Trever Chidester: A merchant's guide to PIM/DAM implementation

Recorded in August 2025, so figures and product details reflect that time. The short teaser at the start of the video is not repeated here.

Matt: My guest today is Trever Chidester of Plytix, and we're going to talk about PIM and DAM and the reasons for the surge in their popularity in recent years. Trever, welcome to the show. Could you start by introducing yourself and your role at Plytix?

Trever: Thanks for having me. I'm the Director of Partnerships at Plytix. I've been with Plytix for about five years, and we've seen some pretty extraordinary growth over that time. A lot of your listeners will be Shopify users, and I think we've taken a trajectory that's not quite the magnitude of Shopify's, but on a similar path: trying to offer a tool that's easier to use and easier to implement. I've been in the front seat for that, and it's been quite an incredible journey.

What are PIM and DAM?

Matt: Let's start with the definitions, for listeners who don't know what a PIM or a DAM is.

Trever: A PIM is a product information management system, and a DAM is a digital asset management system. There are so many acronyms in this business. But these two tools are really more or less just databases of product information and of digital assets, or media. I always say a lot of businesses are doing PIM in some way, shape or form; they just don't have a dedicated solution for it. They manage their data in spreadsheets, in the back end of their Shopify store, or in a hundred different spreadsheets in different silos on different people's computers. What a PIM gives you is one single source of truth: one cloud-based solution that the whole team can access whenever they need information about their products.

Should PIM and DAM be separate tools?

Matt: Are PIM and DAM separate tools, or are they usually integrated?

Trever: When I first started, they were very much separate. Digital asset management has been around a little longer, I believe. Plytix combines them, because it makes sense. When you're managing your attributes alongside your product (think colour, size, material), you also need to manage the media associated with that product, especially as buying becomes more and more visual. Over five years ago you might have only needed one image; now you're expected to have ten images from all different angles, a video, 3D images…

Matt: Generated content, that kind of stuff.

Trever: Exactly. Like what you'd see on social media, lifestyle-type images. Media has become such an important part of selling online that having it integrated with the product information just makes sense.

Why is everyone talking about PIM now?

Matt: When I look back on sales calls in our agency, PIM came up from time to time. Fast forward to 2025 and there's no sales call without a conversation about product information management. What are the reasons for this growth in interest?

Trever: I've had an interesting perspective on this, because when I started at Plytix I was one of our first account executives. In about 90 to 95% of my calls, I spent the first 20 minutes explaining what a PIM was. Most people didn't come to us looking for a PIM. They had searched on Google "how can I better manage my product information" or "there's got to be a better way than spreadsheets to manage my product data".

Matt: So the pain was there.

Trever: Exactly. They came with the pain, but they weren't aware of the solution. It was a lot of education, especially with B2B businesses that might not even have digitised their records. I remember one business in Portugal that was still keeping track of all the product data for its textiles and sheets on paper. For the product data manager and e-commerce manager there, getting that information digitised in a PIM so she could easily get it onto the website was a game changer. So we saw a trajectory from a time, I would say from the 2000s until fairly recently, when businesses were largely unaware of what a PIM was, to it becoming a very obvious piece of the tech stack. I think most businesses now know they need a PIM.

Why have merchants been wary of PIM projects?

Trever: The problem is that a lot of the PIMs that have been in the industry for the last 10–15 years have made it difficult to implement a PIM. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, it requires a lot of resources, and your chances of implementing it successfully aren't that high considering how much you're paying. That has created a lot of baggage around PIM. Especially in the last year or two, a lot of businesses know they need a PIM and want one, but they're not satisfied with the options out there, because of the horror stories they've heard, or their own horror stories.

Matt: We hear that a lot. When our customers hear from Pimcore or similar PIM implementation partners that it's going to take six months and cost more than replatforming to Shopify, it's a no-go for them.

Trever: A lot of these PIMs came about in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, when the businesses that needed a PIM were large international enterprises with a lot of data that needed some sort of master data management system. But, other than Plytix, PIM hasn't really evolved to fit the world Shopify has created, where anybody can create an online shop within minutes. So you have businesses paying 500 bucks a month for Shopify, and then they're being asked to pay $2,000 a month…

Matt: Exactly.

Trever: …just to manage the data for their store.

