Across industries, manufacturers are bypassing traditional distribution channels and selling directly to customers. The key enabler isn is better software. And among the tools driving this shift, product information management software for manufacturing has quietly become one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle.
Just five years ago, a mid-sized manufacturer relied on a network of regional distributors to get its products onto retailer shelves. The pandemic changed the calculus, and what began as an emergency workaround for many manufacturers has since become the preferred model.
Today, the same manufacturer publishes directly to its own webshop, Amazon, and two B2B portals simultaneously, from a single system, with fewer intermediaries in the chain and significantly better margins as a result. This story is playing out across industries, from consumer electronics to industrial components to specialty food.
Why Manufacturers Are Going Direct
The motivation is straightforward: every layer in a traditional distribution chain is a margin given away. Selling directly lets manufacturers reclaim that revenue and own the customer relationship. The behavioral data that comes with it (who buys, what they ask, what converts) feeds back into product development, compounding the financial benefit over time.
The Software Stack Behind the Shift
Going direct sounds simple in principle, but managing it in practice means connecting an ever-present ERP system with a growing number of external sales channels, whether that’s a branded webshop built on an eCommerce platform, marketplaces like Amazon or Otto, B2B portals, or a broader multichannel setup combining several of these at once. For manufacturers, getting these to work in concert is the central operational challenge of going direct. Together, they form a connected pipeline, but that pipeline is only as reliable as the product data flowing through it.
The piece that holds this entire pipeline together is a Product Information Management system, PIM for short. PIM is the single source of truth for all product content: descriptions, technical specifications, images, certifications, dimensions, pricing rules, and translations. Without one, product data tends to scatter across spreadsheets, ERP exports, and email threads. Publishing to a new channel means manual work. Keeping content consistent across channels becomes a constant battle. The PIM solves this by sitting at the center of the stack, feeding clean, structured, channel-ready data to every downstream system.
Why PIM Is a Natural Fit for Manufacturers
Manufacturers are better positioned to implement a PIM than retailers are, and they tend to see results faster.
The reason comes down to data ownership. A manufacturer is the source of the product information. The materials, tolerances, certifications, and packaging dimensions are all known internally, generated during product development and production. That data doesn’t arrive from a third party in an inconsistent format. It exists, it’s accurate, and it just needs to be structured and enriched for each sales channel.
Retailers face a fundamentally different challenge. Aggregating products from dozens of suppliers means inheriting as many different data formats, naming conventions, and levels of completeness. Before a PIM can deliver significant value, a retailer must first invest heavily in normalizing that data — a project that can be as costly as the implementation itself.
For a manufacturer, none of that groundwork is necessary. The PIM fits naturally into existing workflows: product data is created as products are developed, then enriched and organized within the PIM for each channel, whether that’s a technical data sheet for a B2B buyer, a consumer-friendly listing for an online store, or a marketplace entry with platform-specific attributes.
“The proportion of manufacturers among our clients adopting PIM software has doubled in recent years, accompanied by a declining share of retailers. Manufacturers are also rapidly adopting ERP and eCommerce integration solutions to reach customers directly, and they have every advantage to do so: they own the product data from the outset, know their products better than anyone else in the chain, and can offer the most competitive prices. Digital sales channels have made this shift happen far faster. Manufacturers have realized they need a complete data infrastructure, and they can afford to build it.” — Alexander Zinchenko, Founder & Executive Director of AtroCore
The Compounding Advantage
Once product data is centralized and channel-ready, scaling becomes a matter of mapping and exporting. not rebuilding from scratch. Manufacturers who connect PIM, ERP, and their sales channels into a coherent system today are building the capacity to grow anywhere, at speed.
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