Ecommerce Glossary: 125+ Terms and Definitions You Should Know

In today’s digital age, ecommerce has become a crucial component of the global economy. With online retail sales continuing to grow year after year, it’s more important than ever for businesses to have a solid understanding of the key terms and concepts that make up the ecommerce landscape.

Whether you’re a seasoned ecommerce veteran or just starting out in the world of online retail, having a solid grasp of the terminology used in the industry is essential for success. That’s where this ecommerce glossary comes in.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ve compiled a list of essential ecommerce terms and definitions to help you navigate the ever-evolving world of online retail. From common industry jargon to technical concepts, this glossary covers it all, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking to build a successful ecommerce business. So whether you’re looking to optimize your website, streamline your supply chain, or expand your product offerings, this ecommerce glossary has got you covered.

1. 301 Redirect

This is a function that automatically redirects an old URL or domain to a new site destination.

301 Redirect is mainly set up to associate common web conventions with one URL, to rebrand or rename a website with a different URL, or to direct traffic to a website from other URLs owned by the same organization.

2. Abandonment

It is also called as cart abandonment. This term is used to describe a website visitor that left the webpage before completing the desired action. For example, when a buyer added items in his cart but leaves the website without placing the order.

3. A/B Testing

Also known as split testing or bucket testing. This is a method of comparing two web pages to figure out which one has better performance.This mechanism helps companies to determine the best online marketing strategies. 

A/B testing can be used on popups and emails too. For Example, WallMonkey’s home page testing. While there was nothing wrong with their original home page, they want to optimize the clicks and conversion by adding features shown in the second image. As a result, their conversion rate dramatically increased up to 550 percent.  

4. Address Verification Service (AVS)

This is a tool used by credit card companies to check if the billing address submitted by the customer to the merchant matches the cardholder’s billing address on record in their issuing bank. This is used to detect suspicious transaction or fraud.

5. Affiliate

This is a promotional partnership used by companies where one firm sells and promotes the other merchant’s product in their website. An affiliate can also be called commercial partner.

The affiliate then gets a commission whenever a customer purchases the merchant’s product in the affiliate’s website. 

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when a merchant pays a commission to the affiliate websites each time their products were purchased in the said website which brings traffic to the sales of the merchant. This is a type of performance-based marketing which incentivizes the affiliates to determine more ways to promote the product.

7. Application Programming Interface (API)

An API is a set of functions and procedures that allows two software applications to communicate with each other. 

It helps make it easier for developers to perform operations so that they do not have to start from scratch. APIs are also used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components.

8. Authorization

This is a mechanism of giving authority to someone to give orders or make decisions or take an action and verification of access levels or client’s privileges. 

For example, A transaction performed by using a credit card, an authorization verifies the cardholder has sufficient funds on his/her card to pay. Authorization will only take seconds and allows the merchant to ensure that payment will go through. 

9. Average Time on Site

It is a report that provides data on the amount of time visitors spent on your website. This is time measured in minutes or seconds.

Unfortunately, this report is not reliable as this report measures the amount of time the webpage is open on someone’s browser whether they are really browsing on it, opened with other webpages or was simply left open.

For example, if Average Time on Site is calculated as 10 seconds for a long blog post, then it is assumed, that visitors are not reading the post unless in the rare case you have an extremely fast reader reading it.

10. B2B (Business to Business)

This is a transaction where a business sells products or services to other businesses rather than a business selling to individual consumers.

For example, a tire manufacturer might sell merchandise to a car manufacturer.

11. B2C (Business to Consumer)

Business to Consumer (B2C) refers to a transaction where a business sells products or services to individual consumers.

Companies or websites that use B2C were referred to as online retailers or companies that sold products and services to consumers through the internet.

12. Blog

A blog is an online publication or journal that is regularly updated on a website or webpage and is written in an informal or conversational style. This is typically run by a small group or individual.

The word blog was derived from the combination of the word Web and Log. Blogs often have images and links to other websites and it also provides a comment sections for discussions. 

13. Bounce Rate

The percentage of people who visit one page on your website and leave without clicking on anything. This term is typically used in web traffic analysis as it measures the effectiveness of a website in encouraging users to move ahead in their journey on the website.

14. Bottom of the Funnel

Bottom of the Funnel is when the customer finally decide to make a transaction or purchase a product as a response to web marketing and internet research and comparison with other products. This can be referred to as the “purchase phase”.

15. Brick-and-click Store

This is a business model used by companies to operate both an online store and a physical store. You can capitalize on having your customer’s attention in both the real and the virtual world.

16. Bundling

It is a marketing strategy wherein businesses sell multiple similar products in a package deal. It increases the concept of the customer about the products and makes them feel they got a great deal. 

This strategy is also convenient when more than one product or services have to be purchased from one company. 

17. Business Blogging

This is the publication of blogs and online articles that are related to the company’s business. This is an essential marketing strategy and communication tool that helps your business increase visibility online, brand awareness and subscription. 

A business blog may also be referred to as a corporate blog or a corporate Weblog. These are basically published in order to achieve the company’s organizational goals and growth. This marketing channel helps companies to reach out to stakeholders of all types, from customers to suppliers and from partners to employees.

18. Buy-to-Detail Rate

It is a metric that describes how many unique purchases of a product per number of product-detail views. Buy-to-Detail Rate allows you to understand customers who buy products after reading the product details. In turn, you will know which products sell the most and which do not.

Buy-to-Detail Rate = Total Unique Purchases of a product / Product Detail Pageviews.