Multichannel selling: the first catalyst

Matt: So what has changed over these two years? Is it AI, or the complexity of the business, the fact that one channel won't do and you need to sell wherever your customers are?

Trever: It's a combination of all of it. Around 2020, even a little before, you start to see multichannel come in: businesses realise they need multiple touchpoints with their customers. Twenty years ago, the web shop was basically a digital version of the bricks-and-mortar store. Now there are marketplaces, TikTok, Instagram and, of course, web shops. So many people buy on Amazon; if you're not on a marketplace like Amazon, are you getting all the exposure you need? That growth of multichannel commerce was the first big jump in why everyone needs a PIM. There are tools in Plytix that make managing information easier even with one Shopify store, but the pain is magnified tenfold when you're managing that data not just in one Shopify store but in five different marketplaces and five different languages. That's when you need one central source, so you can push the data out to all the places it goes.

AI content needs a good source and a place to check it

Matt: And what are the other reasons?

Trever: Then you get to the AI revolution, and this is a big one. The most important thing with AI is having a good source of information to give whatever AI tool you're using. You want to make sure your brand voice is reproduced properly, so the AI needs a good database of information to begin with. And once the AI creates all that content, it needs somewhere to go. If you're creating new short descriptions for 5,000 products, that data has to sit somewhere that makes it easy to validate, to get some human eyes on it and make sure it looks right. A PIM is a perfect place to do that.

How does the EU Digital Product Passport affect product data?

Matt: One more thing I think is important: upcoming regulations in the European Union, like the Digital Product Passport. The deadline is there and the scope is unclear, so it's pretty much like a typical e-commerce project. What should merchants expect, and how can a PIM help?

Trever: It's a bit of a moving target. The deadline has changed a little, and they've adjusted which verticals go first. The latest I've heard is that they're aiming to have it fully rolled out in 2027, and the first vertical is fashion, followed by furniture, electronics and others. If you don't know what the DPP is, it's a new EU regulation under which all the products you sell need some sort of record of their manufacturing, their environmental footprint and that sort of information, so buyers are more aware of the product's impact. To be compliant, businesses will need a place to organise and manage that information and get it to consumers easily. What we've seen, and we're talking to a partner right now about developing the technology, is QR codes updated with the information in the PIM. They work almost like little mini-sites: you scan a QR code printed on a shirt tag and get the carbon footprint and all the manufacturing information.

Matt: And the reason for introducing this is for the EU to be as green as possible, right?

Trever: Yes, they're trying to create more transparency in how products are developed. And there's a new generation of buyers, Gen Z, who are more and more aware of the environmental impact of products; it's a really important part of what they look for. So although it feels a little forced on brands by the EU, it's very much an opportunity for businesses to showcase the work they're doing to build a sustainable brand, and it has the potential to win them a lot more business.

What does a PIM solve for Shopify merchants?

Matt: So we have three really good reasons to talk about PIM. When your team talks to customers now, what other problems do they mention? And are there hidden costs of not having a PIM?

Trever: It's tricky business being in the PIM space, because pretty much every business that sells products needs a PIM, and these businesses look very different. A B2B manufacturer that only sells to distributors needs a PIM for different reasons than a Shopify seller with one store who also sells on Google Shopping, and their reasons are different again from an international brand selling in ten markets on Shopify, on all the marketplaces and through a B2B team. Perhaps it would be best to focus on Shopify users.

Matt: Definitely. Let's feed the search algorithms and large language models with the proper keywords.

Trever: Sounds great. At the end of the day, Shopify merchants just want to manage their product information more easily.

Bulk edits, variants and product completeness

Trever: In the Products tab in Shopify, where most businesses do their editing, there's a bulk editing option that looks like a spreadsheet you can drag down, but you can't really select which products you want to bulk edit from that view. That's a big pain point for businesses trying to work quickly, get products to market faster and make fewer errors. Also, if you're selling 10,000 products, you often don't even know which products are missing information. You can filter to find all your T-shirts, but you can't search for "my T-shirts that don't have the T-shirt tag". Tag management in general is really tricky in Shopify.

