How to manage products in Magento?
- Product Descriptions – Basics of Management in Magento
- Real challenges with an extensive product base
- Why native management in Magento is not enough
- System PIM – the foundation of effective management
- Implementation of PIM – key benefits for Magento stores
- What does the Magento – PIM integration process look like?
- Implementation of PIM in practice
- The impact of PIM on Magento performance
- Choosing the right PIM system
- The future of product management in e-commerce
- Summary
- FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Managing thousands of products in Magento is a challenge faced by an increasing number of online store owners. The growing complexity of product catalogs, multichannel online sales, and the necessity to maintain up-to-date data mean that traditional management methods are no longer sufficient. In this article, we will show why effective product management in Magento requires the support of an external PIM system and how implementing PIM can transform the way you work with product data.
Product Descriptions – Basics of Management in Magento
The Magento e-commerce platform offers extensive product management capabilities through the admin panel. The system allows for the creation of different types of products: simple, configurable, grouped, or virtual. Each product in the e-commerce store can have individual attributes assigned, such as size, color, material, or technical specifications.
Magento admin panel allows for basic operations:
- adding products,
- editing prices and stock levels,
- creating content, such as product descriptions.
However, as the number of products increases, managing them becomes increasingly time-consuming and prone to errors. According to industry research, stores with catalogs of over 10,000 products spend an average of 40% of their working time on manual data updates.
Real challenges with an extensive product base
Store owners whose product database is very extensive often encounter technical and operational problems. Research shows that with catalogs over 100,000 products, performance can drop by up to 70%, and the loading time of the admin panel can extend to 15 minutes, which negatively affects the team's work efficiency.
The main challenges with an extensive product base are:
- Maintaining consistency– product descriptions across different sales channels must be consistent, which requires a huge amount of work and increases the risk of errors when manually making changes in multiple places.
- Data duplication– managing product variants in an online store often leads to duplication of the same information, which burdens the system and complicates updates.
- Magento tool limitations– native import/export functions have a limit of 5000 products per operation, which significantly prolongs updates of large catalogs. Additionally, synchronization with ERP or WMS requires manual data mapping.
Why native management in Magento is not enough
Magento implementations show that despite its flexibility, the system is not suited to the role of a central product data repository—the EAV model generates hundreds of SQL queries for products with many attributes, which complicates scaling. In multichannel sales, where data is sent to marketplaces, brick-and-mortar stores, or B2B catalogs, Magento becomes just one of many channels, and maintaining it as the main source of truth results in inconsistencies and errors.
Industry research indicates that companies using e-commerce platforms as their main product data management system lose an average of 15-25% of potential revenue due to incorrect or incomplete product information (MIT Sloan Management Review, Experian research).
System PIM – the foundation of effective management
PIM System (Product Information Management) is a central repository of all product information, specifically designed to manage complex product data. Unlike sales platforms, PIM focuses solely on collecting, enriching, and distributing product information.
Implementation of PIM fundamentally changes the way of working with data. Instead of updating information in multiple systems, teams work in one place, and the system automatically synchronizes data with all sales channels. According to Ventana Research, companies using PIM reduce the time to market for new products by an average of 75%.
Magento – PIM integration means that the online store becomes one of many channels powered by the PIM system. Changes made in the PIM system are automatically propagated, eliminating the need for manual updates in Magento. Implementations connected with the PIM system report an 80% reduction in product data errors, which significantly improves the quality of information in the online store.
Implementation of PIM – key benefits for Magento stores
Centralization of product information management brings tangible benefits. ROI studies show that the typical return on investment for implementing PIM is 100-150% within the first two years. Companies report a 50% reduction in the time needed to update catalogs and a significant reduction in work duplication.
Thanks to the automatic distribution of data to all sales channels, the customer sees the same information regardless of whether they come across:
- e-commerce store,
- marketplace,
- mobile application.
This directly translates into a significant reduction in returns caused by incorrect or outdated product information.
The PIM system also enables effective management of language versions and localization. For stores operating internationally, this means the ability to manage translations for thousands of products from a single interface, with automatic synchronization to the appropriate store views in Magento.
What does the Magento – PIM integration process look like?
Integration of the PIM system with the Magento platform is a strategic process that step by step consolidates and synchronizes all product data, ensuring its consistency throughout the entire ecosystem that is the e-commerce store.
Analysis and design of data architecture
The process we are talking about, namely the implementation of PIM, begins with the analysis of the current data structure and business processes. It is crucial to identify all sources of product data – Excel sheets from suppliers, ERP systems, production databases, existing catalogs in various systems. Based on this, the data flow architecture is designed.