19. Buyers Persona

Buyers Persona is a research-based profile that depicts a target customer. Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face and how they make decisions. It is a research-based modeled representation of: Who are the buyers and their goals? How they think and what drives their behavior? On what terms are they making buying decisions?

20. Call-To-Action

This is a button, link, or phrase within a site that is asking the visitor to take action by registering, subscribing, or purchasing a product. Typical CTAs used in marketing and advertising are ‘Buy Now‘, ‘Call Now‘, ‘Click Here‘ etc. Such words prompt an immediate response or encourage visitors to make a purchase.

It’s used in business as part of a marketing strategy to get your target market to respond through action. It usually displays what you were looking for, thus persuades the user to click on it.

For example, To prompt the visitor to sign up, Dropbox has this simple blue “Sign up for free” call-to-action button stands out from everything else on the page. Since the CTA and the Dropbox logo are the same color, it’s easy for the visitor to interpret this CTA as “Sign up for Dropbox.”

21. Cart Abandonment Rate

An online shopping metric which shows the ratio of the number of abandoned shopping carts to the number of completed orders. It shows the rate of interested potential customers who leave without buying anything compared to the total number of shopping carts created. This marketing metrics will help marketers of such sites to understand and study the website user behavior and which marketing strategies are effective or unsuccessful.

22. Chargebacks 

Chargeback is the return of funds to a consumer designed to protect cardholders from fraud. For instance, if the products they receive are faulty, a chargeback is always a feasible remedy.

It’s highly recommended that merchants take steps to acquaint themselves with the procedure to safeguard against chargebacks being misused against your business, as chargebacks are going to be (whether you like it or not) a problem with your payment processing provider.

23. Churn Rate

It is the number of consumers or subscribers who, in a given period of time, cut ties with the business or services. Therefore, by unsubscribing from the products, it is simply the revenue or customers lost during a specific period (usually one month).

Churn Rate is also called Attrition Rate.

24. Closed-Loop Marketing

Closed-loop marketing is a viable strategy that organizations use to assess and increase better understanding into promoting efforts prompting ROI.

This strategy includes the accumulation of client information from different channels, dissecting this information and utilizing the data to make proper substance for focused gatherings of clients.

These statistics involves information from advertising and marketing campaigns inclusive of your website, content offers, blogs, search engine optimization tactics, emails, etc. It is a record driven method connecting cease outcomes of each marketing campaign to the advertising and marketing initiative which in flip helps to recognize its effectiveness.

25. Cohort Analysis

It is a consumer behavior study that is divided into groups of individuals with the same attributes. It requires examining how a population (group)’s unique characteristics change over time. It is one of the marketers ‘ most powerful tools that lets them analyze long-term customer relationship patterns.

26. Comma Separated Values (CSV) 

A CSV or a comma-separated file is a category of database that stores data in tabular shape. It seems like a generic database, but it has an extension.csv.

Such files are extremely important for exporting and acquiring large amounts of data that could be consumer records, goods, stocks and more in the case of your online store. For instance, collecting information from the production unit to submit to your company’s finance department.

27. Conversion

Conversion is a stage where after making a purchase, an unknown website user converts to a consumer. Therefore, it is considered the product of a Call-To-Action answer.

If a client clicks the ad or does a positive activity for the business, conversion occurs. This involves getting the visitors to choose what you want them to do, such as purchasing a product, subscribing for a newsletter, registration for a webinar, and filling out a contact/lead form.

28. Conversion Funnel

Throughout eCommerce, this term is used to describe the set of circumstances that occur during the online order process of the consumer. It is a process from the beginning of the transaction to the navigation stage and eventually to the conversion into a purchase.

It is considered a funnel as the number of visitors decreases at each point and there is a reduced number compared to the end of the purchase process at the final stage where the transaction occurs.

29. Conversion Path

Conversion Path is a step-wise method involving the transformation of unknown visitors to that of a recognized lead. The common conversion path starts once a customer arrives on the landing page, browses through a sequence of page changes, and enters the final state that is either a purchasing session or an abandoned session.

These are actions taken by the customer from any remarkable offer or call-to-action buttons to attain his desired outcome.

30. Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is a marketing concept measured in percentage. It is the rate at which guests convert on a site, which means dividing the number of individuals who changed into paying clients by the number of guests that visited the site. 

For example, consider an eCommerce website is visited by 500,000 people on average in a month. During that month, 5,000 users purchased something from the site, then the site’s conversion rate is 5,000/500,000 = 1%.

31. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

A marketing effort to drive conversions by enhancing the layout, content, and design of an ecommerce website, landing pages, and sponsored search ads.

For example, if you sell products online, purchases may be a conversion for you or the number of visitors to the website that add a product to your shopping cart. You may be calculating the number of leads the page receives or the number of white paper updates when you offer products or services to companies.

32. CMS – Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a software application or set of related programs that are used for digital content creation and management. CMS is typically used for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Web Content Management (WCM).

This system has made it easy to create and manage digital content for administrators with no programming knowledge. Additionally, it offers helps one or more clients to quickly post online updates.

33. Content Optimization System (COS)

A content management system (CMS) is a web content management software that allows various users to develop, update and publish material.

It is, therefore, a system that enables a content provider to use various techniques to boost search results and ratings.

34. Cookies

A website sends small text files called cookies to the computer of a client to store data relevant to the website experiences of that user. Each time the user accesses the page, these text files are sent back to the client. Cookies are mainly used to target ads and content, as well as to save information about shopping carts.

35. Cross-Selling

This is a process when a seller offers additional products complementing, enhancing or related to a product being sold.