Trever: Plytix gives you an easy-to-use PIM where you can use multiple filters to find a selection of products, choose which ones to edit, pick the attribute you want to change and bulk edit it for all of them. Then there are variants. Pretty much everybody selling online has them, and in Shopify they're managed line by line. If you want to change a colour name, say from blue to cerulean, across all your products, you have to go into each one individually. In Plytix you manage data at the parent product level and it passes down to the variants. Country of origin, for example, is managed at the parent level: you change it on the parent and it pushes down into all the variants automatically.

Trever: Those are very simple things, but they're what allow businesses to get products to market faster. The overarching theme in the customer success stories on our website is businesses getting to market three times faster, 20 times faster. One more thing is product completeness. If you want your products to rank with the right SEO and your customers to have all the information they need to buy with confidence, the product has to be complete, and there's no real way in Shopify to see whether a product is complete.

Metafields, translations and selling beyond Shopify

Matt: Bulk editing in Shopify has improved over the years, but it's still not the optimal way to manage large numbers of SKUs. You can store attributes in metafields, but Shopify isn't designed for that, and it's not convenient to get that data out into other tools.

Trever: That's a really interesting point, because it all adds up. Most businesses don't sell only on Shopify, and a lot of those using Shopify as their PIM end up creating all these random metafields. I've seen a huge number of metafields in some stores, because that's the only way they can host the information they need for Google Shopping or whatever marketplace they also sell on. That's not good practice. In Plytix, you send Shopify just the information it needs and create as many other attributes as you want for your other sales channels. It keeps Shopify nice, neat and clean, not bogged down by 500 metafields for all the places you sell.

Matt: The first roadblock that comes to mind is storing translations in metafields. Shopify wasn't designed for that.

Trever: They've been doing a lot of work on that, but the work on translations and on Markets seems siloed, which doesn't make for a smooth experience. If you're editing your product information in English, you want your Spanish information right alongside it, and in Plytix it's all right next to each other.

When is the right moment to implement a PIM?

Matt: Let's say somebody is convinced. What should I ask myself as a merchant to know whether it's the right moment to implement a PIM?

Trever: We're in an interesting middle period, where PIM is still thought of as a project that needs serious evaluation and then a whole implementation, and we're right on the cusp of disrupting that. With a lot of Shopify apps, like basic order management apps, you don't need to block out two months to implement them. That's exactly what we want: a business says "I need a better place to manage my data", downloads the Plytix app and it creates their PIM in an instant from the information they have in Shopify. This already exists; we're live on the Shopify App Store. It isn't what adoption looks like yet for 95% of businesses looking at a PIM, because that's how things have been for so long. But we're on the cusp of making adopting a PIM something you can do on a Friday afternoon.

Matt: I must agree. When we first came across Plytix in one of our projects, I think it was a shoe company from Germany, we were like, "Where's the catch?" It was so smooth and easy to get going, compared with our previous experiences with Pimcore and other tools. That entry level really aligns with Shopify's strategy of being nimble, so you have something from day one.

Pick only the features you need

Trever: A lot of other PIM tools force you into a huge implementation because their software has so many functionalities. They could be beneficial, but they're too much to chew on and they don't exactly address the business's issue. I was talking the other day with a pretty big brand whose e-commerce team just wants to manage their translations in Shopify more easily. The team loved what they saw, but they also saw other functionalities, and the price point made them think they needed to get more out of the solution, so they looped in their B2B commerce team. It has turned into a very large evaluation of whether this suits the entire business, and it's still hanging in the air.

Trever: That's what we're trying to avoid. We're moving the tool and its pricing to a place where you can pick and choose the functionalities you need right now. If, after a year, your e-commerce needs are being met and someone on the B2B side is interested, you can add other parts of the platform. So someone managing the Shopify store can download the app on a Friday afternoon and start paying $99 a month to manage their data in Plytix and send it to Shopify. Then, as usage grows, the team sees there are tools for creating online e-catalogues that could be interesting for the B2B side, and they add those features. We're really the only ones doing this right now, and I think it's going to disrupt the space quite a bit.

Matt: Especially with the adoption of AI. There's research showing that people pay for tools like SAP or Salesforce and use only 10 or 20% of the software. And with AI, it will probably be easier for companies to say, "I don't need the entire Salesforce, I need one functionality," and build it internally.