Consolidation and enrichment of data in PIM
Data import into the PIM system is the process of consolidating information from multiple sources. Product data from ERP systems, specifications from suppliers, photos from photo sessions, marketing descriptions – everything goes into the PIM as a central repository. The PIM system organizes, enriches, and standardizes this data. The average time for the initial feeding of data into the PIM is 2-12 weeks, depending on the number of sources and the quality of the input data.
Integration and synchronization with Magento
After configuring the PIM, integration with Magento follows. The PIM system exports complete, verified product data to the store – descriptions, attributes, multimedia, variants. Synchronization can be one-way (PIM → Magento) or two-way, where information about stock levels and orders returns from Magento to PIM. Modern PIM systems offer real-time synchronization, ensuring data accuracy across all sales channels.
Implementation of PIM in practice
After implementing the PIM system, daily product management undergoes a significant transformation. Product teams gain access to an intuitive interface that facilitates working with data.
Key improvements in daily work with PIM
Central management and mass editing: Possibility of mass editing of attributes, managing multimedia, and controlling data completeness from one place, with automatic validation of entered information.
Automation of approval processes: Built-in workflows allow for defining verification stages for new products, eliminating the risk of publishing incomplete or incorrect data in the online store.
Data enrichment using AI: Advanced features, such as automatic description generation or tagging based on images, accelerate the preparation of products for sale, reducing the time for creating product content by up to 70%.
The impact of PIM on Magento performance
Implementing PIM can noticeably increase Magento's performance – when the e-commerce platform stops processing product data and only displays ready information from the PIM system, server load can decrease by several dozen percent. This translates to faster page loading and a better user experience, which directly impacts conversion – every second of delay can mean up to a 7% drop in sales. Moreover, the PIM system takes over integrations with ERP, WMS, and suppliers, providing consistent, processed data directly to Magento, which further simplifies the infrastructure and improves the stability of the entire solution.
Choosing the right PIM system
The PIM systems market is diverse – from open source solutions to advanced enterprise platforms.
Key selection criteria are:
- scalability,
- integration capabilities,
- support for specific industries,
- total cost of ownership (TCO).
For medium-sized companies, SaaS solutions are often the optimal choice as they do not require large initial investments and offer predictable monthly costs. Large enterprises may consider on-premise or private cloud platforms, providing full control over data.
It is also important to support industry standards and the ability to integrate with Magento. Most PIM systems offer integration through API or intermediary platforms like BaseLinker. A well-designed integration can significantly shorten the implementation time compared to solutions requiring extensive custom development.
The future of product management in e-commerce
The PIM systems market is growing dynamically – according to forecasts, its value will increase from 18 billion USD in 2025 to almost 37 billion in 2030. This is a clear signal that product information management is becoming the foundation of effective online sales. More and more companies are choosing to implement Magento as part of a composable commerce approach, where this platform is one of many elements of the e-commerce ecosystem. In such a setup, the PIM system serves as a central data hub, providing consistent information to all sales channels – from e-commerce stores, through marketplaces, to mobile applications.
AI and machine learning will play an increasingly significant role in the automation of product management. PIM systems utilizing these technologies can automatically categorize products, generate descriptions, optimize attributes for SEO, and predict demand trends.
Summary
Effective product management in Magento in 2025 requires a thoughtful approach to data architecture. The native capabilities of the platform, although extensive, are not sufficient for companies with ambitions for multichannel development and business scaling.
Implementing PIM is not only a solution to technical problems, but above all an investment in product data quality, team efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Companies that decide to take this step gain a competitive advantage through faster time-to-market, better data consistency, and the ability to effectively manage the growing complexity of product catalogs.
Do you want to learn more about the capabilities of PIM systems and how they can streamline product management in your Magento store?
Check our solutions:
Contact us and find out how we can help transform product information management in your company!
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
The main limitations are the decrease in Magento panel performance, long loading times, difficulties in maintaining data consistency across multiple channels, and import/export limits for large catalogs.
PIM increases efficiency by centralizing data, reducing product introduction time (by 75%) and updates. It provides an ROI of 100-150% in 2 years, reducing errors and increasing conversion.
Yes, PIM improves the loading speed of Magento. This happens because PIM takes over complex operations on product data, reducing the load on the Magento server and speeding up page display.
The key stages are data analysis, data consolidation and enrichment in PIM, followed by the integration of PIM with Magento (data export/synchronization). The most important aspect is data consistency and automatic currency.
Trends include the growing PIM market (up to USD 37 billion by 2030), the dominance of composable commerce (PIM as a central data hub), and the use of AI/ML in PIM for automation and optimization of product data.