An electronics retailer’s sales representative suggests that a memory card is also purchased by the customer buying a digital camera.

36. Crowdsourcing

The idea of crowdsourcing is to break big projects into smaller microtasks so that many people can quickly and efficiently work on a project.

For Example, Traffic apps crowdsources information by measuring the driver’s speed to determine traffic jams and by asking users to report road closures. It’s a great app that proves a dedicated crowd is sometimes all a company needs. It also attracted some big-name investors and suitors.

37. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A software solution dedicated specifically to the organization, synchronization, and automation of customer relationships of a business.

Through consumer clicks and transactions, CRM systems can monitor the client and his partnership. Thus CRM is used for offering improved client service and products that improve the overall experience of the consumer.

38. CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a style sheet language used to format the layout of Web pages. These can be used to describe text types, table dimensions, and other Web pages elements that could only be previously defined in the HTML of a website.

The term cascading comes from the idea that the same web page can be used for several style sheets. CSS was developed by the W3C.

39. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The estimated profit that a consumer will produce in all their experiences with your online store for your company.

Online businesses may calculate a customer’s productivity based on the expected monetary value produced from the customer’s entire relationship with your online store.

40. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition costs are the expenses associated with persuading a customer to purchase a product or service, covering study, marketing, and advertising costs.

It usually involves costs related to the cost of the product as well as involved research, marketing, and incentives. This can be used to calculate the value of the product to the business and Return On Investment to purchase the consumer.

41. Click Through Rate

Click Through Rate is a measurement of the number of clicks advertisers receive by the number of impressions on their advertisements. CTR is calculated in emails for a website, ads, and references that help determine online marketing strategy effectiveness.

42. Digital Commerce 

The buying or sale of goods and services using the Internet, mobile networks and trade facilities. This involves analysis and advertising efforts to enable these sales, including the individuals, procedures and technology that are used through the purchasing experience of the consumer to implement these touchpoints.

Understanding the overwhelming scale of conducting online business often encourages you to better prepare for selling your product, enables you to collect information about the purchasing habits of your clients and respond to them accordingly.

43. Discount Code

A code or series of letters and numbers which could be entered when an online purchase is done, enabling the shopper to take advantage of a special promotion or discount, these codes are also known as coupon codes.

These are provided through email or advertising and must be entered on the website (shopping cart or checkout page) in the corresponding promotional box to take advantage of the discount.

For example, a percent discount takes a given percentage off a customer’s order, such as 10%, 20% or even as much as 50%! The percentage discount only applies to the cost of the purchase and is not applied to any shipping charges or taxes.

44. Discount Rate

Discount rate is a fee assessed when a customer’s credit card payment is processed, the discount rate includes the merchant’s fees, assessments, network fees, dues and markups required for debit and credit card acceptance.

Discount rate frequently applies to the interest rate paid by the Federal Reserve Bank for depository institutions taking loans from the discount window of the Fed.

45. Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a form of supply chain management whereby the supplier does not hold the products in storage but instead sends customer orders and delivery information to either the producer, another distributor or a wholesaler who then delivers the goods directly to the customer.

There are two options for shop owners to manage the delivery of the products:

1. There are retailers who have relations to suppliers who make arrangements so that they do not stock or own the inventory. Alternatively, the merchant purchases the products from the third party (manufacturer or wholesaler) is required to fulfill the requirements of the order.
2. There are retailers that work with distributors or producers and provide them with the shipping address so they can deliver the item directly to the customer on demand.

46. Domain Name

A domain name is the title of your page. A domain name is the url where you can reach the website through Internet users. While visiting the website, you can find a domain name on the web browser’s address bar.

Any set of letters and numbers can be a domain name and can be used in conjunction with the numerous domain name variations, such as .com,.net and more. A typical domain name of a commercial business says Amazon or Flipkart will be www.amazon.com and www.flipkart.com respectively.

47. Ebay

Ebay is the most well-known online shopping site for its auctions and consumer sales. The company uses a digital network to allow customers and businesses to buy and sell a wide range of goods and services throughout the world. Using it as a sales channel is also extremely popular for online merchants. On-site transactions are usually made through PayPal or other payment options and then the product is delivered to the customer.

48. Ebook

An eBook sometimes referred to as an online book is a digital version of a printed book that can be read on a laptop or e-reader machine. This consists of both text and images in a readable format and can be easily accessible on a desktop system with a controllable viewing screen or on a handheld device designed specifically for this purpose.

By merely downloading it over the Web, eBook provides immediate access to a novel. You may print an eBook in various file formats, such as plain text, PDF, Rich Text Format, and image files.

49. Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a content plan to be created and distributed over a defined time frame to your audiences, including your website, social media channels, email newsletters, etc.

The method of publishing enables anyone who publishes data on any channel such as media, web, image, etc. to plan and coordinate content marketing.

50. Email

Email short for “electronic mail,” together with the web is one of the Internet’s most commonly utilized apps. This allows you to send and receive emails anywhere in the world to and from anyone with an email address. An email that contains text, documents, images or other attachments sent via a communication network requiring a user-specific email address.

51. Engagement Rate

An engagement rate is a metric measuring the level of engagement received from an audience by a piece of created content. It shows how many people are interacting with the content. Posts, posts, favorites, and more are variables that affect engagement. It serves to assess the curiosity and desire of the user to learn more about the specific bit is shown.

For example, Say you have a following of 2,500, your ‘engagement’ is measured by your likes and comments combined per post, divided by your following. Let’s say your total likes were 137 and comments came to 10.

