Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Product Experience Management for Retail: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

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 a retailer’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 customer interactions and the underlying lifecycle that enables impactful and interactive communication. 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.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of product experience management for retail software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating product experience management for retail offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Product Experience Management for Retail in 2025 finds Akeneo first on the list, followed by Salsify and inriver.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Akeneo.
• Salsify.
• Syndigo.

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• inriver.
• Contentserv.
• Bluestone PIM.

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Akeneo and inriver in four categories.
• Bluestone PIM in three categories.
• Pimcore, Salsify, SAP and Syndigo in two categories.
• Contentserv and Stibo Systems in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle product experience management for retail, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our product experience management for retail blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.