Trever: You've hit the nail on the head, and that's why businesses like ours have to adapt. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, businesses were all creating their own custom solutions, because that was what was available. Then there was a huge shift towards SaaS. Back in the day, if you wanted a website, you had to go to a developer for a custom-built e-commerce site; Shopify completely "SaaS-ified" that market. If SaaS tools don't get their act together and make it easier to implement and buy their tools, we risk seeing that reverse towards custom solutions again, because AI makes it so easy to build a tool yourself.

How many products before you need a PIM?

Matt: Is there a threshold, like 100 or 1,000 products, or a headcount or revenue level, that's a clear sign that I need a PIM?

Trever: I always describe it as a Venn diagram. On one side you have a lot of products that are very simple. On the other, few products that are very complex or sold on a lot of different channels. In the middle, a lot of products with high complexity. All of those fit the PIM space. The only case where it might not be is if you're selling maybe 50 products on your Shopify store on one channel. Bulk edits and completeness checks will still help, but managing 50 products manually is not that difficult. As the business grows to maybe 200 or 500 products, it becomes difficult to manage that data product by product, and that's a good time to get a PIM. And the spectrum goes all the way up: you would be surprised at some of the international brands, so well known, that don't have a PIM system yet.

Matt: I've heard stories, so that's no surprise.

Which PIM features matter most?

Matt: What are the must-have features when you compare PIM solutions, and what sets Plytix apart?

Trever: The point of this tool is to be a repository for information and media. So the basics are filtering products to find what you're looking for and applying bulk edits. Attribute data modelling is really useful: not 100% necessary for smaller businesses, but as you grow you need to say that a chair has a certain set of attributes and a lamp has a different set. Media management is becoming so important that you need a user-friendly way to upload images, associate them with products and move them around, and even AI enhancements like background removal or resolution upgrades.

Trever: It's also really important that it's easy to get data in and out. A lot of businesses use APIs, with a developer creating connections between systems. But many don't have developers on hand, and if everything is connected by API, a user who doesn't code has little control over what data is sent. So data feeds for import and export are really useful: they're no-code ways to connect platforms, and the interface lets you choose which products and information you send or receive.

Trever: And you cannot underestimate user-friendliness. Most businesses don't have tech teams or dedicated product data managers; 90% of the time, managing product information falls on a marketing manager or an e-commerce manager. They probably have a good tech background, but they're not developers. Shopify has done this incredibly well: it lets businesses build an e-commerce store almost without code, which ten years ago needed a team of developers. That's what we've done too: a no-code way to manage information without a big IT team building a data structure that can be clunky and hard to use.

Who works in the PIM?

Matt: The UI and UX of Shopify were probably one of its biggest growth drivers. Is PIM the responsibility of one person, or do multiple teams work with it?

Trever: We really see Plytix as a collaborative tool. Different employees manage different parts of the product's information and need one place where it all comes together. A graphic designer creates images and manages the digital assets. The marketing manager might manage the information the B2B side needs to sell to retailers or distributors. E-commerce managers need the data for websites and marketplaces. Logistics people need to look up information. B2B sales reps use it to sell products and create presentations, and customer support looks up data sheets and instruction manuals to answer questions. So everybody needs access, and a select few edit different parts. Editing is collaborative, like in a Google Sheet or Google Doc: so many of us work asynchronously now that you want to be able to tag a colleague and say, "This product needs a second look."

How long does a PIM implementation take?

Matt: Let's switch to implementation. How long does it take from day one to a fully operational PIM, how do we prepare, and what are the common roadblocks? A lot of questions in one.

Trever: No worries. I'll give two answers, because Plytix is moving towards, and in a lot of ways is already at, the Friday afternoon implementation. I think I'm going to start calling it that. Right now you can download the Plytix app on Shopify, create your account and automatically pull in all the information from your store, so you have a PIM that completely mirrors your Shopify store. You can have a ready-to-go PIM for Shopify in a matter of minutes. Traditionally, PIM implementations could take up to six months.

Trever: But a lot of businesses also sell B2B, have multiple web shops and sell on different marketplaces, so their data lives in different places. Then the work is pulling all that data out into one homogenised data set in Plytix. That requires a bit of massaging, and I'd say it takes around two weeks, often working with one of us or with an agency like yours.

Matt: So compared with Pimcore or similar tools, we can have a basic solution in days, and full integration with all the channels, for example to the marketplaces, is measured in weeks rather than months?