137 + 10 = 147

You then need to take this magical number and divide it by your total followers, and times it by 100 (this will give you the percentage).

147 / 2,500 x 100 = 5.88%

Your total engagement rate for this post is 5.88% which is sitting smack bang in the middle of the average engagement rate on Instagram.

52. Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is always relevant content — like the way evergreen trees keep their leaves throughout the year. It is necessary to find interesting and relevant content that is not dated so that search engines can be found online.

In today’s time, this type of content is a must especially in order to appear on search engines and drive more traffic to the site.

Examples of evergreen content include how-to guides, personal stories, posts about company views that won’t change, a list of resources, etc.

53. Event-Triggered Email

Event-triggered-email is an email sent to subscribers based on specific events, such as a birthday or wedding anniversary of a subscriber’s special offer. For example, on their birthday or wedding day, a special email or discount coupon will be sent to a customer that they received at the time of enrollment.

In email marketing, triggered emails have been shown to be advantageous as it makes the customer feel valued and helps to retain them. 

Below is an example of an event-triggered email.

54. Fulfillment

This refers to receiving, sorting, packing and delivering orders from your online store. Typically, ecommerce playfield fulfillment involves a phase in which the retailer takes steps to send an order to the customer.

It is important to have a system of delivery and shipment in effect once the market has picked up and you get lots of orders. Most SMEs or ecommerce firms outsource this system to fulfillment-specific companies.

55. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service providing reports and simple analytical tools for managing search engines (SEO) and marketing purposes. Anyone with a Google account has access to the service. Google acquired Urchin Computer Company and used Urchin on Request as the base for its current service.

Google Analytics is now the Internet’s most commonly deployed web analytics tool, offering invaluable insights into your website that can be used to detect growth hacks.

56. Growth Hacking

A sales strategy that incorporates technology, mainstream advertising, and brand innovation to quickly sell, promote, and gain exposure.

Growth hackers take every aspect of the sales funnel to find the best strategies to grow. They marketers, engineers and product managers whose aim is to increase the number of customers for a particular product by concentrating primarily on creating and engaging a business ‘ user base.

57. Hashtag

Hashtag is a word or phrase followed by a hash sign (#) used to recognize messages on a specific topic on social media websites and apps, especially Twitter. As a result, a hashtag archive is compiled under the same hashtag in a single stream.

For example, on the photo-sharing service Instagram, the hashtag #bluesky allows users to find all the posts that have been tagged using that hashtag #bluesky.

58. HTML

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language which is a markup language specifically created to view applications or web pages in web browsers. Like other markup languages, HTML annotates a file to define its form, syntax, and format.

It is a system for tagging text files to create a script, color, image, and hyperlink effects on the web. It involves a series of markup symbols or codes in the folder that specifies the web browser how to view the user’s words and images on the web page.

59. Inbound Link

Inbound reference is referred to as a link that leads to your domain on third-party websites. It’s also regarded as a backlink in SEO terminology. Inbound links are essential to SEO as such pertinent links are considered by Google and other search engines as an indication that the content on that site is beneficial. This, therefore, determines the Google Page Rank that influences your website’s position in the search engine.

60. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a business process that tends to attract customers through the creation of relevant content and personalized experiences. It is about offering solutions and incentives that affect people and the company positively.

To build brand awareness, this approach utilizes multiple types of pull advertising such as content marketing, SEO, activities and more. Across platforms like forums, search engines, and social media, prospective customers can find you. The best example of inbound marketing is HubSpot.

61. Infographics

Infographics (Information Graphics) are a visual style representation of details designed to make the facts easier to understand at a glance. These are commonly utilized as they can transmit information easily and simplify vast amounts of data presentation.

Below is an example of an infographic used by the government to share statistics and census data. 

62. Intelligent Product Recommendation Systems 

An intelligent product recommendation system refers to a recommendation for a service that is essentially a sorting process that aims to anticipate and display the products a consumer wants to buy such as prices, quality, longevity.

63. Instagram

Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 as a free, online photo-sharing application and social network platform. It enables people to use a mobile app to edit and upload photos and short videos.

Instagram is commonly used to improve your original photos to make them look more professional. For example, the Valencia filter from Instagram brightens pictures and enhances the look of drab pictures.

64. Inventory

Inventory is the volume and price of a manufacturer’s or retailer’s current stock. This may include raw materials and parts used in the manufacturing process. To ensure that items that are not in stock are not advertised on the website, it is essential to keep track of inventory levels. This allows you to keep an eye on shrinkage and minimum levels of order. 

Inventory management will involve not only controlling the amount of stock you have but also the time required for stock replenishment, asset management, inventory cost carrying, forecasting, visibility, physical inventory space, the return of defective goods, valuation, and future price forecasting.

65. JavaScript

JavaScript is a language by scripting that renders web pages flexible and interactive. It ensures that even after a web page has been enabled, the JavaScript feature will operate and this can be achieved by connecting with the client.

For example, a feature can review a web form before it is submitted to ensure that all the fields specified in the form have been filled out.

66. Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

KPI is a metric used to assess the effectiveness of a company, worker, etc. in achieving performance goals. There are two forms of KPIs, high-level KPIs focused on the company’s overall efficiency, and low-level KPIs looking at operations in divisions such as finance, advertising, and call center. It is a measurable value that indicates how successfully an organization meets key business objectives.

67. Keyword

A keyword is a term used in online marketing to identify a word or set of terms used in a search engine or search bar by an Internet user. There are search engine keywords and words that describe the website’s content. A keyword can be in the form of a single word or phrase. 

