Frequently Asked Questions

The short answer is “we don’t”. There are much better systems for managing digital assets and much better places to store them such as OneDrive and Dropbox. What pimsimple does is store a link to the asset and then allow you to associate the asset with SKUs, products, product groups or product bundles.

How many do you want to store? Seriously... We can store millions of products. We have successfully load tested the system with 5,000,000 SKUs and 1,000 users it ran flawlessly. Depending on how many SKUs you have, depends on the price tier you have to pay and a SKU is counted as "an individual product" so for example; a shirt that comes in 5 sizes and 5 colors will contain 25 SKUs in the "style" or garment.

How many would you like? But seriously... We can deal with any reasonable number you could think of. Tens of thousands have been tested and it works.

pimsimple is built on a full RESTful API. So the interface you use in the browser connects to the system in the same way you can. As well as this the system can import and export a number of formats manually or automatically via FTP. These include CSV, Excel XML and delimited files. Finally, the system has automatic connectors to systems such as Google Shopping, eBay, Amazon, Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify.

Well, we prefer the word “inexpensive”, but the simple answer is “why not?”

We don’t have flash offices, flash cars and flash salespeople. We don’t need to come and visit you, we won’t take you for lunch or a round of golf. We won’t push you into buying it, we won’t fill in any RFIs or RFQs. You try it. You like it. You buy it.

More importantly, we think the market for PIM solutions is huge and most potential customers won’t or can’t afford to pay upwards of $100,000 for a system. Even “free” open source PIMs end up costing the same as a paid for system as their business model is “free software… exorbitant consultancy.

We think it should be simple to have a PIM… pimsimple

It’s “free as in beer”. You get a fully working system, that can either be used to demo and test the system and store 100,000 SKUs but the only limitation is that only 100 SKUs can be exported from the system.

This is great for bigger companies to test the system and great for small companies who just want a simple PIM for a small range of products.

And it’s free forever!

Yes, to either. If you pay annually, you pay up-front for the year ahead and you get 2 months free.

No. The prices you see on the pricing page are the only costs. We don’t offer consultancy because it’s easy to set up yourself and all future upgrades will be free. The only time you’ll need to pay more is if you’re using features from a higher price band, and if you’re in the top tier, everything is unlimited so you can’t ever pay more!

Not without your permission they can't. Although the system is a "multi-tenant system" where everyone's data exists on the same bunch of servers, every single piece of your data is tokenized with your account details, so it's impossible to see data from another account.

Just a computer or device capable of running a browser. So you can use MacOS, Windows, Android, Ubuntu, iOS... anything! We manage the servers for you on Amazon Web Services, so you can simply get on with managing your product information.

The system is “cloud-based” so there is no software to install, you simply open the URL https://pimsimple.app in a browser and login.

Being browser-based means you can use it on any platform including iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu etc. and there aren’t many PIM solutions you can work with on an iPad!

pimsimple is built on a scalable, fault-tolerant, full-stack javascript platform that runs on Amazon Web Services. This one distributed system can deal with millions of users from numerous customers anywhere in the world. The various servers run Linux, the main database is a distributed MongoDB with MySQL used for some customer facing bits, Node.js as a runtime and Sails.js as the MVC framework.

Your data is securely stored on Amazon's "Elastic Cloud Compute" or EC2 platform and backed up securely. Uniquely for ANY cloud-based  PIM system, pimsimple not only encrypts the data when transferring it over the internet, it is also stored in an encrypted form on the server. No other PIM is as secure. Your digital assets are stored wherever you want them to be stored.... OneDrive, Dropbox, your servers. It makes no sense to move them!

A “source” is somewhere data comes from. So it could be an Excel file that is checked overnight via FTP or a cleverly automated RESTful connection or just a CSV file you put in manually… it’s just “stuff going in”

A selection is a subset of your product data. Just highlight or search for some products and save that "selection" of products as..... a selection! You can then use this as the basis for what products go to a “destination” or to hand to a colleague or send to the InDesign Client or report on or....

A view is a way of selecting how users see information. Information can be set to be hidden, read-only or shown and the order on the screen can be changed. This means different users can see different views of data depending on their job role or different systems have different views depending on the task

A Destination is where the attributes specified by the View, of the products according to the Selection, finally end up. You might need to save a CSV document to an FTP server every day at 1 am, or maybe you need to send an XML document to your Magento or Shopify instance. Using pimsimple, for each place you need to send your product information, you can save as a Destination for next time.

An attribute is the smallest descriptive part of a product, such as Price or Description. There are different types of attribute for different types of information, so Price will be a number and Description would be text. Each attribute can have different rules, access permissions set for it.

You can have different versions for different languages or countries, you can have different versions for different destinations, but all those versions are still the same attribute.