Introduction

Product Information Management (PIM) is a crucial process in managing and organizing product data for websites, online shops, and other digital platforms. It involves collecting, storing, enriching, and syndicating product information to ensure accurate, consistent, and up-to-date data across all sales channels. This improves customer experience and drives better business performance. Conversely, low quality product data is detrimental to user experience and business results.

Example: Validation of Product Data

Online shops that are integrated into an ecosystem of complementary services and products face the challenge that data references to entities of the wider ecosystem must be 100% correct within shop product data in order for customers to have an enjoyable experience. As data validation cannot always be integrated directly into PIM systems that drive shop product data, a separate validation step can be implemented that audits product data before it is moved to the shop system.

Technical Implementation

With Commitspark, shop operators can add a mandatory validation layer between the PIM and shop systems where product data is automatically validated against data sources in the businesses' wider ecosystem. In this validation layer, developers can then write automated validation code that asserts all product data is fully correct according to business rules. As Commitspark is based on Git, such validations can easily be integrated into automated workflows that are executed on every change to product data in a repository.

Benefits of Using Commitspark

By using Commitspark to add a validation layer between PIM and online shop, the following benefits can be realized:

• Establish a hard validation point that requires custom business-specific validation scripts to give green light before any data changes are accepted into production
• Easily automate validations in the form of workflows or pipelines that are executed on any data change in a Git repository
• Extend product data validation to take entire ecosystem into account, not just product data itself
• Decouple product data enrichment from integration validation that takes all affected systems into account
• Obtain precise and auditable logs of data changes between releases down to single characters or digits

Conclusion

With Commitspark, it becomes possible to establish a strict, automated product data validation layer between a PIM system and online shops that offer products embedded in a wider ecosystem of products and services. This validation enables businesses to assert seamless ecosystem integration of products sold, in turn improving the shopping and product experience of customers.