It’s a good idea to have proper keyword phrases, and not just single keywords on your Web pages to get a more specific result. 

68. Keyword Stuffing

It is an SEO technique that overloads as many keywords as possible to manipulate the search engine ranking of a site with as many keywords as possible, often without context. Currently, it is deemed to be webspam or illegal activity that causes the website to be temporarily or permanently blocked and penalized on major search engines. Google has parameters that are capable of checking for keyword stuffing concealed from a novice website user.

69. Landing page

Landing pages are single web pages displayed in online marketing, the site displayed in response to an action request, the pages displayed in response to a link in an email, a pay per click ad, or a URL displayed in offline advertisement.

It is also known as a ‘ Lead Capture Page ‘ or ‘ Destination Page ‘ which occurs after clicking on the outcome of the search. There should be no global navigation to direct the visitors to your expected conversion target from this link to the main website.

70. Listing fee

Online auctions and trading sites like eBay will charge a nominal fee for listing known as a fee for listing or insertion. Listing fee is also referred to as Insertion fee and is not refundable. If you want to take advantage of priority listing, the listing fee will lead to a raise.

71. Lead

It is a category in advertising used to identify a prospective customer or entity who shows interest in the product or service of a company. With ads, trade shows, direct mailings, and other marketing efforts, businesses gain access to revenue. You can purchase leads from third-party firms as well.

72. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the method of developing relationships at each point of the selling funnel with customers and through each phase of the purchaser’s path. In this method, leads will be sent newsletters, content, and promotional materials that will keep them involved in an effort to sell them.

A common form of lead nurture is email marketing where the objective was to provide prospects with details and feedback they need through their purchase.

73. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a corporate community-specific social networking site that began on May 5, 2003. This helps you to share information related to your research with registered members and to communicate with other professionals. You can also build a personalized profile that is business-oriented rather than private. Your LinkedIn network is called “connections”.

LinkedIn is highly recommended to share expertise, insights, and job opportunities that help individuals grow their networks and find jobs in their own profession.

74. Lifecycle Stages

The term lifecycle defines the different stages a product passes through before, during, and after making a purchase in terms of customer relationship management. During an ongoing relationship with a company, a customer’s processes differ on a case-by-case basis, but here are five fundamental stages of a customer’s life cycle: Development Phase, Market Introduction Phase, Growth Phase, Maturity Phase, and Decline/Stability Phase.

The Lifestyle stages include first market analysis and product development, then product launch with high-level ads, and subsequent sales increase, thereby hitting the upper limits of the demand period and diminishing slowly due to the introduction of new goods.

75. Logistics

Logistics means resource and product management when in processing or transfer. The logistics process maintains a product line in transit right up to the delivery point. The method involves arranging, executing and managing the effective forward and reverse transfer and processing of goods and services and information related to them.

76. Long Tail

It is a consumer advertising term used to describe the practice of selling large volumes of goods to fewer people, as opposed to selling a few items to many people. Long-tail was Chris Anderson’s theory published in the October 2004 issue of the magazine “Wired,” which indicates that the online marketplace is turning away from mainstream goods and heading into niche products. New ecommerce stores will often find it easier and more cost-effective to focus on items in a niche.

77. Long-Tail Keyword

Long-tail keywords are the three and four keyword phrases that are very, very specific to anything you sell. Most of them are used to reach populations in niches than mass audiences.

In virtually every case, such very particular searches are much more likely to convert to sales than general generic searches, which tend to become more focused on the kind of research consumers commonly do before making a purchase decision.

78. Marketing

Marketing is the promotion and sale of products or services, including market research and advertising, or business. It is one of the leading elements of business management where businesses utilize phrases, advertisements and media exposure to attract markets. 

In general, it is a way of creating, maintaining and pleasing the client by engaging with them, meeting their needs and sharing useful offers. This is done through the introduction of sales techniques, corporate interaction and development strategy.

79. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a technology that automatically manages multi-channel marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns. Such technology enables companies to streamline, simplify and handle advertising processes and workflows. This allows them to improve operational productivity and accomplish the ultimate goal of higher business income growth. 

It is an essential part of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with efficient processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management.

80. mCommerce

mCommerce or mobile commerce is the purchase and sale of goods and services by means of wireless handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Kevin Duffey originally coined mobile commerce at the 1997 launch of the Global Mobile Commerce Forum, where he mentioned the delivery of the consumer’s eCommerce capabilities through wireless technology.

81. Merchant Account

A Merchant Account is an online bank account that allows transactions via credit card, i.e. where purchases are made to an e-commerce shop. It is an arrangement between a company, the merchant manager, and the payment processor to fund payments by debit or credit cards. If you want to operate an online business, merchant accounts are necessary. 

82. Microsite

Microsite is a single landing page or a small cluster of pages that exist outside the central territory of the product. It has its own URL layout, looks and feels its own, and relies on one or a few things..Often known as a Minisite, microsite is used for advertising and marketing purposes.

For example, Alex and Ani. This big costume jewelry brand has its main website on Magento. Simplistic built them a failover microsite on Shopify so that when the Magento site crashes, they are able to port visitors over to the microsite, which is able to handle the traffic.

83. Middle of the Funnel

This refers to assets that reach leads that are already involved with your brand in your database. This is also called as Sales Funnel or a Buying Funnel.

Before you can accomplish your business target, there are 3 steps here:

1) Marketing the relevant products or features

2) Measuring the prospect’s willingness to buy

3) Heading the right prospects closer to purchase

84. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is an advertising practice that supports digital products and services, such as tablets or smartphones. Mobile advertising is a way of creating a customized advertisement of goods or services for a consumer who is continuously linked to a network. The functions of this mobile technology provide consumers with time- and location-sensitive, customized data.

85. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is the method of modifying the functionality of your website to insure that users who access the site from mobile devices have a personalized experience using their phone. To provide the consumer with an excellent experience, optimized content flows seamlessly between desktop and mobile phones.

86. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is revenue that a company may expect to receive each month. It is also called Predictable Revenue. It serves as a by-product of a membership company that includes recurring billing.

The easiest way to calculate the MRR is to divide by the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) the total number of paying users.

87. Native Advertising

Native advertising is the use of paid advertisements that suit the look, sound, and purpose of the media format they exist in. Native advertisements are frequently found on social media feeds, or on a web page as suggested material. Native ads do not really feel like advertising, unlike display ads and banner ads.

88. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Rating is an average of -100 to 100 that tests customers’ ability to suggest the goods or services of a business to others. It is used as a metric to calculate the overall satisfaction of the consumer with a product or service of a business and the loyalty of the customer to the brand.

This metric was developed in 2003 in collaboration with the company Satmetrix by management consultant Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company with the intention of determining the customer satisfaction score.

89. News Feed

This is also known as a Web Feed is a service that provides users with the regular transmission of news-updated data. These are received by XML-format subscribers as summaries or links of updates about the people in the list of your friends as well as the odd advertisement.

90. No-Follow Link

A no-follow link is a connection that does not act as a point in support of the website, does not raise PageRank or aid to put a page in the SERPs. This tag tells the search engines to ignore that link.

The nofollow link has a nofollow tag.

91. On-Page Optimization

In search engine optimization, on-page optimization applies to factors affecting the normal search results of your website or web page. On-page optimization examples include actual HTML code, meta tags, keyword placement, and keyword density.

Not only does this help to get a good page ranking on search engines, but it also increases site readability overall.

There are 5 on-page SEO factors you need to consider while creating blog posts or pages on your website:

1. The slug
2. Body text
3. Images
4. Title tag
5. Meta description

92. Off-Page Optimization

Offpage optimization refers to all the steps that can be implemented outside the actual website to boost the search ranking role. These are measures that help to create as many backlinks of high quality as possible (incoming links). 

Mentions are more common on social media (likes Twitter, posts, hearts, etc.) and are more likely to be bookmarked or exchanged among like-minded user groups.

Off-page optimization includes:

1) Creation of links on third-party websites

2) Placement of keywords/website name/webpage in the anchor text of links created

3) Generation of links on authoritative websites

4) Creation of links on social media networks

5) Submission of website to search engines and web directories

93. Omni-channel Management 

This is a multi-channel marketing strategy that strives to provide a streamlined shopping experience to consumers, whether they shop online from a laptop or mobile device, via smartphone or in a brick-and-mortar store.

An example of omnichannel is when your wishlist or cart from one device appears in your other devices.

94. Open Rate

The open rate of an email is the percentage of contacts that opened your email when compared to how many contacts the email was sent. This is calculated by dividing the number of emails received by the maximum number of emails sent.

Example: You send an email to 5 contacts, 1 email bounces, and 2 contacts open the email. The open rate is calculated like this: Open Rate = [ 2 unique opens / (5 emails sent – 1 bounced email)] = 1/2, or 50%

95. Order Fulfillment

Order fulfillment is defined as the steps to receive, process and deliver orders to end customers. A fulfillment service is described as a third party company on behalf of another entity, such as an online seller, who performs such order fulfillment measures.

96. Pageviews

Pageviews, also called page impressions are when Internet users access a particular website page. These are tracked by website monitoring applications to record a website’s traffic. This is also helpful for publishers to know the performance of their ads and to calculate their expected revenue.

97. Payment Gateway

This is an ecommerce service provider that works to approve and accept credit card payments with your merchant account provider. They check with credit card companies the card information and then approve the transaction. By encrypting the sensitive information it carries, the payment gateway protects the records on a credit card.

It can also be considered an IP payment gateway when relating to payment gateways used for web payments. Popular payment gateways include PayPal/Braintree, Stripe, and Square.

98. Profit margins

Profit margin is one of the profitability metrics that is widely used to calculate the degree to which a corporation or organization makes money. The higher the profit margin, the better the cost control is considered by the company. Margin calculations may take into account only the price of selling products or the depreciation and other variable costs.

You can measure the profit margin using the below formula:

Profit Margin = (Total Sales – Total Expenses)/Total Sales

99. Partial Shipment

Partial Shipment is when you give a client only part of an order and in several shipments meet the request. Upon confirmation of this request by the customer, various order tracking codes are given.

100. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing

PPC is also referred to as CPC which stands for Cost Per Click. It is a marketing system in which the company just charges when someone clicks on an ad or heads to the sales page.

Google’s AdWords platform is the best example of Pay-Per-Click promotion.

101. Payment Service Provider

It is a third-party that helps and facilitates the acceptance of payments by merchants, also known as a merchant service provider or PSP. The PSP will provide different payment methods of online shopping, including direct debit, bank transfer, online banking real-time bank transfers, and credit card.

In essence, they bring everything together to allow a merchant to accept credit cards, and do so seamlessly, making the entire process transparent to customers and stress-free for merchants.

102. Point-of-Sale (POS)

Point of sale refers to when a transaction is completed by a cardholder and a merchant. It is also sometimes called a point of purchase.

This may include a cash register manual or electronic, scanners, weighing scales, touch screen terminals, and a wide variety of other bits and bobs.