Trever: Absolutely. In Plytix you can get a full implementation done within two to three weeks. A lot of that is because we focus on helping businesses manage their data better; we're not trying to do everything associated with your products. The traditional PIM has got a little carried away: "We can be a PIM, a B2B e-commerce platform, a marketplace integration tool." What we've seen is that it drags implementations out and often makes them fail. And if your tool isn't updating every month, you're probably missing a technology that's just come out; we see businesses that spent the last year on their marketplace integrations and let their PIM functionality fall behind. So we believe in a plug-and-play tech stack of specialised tools. Instead of paying $50,000 a year for a tool that does a lot of things, but not a lot of things well, you pay around 100 bucks a month for a tool that does exactly what you need and connects easily with other tools that do what they do really well.

How do you measure the ROI of a PIM?

Matt: That should resonate with Shopify merchants: it's Shopify's promise too, focus on your business and leave the technology to us. Could you summarise the ROI of a PIM and how to measure it?

Trever: There are a lot of baseline benefits. You have fewer returns, because there's more data on your products and your customers are more informed buyers. Time to market is a big one: if you want your business to grow at a good rate, you need to be able to create and manage new products more easily. We've got businesses that have doubled their time to market, and businesses that have 20x'd it, by managing their information in Plytix. In money terms, you can attach the ROI to fewer returns, more products on the market, or expanding to a new market and making sales you didn't have before.

Trever: One I find really interesting: Plytix lets you create product data sheets alongside your products. We have a business that was doing all that manually and spending around €130,000 a year in man-hours on it. It went from €130,000 to essentially zero, or whatever they pay for their PIM subscription, which is nowhere near that. That kind of ticket item makes a tool like Plytix worth it.

Which AI features belong inside a PIM?

Matt: As we come to the end, let's touch on AI. What AI functionalities are built into Plytix, and why is it better to have them inside the PIM rather than in external software?

Trever: The AI revolution is incredible and hard to keep up with. What we've done in the last six months has almost surpassed everything we did in the previous four and a half years. We're dedicated to being an AI-first tool. Right now you can connect to ChatGPT and, at attribute level, generate short descriptions or translate content within the PIM. Coming out next week is the ability to do that in bulk. It'll be as simple as selecting products and writing a prompt like "Create a new short description of 200 characters, optimised for Google Shopping, using our tone of voice, based on the other attributes in the PIM", and that kicks out 500 new short descriptions. This will be a game changer for enriching products, especially for drop shippers and resellers. That process used to be a nightmare: businesses had to scrape websites because getting information from suppliers was nearly impossible. Now AI can generate the content from scratch.

Trever: What I'm most excited about is AI agents within the PIM. AI content generation won't really set businesses apart, because you can get it in lots of places. What we're going to build in Plytix is an AI agent that's basically like having a product data manager in the PIM. You can say: "I need to get these products ready for Amazon. I'm uploading these 15 new SKUs; fill out all the product information." Tasks that used to fall on the marketing manager and the e-commerce manager can be done by an AI agent in the tool.

Matt: So you could tell it to increase prices for each product by 10%?

Trever: Exactly. That's a perfect example.

Matt: That's amazing. It will be pretty similar to Shopify Sidekick, and we've already been playing with that; it's definitely a tool worth having.

Final advice for merchants evaluating a PIM

Matt: Any final words of wisdom for listeners who want to start evaluating a PIM?

Trever: Pretty much everyone listening probably knows by now that they need a PIM solution. So I urge you to forget all the baggage that has come with traditional PIM solutions and take a look at Plytix. We'll include a link to the Shopify app: download it, play with it, get a free account and explore it. The Friday afternoon implementation is definitely going to be a thing now. So those are my words of wisdom: forget the idea that a PIM is difficult to implement, because it's going to let you manage your products more easily, and you'll be able to implement it on a Friday afternoon.

Matt: Amen. What's the best way to contact you or Plytix?

Trever: I'm on LinkedIn, so feel free to send me a connection request and a message; I'm always checking it. We're still a very tight-knit team, so if you need a sales rep or a customer success manager, I'm more than happy to tap somebody on the shoulder and get you some help.

Matt: Thanks for accepting the invitation; it was a pure pleasure talking to you.

Trever: It's been great. Thank you very much for the invitation.