Executive Summary

Product Experience Management for Retail

Products are the foundation of every retailer, regardless of its industry or size. Across all channels and departments, nearly every interaction relates to answering questions or gaining access to product information. Every retail organization must ensure that products get the attention they deserve as they are marketed, sold, serviced and enhanced to meet customer expectations. A “customer-first” mentality is critical and not unreasonable. Still, in a rush to be the most cost-effective, retail leaders too often forget that product experiences are key to satisfying and retaining customers.

The ability to invest adequate time and resources into products determines an retail's agility, sustainability, operational effectiveness and overall business health. Successful product experiences require technology investments like product information management (PIM) to ensure the proper support of interactions and the underlying lifecycle that enables impactful and interactive communication with customers. To accomplish this requires an agreed-upon standard of product information that should be readily available for any purpose, including AI uses cases. By 2027, the product information management category will evolve as product experience management (PXM) where the value from the technology is focused on digital experiences and engagement through GenAI.

ISG Research defines product experience management as the methods and processes for managing customer experiences using systems that support product-related processes to meet the satisfaction and needs of any buyer, consumer or customer. PXM is integral across the front office; the customer and revenue areas of marketing, sales, commerce, customer and supplier; and retail needs. As retailers increase the number and diversity of products offered to customers, it is critical to address limitations in the ways product information is managed and distributed, including the administration of related attributes and content that describes the products. 

The goal of PXM is to establish a reliable, single source of product information to share across retail channels. Getting it right is not easy, as the majority of retailers have more than five sources of product information to integrate and manage efficiently. Most retailers acknowledge that standardizing product information requires substantial effort and often use laborious, time-consuming, customized methods or rely on manual effort to produce a reliable product record. Worse yet, many retailers still depend heavily on spreadsheets, and most will admit to finding major or minor errors in records. Processes and tools are available to automate much of this work. If properly deployed, PXM systems can synchronize all attributes and definitions used in the identification, description, sales and accessibility of products across all retail channels that customers access.

PXM benefits from decades of evolutionary advancements in product information management systems that have focused on the administration and standardization of product content and data for internal processes and applications. However, not all PIM systems have evolved to support product experiences consumed across channels—though the needs of retailers necessitate those capabilities. Effectively evaluating PIM systems requires the ability to examine an expanded set of requirements that support PXM.

At the same time, competitive pressures require that retailers quickly incorporate large amounts of new content—video and images, for example—while ensuring the information presented to customers is accurate, operational processes run uninterrupted and timely data is available for business analysis. For environments where consumers can use multiple channels to access product information—websites, kiosks, smartphones, tablets—retailers must present complete, up-to-date product information to inspire interest and facilitate purchases.

Today’s retailers must manage a continually expanding array of data, content and digital assets while satisfying consumer demands for comprehensive product information. Addressing these challenges requires unified processes, automated systems and, importantly, the ability to augment and enrich product information. We find that most retailers have incompatible tools and lack a centralized information repository. These situations lead to wasted time and inefficiency in checking for errors and reconciling data across systems.

To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers and customers across channels, retailers must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. Crucially, it is impossible to deliver the best customer experience without a great product experience, and successful retailers recognize this is a key benefit realized from PXM investments. PXM enhances visibility into—and engagement with—product information and can help retailers increase revenue and satisfy customers.

Managing product information can be challenging when a retailer and its workers use different names, attributes, images and related product information for the same purpose. Disparities often exist across retailers and manufacturers. Additionally, retailers regularly add suppliers to their channels and increase the number and variety of products offered without utilizing already defined and agreed-upon product information. Many retailers indicate that today’s customers also expect a delightful product experience that provides information on mobile devices, but conducting commerce across sites, marketplaces and social media introduces challenges for a unified experience.

These advances bring additional content and data into a retailer’s information systems, introducing new inconsistencies in how products and attributes are combined. Still, competitive pressures require up-to-date and accurate information that is also engaging in its presentation—in other words, an effective product experience. Retailers need systems that enable intelligent processes to run continuously and uninterrupted, using AI and machine language with analytics to identify issues and opportunities to exploit the power of product information. Analytics provide insight into the use of product information and where collaborative actions are necessary for improvement. By 2028, one-third of enterprises will have invested in a common technological approach for product information management that is committed to product experiences and not just digital assets.

In most retailers, product information is spread across websites, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each retailer can uniquely present information from similar manufacturers, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside retailers’ systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems. Slow and incomplete integration processes prevent retailers from gaining a single view of products to control and update the information and enable a consistent product experience for buyers, consumers and customers.

Retailers must effectively manage and improve product information beyond internal channels and systems to ensure accuracy and consistency across the retailer spectrum. This approach enables better alignment of products to specific activities and processes but requires applications that allow a retailer to manage product information for satisfactory digital experiences. The benefits of using dedicated PXM technology can be significant. In our research, most retail organizations said PXM can help eliminate data errors, gain a competitive advantage and improve the customer experience through consistent product information. And if addressed effectively, the improvement can ensure a retailer achieves satisfaction in product experiences.

PXM—and the applications and technology that enable it—help retailers provide the best possible product information for processes, departments and partners. To accomplish this, software must support multiple business roles, including product managers and marketers, operations and connections with manufacturers. Manufacturers, for example, must be able to share product information with distributors and direct retailers. PXM software should meet customer needs for interacting with any application or platform or directly via product catalogs shared from websites to marketplaces.

ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. Improving retail performance through adapting processes, information and technology components requires selecting the right software provider and product. However, caution is appropriate here: Technology updates alone are not enough to improve the use of PXM in a retail organization. Doing so requires a balanced set of upgrades and efforts to enhance processes and information. We find that few retailers are satisfied with PXM processes that derive from underlying PIM efforts.

It is best to start by assessing all short- and long-term efforts related to the product experience and any existing approach. No matter where a retailer manages product information—whether from a dedicated ERP or CRM system or, vexingly, a tangle of spreadsheets—it must continuously improve the product experience. Product success is more than just merchandising and maintaining product information on a digital shelf. The goal is to increase productivity and sustain those efforts in the best and worst of times, ensuring success under pressure and over the long term. Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process. Applications should do more than enhance productivity in managing product information and provide insights into usage such as product activation, new product introduction and end of life.

The product experience unifies a retailer’s efforts to sustain continuity while bringing new value to digital merchandising and marketing efforts, helping exceed customer expectations. Optimizing the product experience is more than just a nicety—it is essential for every retailer that looks to make the most of customer engagement and relationships. This effort is vital when relying on digital commerce to sell products and services. Without an optimized product experience, a retailer will not successfully elevate the customer experience.

Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility across business and IT leadership, and impossible to do without PIM designed to optimize the product experience. This approach is separate from master data management technology or goals for achieving better data integration. Antiquated methods such as spreadsheets, databases and other ERP, CRM or digital commerce systems are not always designed for a contemporary digital product experience.

Retailers should also prioritize investments that enable more effective digital merchandising and price management. These systems need a comprehensive view of the digital shelf and should be able to virtualize products from packaging to specifications for buyers and customers. Simply posting an image and description was possible a decade ago, but that does not provide an actual product experience. In cases where the product is equipment, extended reality technology can virtualize and augment the product experience, significantly enhancing buyer and customer engagement and often answering their questions without losing valuable time on a phone call or chat with a customer service agent. Embracing methods that use mobile devices to virtualize products in context—whether in a retail store or a living room—can further enhance the product experience, thus increasing the likelihood of a purchase.

Retailers can better determine sentiment about the product experience by collecting feedback from customers and related parties at the time of purchase or product usage. If a retailer does not capture and monitor interactions and online feedback from all relevant parties, it is likely missing the insights required to effectively improve the product experience. Continuous feedback can help increase productivity and, more importantly, the effectiveness of the retailer. Additionally, sharing feedback digitally through product reviews establishes confidence with buyers and customers. Retailers should seek to create or expand a voice-of-the-product program with processes and technology that collect customer feedback and sentiment, aided by analytics and ML to gain insights. 

Using digital technologies to reinvent the product experience from the outside in and the inside out requires the right lens to support business continuity—rather than distract from it. Retailers should optimize underlying product processes and technology for internal use and buyers, customers, suppliers and partners. This can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results and reflects the priority a retailer places on product experience. Retailers should ensure that existing and future PXM technology investments are designed for effective engagement and a fantastic product experience, not just for automation and efficiency.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PXM for Retail evaluates products based on support for analyst and administrative-specific requirements, catalog management, commerce, consumers, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, digital merchandising, integration-specific requirements, industry standard requirements, management and manager-specific requirements, product managers, product-specific management, investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits. To be evaluated in this retail industry Buyers Guide, products must include support for consumer requirements or digital merchandising.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of PXM for retail as we define it: Acquia, Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, censhare, Comosoft, Contentserv, fabric, Feedonomics, inriver, insightsoftware, Netcore Unbxd, novomind, Pimcore, Plytix, Productsup, Sales Layer, Salsify, SAP, Stibo Systems and Syndigo.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PXM for Retail is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address retailers’ requirements for PXM software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. 

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 
   
   

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Akeneo atop the list, followed by Salsify and inriver. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Akeneo and inriver have done so in four categories; Bluestone PIM in three; Pimcore, Salsify, SAP and Syndigo in two; and Contentserv and Stibo Systems in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, inriver, Pimcore, Salsify, SAP and Syndigo.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Acquia and Netcore Unbxd.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The provider/providers rated Assurance are: insightsoftware and Stibo Systems.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: censhare, Comosoft, fabric, Feedonomics, novomind, Plytix, Productsup, and Sales Layer.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every retailer or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how retailers handle PXM, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular retailer’s needs.

We advise retailers to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address a retailer’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with a retailer’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent a retailer’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (12.5%), Capability (35%), Reliability (7.5%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Akeneo, Salsify and Syndigo were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, SAP was also found to meet a range of retailer and commerce product experience requirements.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle a retailer has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are inriver, Contentserv and Bluestone PIM. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and a customer’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the retailer, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for PXM for Retail in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $10 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.

The product must provide PXM for retail processes, including support for: analyst and administrative-specific requirements, catalog management, commerce, consumers, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, digital merchandising, integration-specific requirements, industry standard requirements, management and manager-specific requirements, product managers, product-specific management, investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include support for consumer requirements or digital merchandising.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant PXM for retail products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”