103. Qualified Lead

This is referred to as a prospect in your lead-tracking system, which has expressed interest in purchasing your product and passes a set of lead qualifications to further advance the funnel.

When sales add them to their queue, the lead is deemed to be “qualified” as a potential option, with issues that suit the seller’s approach.

104. QR Code

A quick response code (QR code) is a type of two-dimensional bar code consisting of white-based square black modules. It is usually used to store URLs and provide a smartphone with quick access to information.

105. Recurring Transaction

A recurring transaction is an arrangement between a cardholder and a company providing goods/services that essentially authorizes the charging of periodic, automatic payments during a set amount of time. The transaction can be charged on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. The cardholder is typically charged in exchange for goods or ongoing services.

 A cardholder might have recurring transactions in place to fund an internet service or magazine subscription. Recurring transactions often repeat for an indefinite length of time. However, they can also be scheduled to last for only a certain period of time. In most cases, recurring transactions will continue until the cardholder cancels or defaults on the plan.

106. Responsive Design

Responsive Web Design is an approach whereby a designer creates a web page that “responds to” or resizes itself depending on the type of device it is being seen through. That could be an oversized desktop computer monitor, a laptop or devices with small screens such as smartphones and tablets.

The purpose of responsive design is to have one site, but with different elements that respond differently when viewed on devices of different sizes.

107. Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI (Return on Investment) measures the gain or loss generated on an investment in relation to the amount of money invested. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage and is typically used for personal financial decisions, to compare a company’s profitability or to compare the efficiency of different investments.

ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100

The ROI calculation is flexible and can be manipulated for different uses. A company may use the calculation to compare the ROI on different potential investments, while an investor could use it to calculate a return on a stock.

For example, an investor buys $1,000 worth of stocks and sells the shares two years later for $1,200. The net profit from the investment would be $200 and the ROI would be calculated as follows:

ROI = (200 / 1,000) x 100 = 20%

The ROI in the example above would be 20%. The calculation can be altered by deducting taxes and fees to get a more accurate picture of the total ROI.

The same calculation can be used to calculate an investment made by a company. However, the calculation is more complex because there are more inputs. For example, to figure out the net profit of an investment, a company might need to track exactly how much cash went into the project and the time spent by employees working on it.

108. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of snowballing the quantity and quality of visitors to a website by improving rankings in the algorithmic search engine results. It ensures the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs)

 The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing).

On-page SEO refers to activities on a website to improve organic visibility. This largely means optimizing a website and content to improve the accessibility, relevancy and experience for users

 Off-page SEO refers to activities carried outside of a website to improve organic visibility. This is often referred to as ‘link building’, which aims to increase the number of reputable links from other websites, as search engines use them as scoring as a vote of trust.

These activities require expertise, often from multiple individuals as the skillsets required to carry them out at a high level, are quite different – but they can also be learned. The other option is to hire a professional SEO agency, or SEO consultant to help in areas required.

109. SERP – Search engine results page

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page, it refers to the results that show up on your screen after you type in a query to Google or another search engine. SERPs frequently combine a few different types of content, such as paid advertisements, organic text, images, videos, or rich answers–such as Quick Answers. The types of content that show up in the results pages depend upon the type of query the user made and how Google believes it will be best answered.

110. Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the service contract element between a service provider and a customer. A SLA offers specific and measurable aspects related to service assistance. SLAs are often included in signed agreements between Internet service providers (ISP) and customers. SLA is also known as an operating level agreement (OLA) when used in an organization without an established or formal provider-customer relationship.

SLAs features include:

• Specific details and scope of provided services, including priorities, responsibilities, and guarantees
• Specific, expected and measurable services at minimum or target levels
• Informal or legally binding
• Descriptive tracking and reporting guidelines
• Detailed problem management procedures
• Detailed fees and expenses
• Customer duties and responsibilities
• Disaster recovery procedures
• Agreement termination clauses

111. Smarketing

The term “smarketing” refers to the alignment between sales and marketing teams generated through frequent and direct communication between the two.

The goal is to have measurable goals that each team agrees to hit so there’s mutual accountability focused on improving revenue. For instance, Marketing might have a mutually agreed upon leads SLA (service level agreement) to hit, and Sales must agree to follow up with a certain amount of those leads. 

112. Social Media

Social media are web-based communication tools that allow people to interact with each other by both sharing and receiving information. it is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.

113. Social Proof

Social proof is an informational influence (or descriptive norm) and can lead to herd behavior. It is also sometimes referred to as a heuristic. Social proof is the idea that customers make their purchase decisions based on what other people have to say. As a result, you see websites that show the numbers of customers who’ve purchased products.

114. Social Signals

Social signals are the engagement likes, shares, and comments your content receives on social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. When it comes to social media marketing, this is the most important metric for many companies.

Few ways you can increase your social signals

1. Link Your Website

Be sure to link to your site in your profile. Even if the links have nofollow tags, you may still get some direct traffic when people find your profile through search engines or via the social platforms themselves.

2. Use Clickbait Titles

Create clickbait titles. Whether you like clickbait or not, these types of titles can be very effective at attracting attention and clicks. Just make sure that you’re following the guidelines of the social media platforms you’re posting to because many of them have started cracking down on deceptive clickbait practices (which you should avoid).

3. Implement Call-to-Actions

Use calls-to-action to encourage engagement. Simply asking viewers to like, share, and comment can significantly increase engagement.

4. Utilize Social Sharing Plugins

Use plugins to make sharing your content easier. There are many good social media plugins you can use on your blog to insert links to the most popular social platforms, allowing users to directly share a piece of content on different platforms.

