento platform and indicates synchronization status. The communication schema goes as follows:

Pimcore

Communication schema of Magento <> Pimcore integration

Usage of a proxy system allows us to avoid Magento overload, prevent data loss, and add real-time monitoring functionality. What’s more, unnecessary duplication of assets is avoided by assigning unique identificators.

The modules are compatible with Magento 2.2 and Pimcore 5.2. This module respects Magento 2 and PSR-2 code quality rules, as well as Divante’s PHPCS and PHPMD rulesets.

Both modules are available under the MIT license at go.divante.co/pimcore-magento

Published April 10, 2019