Akeneo PIM + Magento 2: Reasons, Benefits, Integration

One of the most popular eCommerce platforms to date, Magento 2 is well maintained and kept aligned with the merchant and user requirements. Features rolled out with the latest version are a testimonial to this.

Yet, while Magento 2 serves as a perfect foundation, there has been a growing demand to extend the out-of-the-box functionality and delegate certain tasks to external services and tools. One such case is the need to manage extended product catalogs, support multi-channel strategy, and provide content in multiple languages, all while preserving agility of operations, durability, and security.

Enter Product Information Management (PIM) systems. Knowingly, back in October 2018, Magento announced a Premier Technology Partnership with Akeneo—a leading PIM solution provider. The goal was to give merchants a competitive edge in the constant race to launch products and maximize content value.

Why use PIM?

Let’s examine some of the reasons the Akeneo-Magento cluster is relevant to today’s eCommerce.

Catalog management UX

As effective as Magento 2 may be, its default UX for catalog management has generally been perceived as lacking in features and functionality. This deficiency is further magnified by the increase in catalog size and the number of locales.

Dedicated catalog management teams

A common practice for large stores and brands is to assign catalog management to a separate team. However, store managers are usually reluctant to grant Magento back-end access to any non-essential personnel.

Multichannel sales

More often than not, businesses choose to mix online and offline rather than relying on their eCommerce platforms as the only source of revenue. There is a need for a tool that would allow managing all the different channels from the same place—whether you are entering a new marketplace, publishing a printed catalog, or preparing an ad campaign.

Completeness tracking 

Catering to international markets often requires publishing content in different languages and keeping a close eye on the completeness of product data. Scaling up inevitably means that a significant part of these processes needs to be automated.

The answer

How does Akeneo PIM fit into this scheme? Being a dedicated product information management system by design, it solves the most basic issues as well as providing some additional benefits:

• Better UX for catalog management
• Assuring the necessary visibility for content completeness per locale
• Helps cut down the number of products stored in the Magento catalog, which boosts performance by allowing Magento to only hold a minimum of products while the rest are kept within the PIM until they are ready to be activated
• Support for multiple channels, so if a vendor has both physical and online stores, they can manage product information per channel under the same roof
• Product managers can work with the catalog using just the PIM without the need for granting access to the  Magento 2 backend
• Akeneo can be used as the central hub for product import feeds, which is helpful if your business works with different suppliers.

Akeneo PIM/Magento 2 integration

Since the partnership announcement, Akeneo PIM has been a part of the Magento 2 ecosystem. The association is facilitated by the fact that both Magento and Akeneo share a common PHP tech stack, have multiple joint solution partners, and hoard an ever-growing number of joint customers.

Still, the integration suggests a certain amount of effort—largely due to the fact that each business has its own specifications and requirements. At the same time, technologically, the process isn’t exactly plug-and-play.

To interact with Magento, Akeneo requires a connector. The connector is usually implemented at the receiving end, Magento. Alternatively, it can be integrated on the side of Akeneo or as standalone middleware. However, these solutions will still require a Magento implementation to support the data push and overcome performance issues associated with frequent catalog synchronization.

How does it work?

The Magento connector pulls product data from Akeneo for products that have the required completeness and that have been created or updated since the last pull. This can be run as a scheduled task or triggered on demand.

Additionally, Akeneo holds category, attribute, and product relationship data that can be pulled into Magento. This is normally a one-way sync, but depending on specific data workflows and ERP integrations that run parallel to this, there are cases when products are first pushed to Magento, then synced into the PIM, and they remain inactive until product enrichment is complete.

Regardless of the specific approach, the sync is API based and, to overly simplify, works in two main steps: 

1. Get the data from Akeneo
2. Store it in Magento

The intricacies of the process lie in batching this information and minimizing the data transfer while maintaining a synchronized catalog.

Why we use Akeneo PIM at scandiweb

At scandiweb, we work on a lot of Magento 2 projects and have long appreciated the benefits that Akeneo PIM brings to the table. Broadly speaking, it enables us to offer richer eCommerce experiences to our clients. 

As part of our service model, we aim to provide the best technical implementation to support not only frontend customer journeys but also a quality store management experience. In this respect, Akeneo has proved to be a powerful tool, helping us deliver effective solutions, especially to larger-scale clients.

As a side note, a project we delivered has been awarded among the TOP 3 Akeneo PIM implementations in the world by none other than Akeneo themselves during their annual APS Akeneo Summit!

Building our own connector

As mentioned previously, to integrate Akeneo PIM and Magento, a dedicated connector is required, and the market does provide a number of solutions to address this. Nevertheless, scandiweb is developing its own solution to meet the growing demand.

But what’s the point?

In general, the connectors we have had experience with leave much to be desired in terms of features and performance. Contrary to the highlighted use cases, these connectors tend to crumble under heavy catalogs and cause serious performance problems within Magento 2 while synchronizing data. In other examples, the size of the synchronized data was unnecessarily huge which made the catalog synchronization needlessly slow.

Moreover, some of the declared features have been restricted to work only with Akeneo Enterprise. This can be a limiting factor in a number of scenarios, so, as software engineering experts in general and Magento 2 specialists specifically, we took upon ourselves a challenge to build a better connector that simply works.

Have you found this information helpful? Do you consider implementing Akeneo PIM in your business? Let us help you! Any questions? Feel free to get in touch to book a free consultation or schedule a call!

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