5. Only Share Your Best Content

Only share your best content. This may seem a bit counterintuitive, as you want traffic to all of your content, however sharing only your best content will help you get noticed more often on social media. For example, Facebook shows content from pages that get a lot of engagement more often than pages with less engagement, so by posting only your very best content, you can ensure that all of your posts have a good engagement rate, which will allow your content to be shown more often.

115. Software as a Service (SaaS)

(SaaS) is a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them accessible to customers over the Internet. SaaS is one of three main categories of cloud computing, alongside infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

116. Time Lag

An interval of time between two related events is called Time Lag. In eCommerce terminology, it is the number of days in between the visits before a multi-channel conversion is completed by the visitor.

Thus it determines the time between the first interaction date and conversion date within a lookback window (a specified time span prior to conversion).

Example – Consider a look back window set to 30 days and Google Analytics is searching for all the interactions of the user within this period. If the result shows that the user interacted with the content 31 days before the conversion took place and returned in 31 days to complete the transaction, then the time lag will be equal to 0. This means the interaction of the user when he completed the purchase, was the first one.

117. Turnkey

This is a product or service that is designed, supplied, built, or installed fully complete and ready to operate. The term implies that the end-user just has to turn a key and start using the product or service.

118. Third-Party Payment Processor

A third-party payment processor is an entity that helps you collect payments online from your customers without first setting up your own merchant account with a bank.

 In other words, third-party payments processors allow merchants to entirely bypass the need to own a merchant account

 There are hundreds of third-party processors on the market, ranging from big established players like PayPal and Amazon Pay to smaller services like Nochex

119. Top of the Funnel

Refers to activities and campaigns that concentrate on lead generation and aiming consumers in the uppermost portion of the marketing funnel.

These activities include many content advertising efforts, such as social media, email, blogs, SEO and more.

Top of the funnel marketing generates leads that feed into a brand’s lead nurture program, with the ultimate goal of converting these leads into customers.

120. Unique Users

Unique visitor on a website is a user counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site over a set period of time. Each visitor to the site is only counted once during the reporting period, so if the same IP address accesses the site many times, it is still only counted as one visitor. Special measures are taken by analytical programs to filter out visits that are not human, such as visits from spiders, crawlers and other bots.

121. Upselling

Upselling is a sales technique intended at persuading customers to purchase a more costly, upgraded or premium version of the chosen item or other add-ons for the purpose of making a larger scale. eCommerce businesses often combine upselling and cross-selling techniques in an attempt to increase order value and maximize profit.

Upselling aims to convince the customer to buy a more expensive version of the product, while cross-selling focuses on making personalized recommendations of related complementary products

Example:

Upselling: The customer has added a pair of sneakers from last year’s collection to their shopping basket. Exposing them to images of similar but more expensive sneakers from the most recent collection could lead to an upsell.

Cross-selling: The customer has added a pair of sneakers to their shopping basket. You could display related product recommendations on the checkout page (e.g., socks, insoles, or shoelaces) to prompt them to buy additional items that increase the value of the purchase

122. User Experience (UX)

User experience (UX) refers to a person’s feelings and attitudes about using a specific product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Furthermore, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.

 Paul Hersey described his understanding of the user experience (UX) is a concrete, replicable process which is divided into five major steps:

Prerequisites: User stories, user traffic

Exploration: sketches, wireframes, information structures, prototyping (Axure, Mockplus, Invision)

Design: model, hand-off

Quality assurance: speed, error, details

Feedback

123. User Interface (UI)

User interface design or UI design, in general, refers to the visual layout of the elements that a user might interact with a website or technological product. In essence, it’s the translation of a brand’s vision into a product or piece of software. The look and feel of a product. This could be the control buttons of a radio or the visual layout of a webpage. User interface designs must not only be attractive to potential users but must also be functional and created with users in mind.

User interface design can dramatically affect the usability and user experience of an application. If a user interface design is too complex or not adapted to targeted users, the user may not be able to find the information or service they are looking for. In website design, this can affect conversion rates. The layout of a user interface design should also be clearly set out for users so that elements can be found in a logical position by the user

With interface design, less is more. The flow should be smooth and seamless, getting out of the user’s way and allowing them to be fully immersed in the experience. A great UI should be Clear, Intuitive, Structured, Responsive and Flexible this makes you interface “user-friendly “.

124. Viral Content

Viral content, in a nutshell, is any piece of media that all of a sudden becomes an online sensation. It could be an Instagram post, Youtube videos, Facebook posts, tweets, or almost any social media content that gets shared thousands and thousands of times.

125. Web Analytics

Web analytics offer you website visitors’ data so you can improve your content based on users’ interests. Web analytics is a way of gathering and analyzing what’s happening on your website, covering everything from what your visitors are doing, where they come from, what content they like, and so much more. By using a web analytics tool to collect data, you’ll be able to know what is and isn’t working, and then steer your website in the right direction.

Web analytics helps to measure how many viewers are visiting the website. Web Analytics shows the number of visitors arriving at the site via different sources like search engines, through emails, social media and display ads. Web analytics Tracks Bounce Rate wherein a visitor visits a page on the website and then leaves the same page without taking any action or clicking on any links on that page, A high bounce rate could mean visitors are not finding what they were looking for and they left the site

126. XML Sitemap

(Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website. XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, and helping it understand your website structure.

XML sitemaps act as a roadmap of your website which leads Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be good for SEO, as they allow Google to quickly find your essential website pages, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect