E-commerce glossary: 43 terms in one sentence each
The forty-three terms that come up in every conversation about running an online store, each explained in one plain sentence.
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Catalogue and merchandising
| Term | In one sentence |
|---|---|
| Product | A thing you sell, with a title, description, images, price and one or more variants. |
| Variant | One purchasable version of a product, such as a size and colour combination, with its own price, stock and identifier. |
| SKU | A stock keeping unit: your own identifier for one variant, used to track it across systems. |
| GTIN | A global trade item number such as a barcode, identifying the same product across retailers and search engines. |
| Collection | A grouping of products shown as one page, built manually or by rules. |
| Metafield | A custom data field attached to a product, collection, customer or order, for information the standard fields do not hold. |
| Faceted navigation | Filtering a collection by several attributes at once, such as size, colour and price. |
| Bundle | Several products sold together as one item, with stock tracked per component. |
| Merchandising | Deciding which products appear where and in what order, the online equivalent of arranging the shop. |
Checkout and payments
| Term | In one sentence |
|---|---|
| Checkout | The pages where a shopper enters address and payment and confirms the order, run by the platform and not replaced. |
| Express checkout | Wallet buttons that let a shopper pay with stored details in a tap or two, skipping the forms. |
| Payment gateway | The service that authorises and processes the payment between the shopper’s bank or wallet and yours. |
| Authorisation | The payment provider’s confirmation that funds are available, before the money is captured. |
| Chargeback | A shopper disputing a card payment with their bank, which reverses the charge and usually costs the store a fee. |
| Friendly fraud | A dispute raised by a real customer about a real order, often mistakenly or opportunistically. |
| Abandoned checkout | A checkout started and not completed, recoverable with a well-timed reminder. |
| Conversion rate | The share of visits that end in an order, best read by device, source and page type. |
| Average order value | Revenue divided by orders, moved by bundles, thresholds and merchandising rather than discounts. |
Shipping, tax and operations
| Term | In one sentence |
|---|---|
| Shipping zone | A group of countries or regions that share shipping rates and options. |
| Shipping rate | The cost and delivery estimate offered to a shopper for a zone, by weight, value or method. |
| Fulfilment | Picking, packing, labelling and dispatching an order, and marking it shipped with tracking. |
| Tracking page | The page where a shopper follows a parcel, ideally on your own domain with clear stages. |
| Duties and import fees | Charges levied when goods cross a customs border, collected at checkout or on delivery. |
| Returns portal | The self-service place where a customer starts a return, chooses a reason and gets a label. |
| Reason code | The structured reason a customer gives for a return, reviewed monthly to reduce avoidable returns. |
| Inventory sync | Keeping stock levels in step between the store, other channels and the back office, with one system owning them. |
| Oversell | Selling a product that is no longer in stock because stock levels drifted between systems. |
Marketing and channels
| Term | In one sentence |
|---|---|
| Email flow | An automated sequence triggered by behaviour, such as welcome, abandoned checkout or win-back. |
| Transactional email | An order-triggered message such as confirmation or shipping, the most opened email a store sends. |
| Discount code | A code a shopper enters for a fixed offer, as opposed to an automatic or rule-based discount. |
| Incrementality | The sales a promotion caused that would not otherwise have happened, the only honest measure of it. |
| Marketplace | A third-party platform such as a large retailer’s site where you sell alongside others, for reach at the cost of margin and the customer relationship. |
| Social commerce | Selling through shops inside social platforms, connected to the store’s catalogue. |
| Structured data | A machine-readable description of a product on its page, used for rich results in search. |
| Rich result | A search listing enhanced with price, availability and rating from structured data. |
Platform and performance
| Term | In one sentence |
|---|---|
| Theme | The template that renders a store’s pages on the platform’s hosting, edited through the theme editor and code. |
| Headless storefront | A custom front end built separately that reads the store’s data through APIs and hands off to the platform’s checkout. |
| Storefront API | The public-safe interface for reading products and building carts, used by storefronts, apps and content sites. |
| Shopify Functions | Small pieces of your own logic the platform runs inside the checkout for discounts, shipping and validation. |
| App | Third-party software installed on the store with permissions to read or change data, often adding scripts to pages. |
| Core Web Vitals | Three real-user speed measurements used by search engines: largest element timing, interaction responsiveness and layout shift. |
| Markets | The platform’s feature for selling in several countries from one store with local language, currency, prices and domains. |
| Development store | A free test store mirroring the live configuration, where apps and changes are tried before they touch customers. |
Frequently asked questions
How should we use this glossary?
As a reference when a supplier, app or report uses a term you are not sure of, and as a checklist of concepts worth understanding before decisions about platform, apps or a storefront. Each sentence is enough to follow a conversation; the linked articles are there when you need to make a decision.
Why one sentence per term?
Because a definition you can hold in your head is more useful than a paragraph you skim. Where one sentence is not enough for a decision, the term has an article, and the sentence tells you which one to read.