Ecommerce Glossary | Discover & Learn Ecommerce Terms Glossary
• 3G: Refers to the third generation of developments in wireless technology, especially mobile communications. Offers voice, data and rapid data internet transfer.
• Affiliate: In Internet marketing, an affiliate is a person or company that sends visitors to a website in exchange for commissions.
• API (Application Programming Interface): An application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, much in the same way that a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.
• Article Marketing: A method of promoting your website by writing articles and submitting them to article directories. These articles will be distributed and published online, and they allow you to include a resource box to link back to your website. This has the potential to enhance the credibility of the business and drive traffic to the website via back links.
• Back-end: This means marketing to customers once they have ordered from you. Back-end is before once they are customers and front-end is marketing to them as prospects before they become customers.
• Bandwidth: The rate of data that can be transmitted by bits per second through a channel on your computer and referenced when downloading and uploading data.
• Blog: Short for ‘Web Log’. A website or area of a website often used as an online diary, but can be used for so much more when marketing an ecommerce website. Posting blogs consistently generates fresh content, which is appealing to Google and to your site visitors. Readers can leave interactive comments on the blog for each post.
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth technology allows electronic devices to communicate wirelessly over short distances (using short length radio waves) from fixed and mobile devices, creating ‘personal area networks’ (PANs).
• Bounce Rate: is a key online measurement expressed as a percentage of visitors who only see a single page on a web site before leaving. So they enter and leave on the same page without clicking to another page.
• Broadband: Is a fast and permanent internet connection. Commonly 10-100 times faster than dial-up internet. Domestic broadband connections will be between 3–5 MB (Mega Bytes) per second.
• Call to Action: Also known as Most Wanted Response. This is your intended action for your website visitor. What do you want them to do when they land on your website? Opt in to an email list, buy a product, complete a survey?
• CMS (Content Management System): The engine of an ecommerce website, it’s the back-end admin organized and structured for you the retailer to add products, process orders, etc. and to display content and products in an organized fashion on the website for the user to interactively purchase products, etc.
• Conversion: A desired user action on your website be it a sale, an email opt-in, a contact or completion of a survey, etc.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Technology used to manage a company’s customer interaction and sales. Software is used to synchronize these processes, especially those in customer service, technical support, and marketing. These processes can be streamlined to attract new customers and maintain customer loyalty by reducing marketing costs overall.
• Cross-Sell: Cross-selling is a very simple sales technique online or offline. Simply selling additional products to your customer that they may be interested in, such as items related to their previous purchases.
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): A language of style sheets used for web pages written in HTML. It offers flexibility when organizing and updating the colors, layouts, and fonts on a website across multiple pages in one go. Prevents the need to make changes on multiple pages.
• Discount Code: Also known as voucher codes, these give you the option to run promotions and offer your customers a discount off your products when they place an order on your website.
• Drop-Shipping: To send a product from your supplier direct to your customer without you handling the product. This is usually done covertly so your customer believes you have shipped the product.
• Downtime: When your hosting service temporarily fails due to a technical glitch and your website goes offline for a certain time. It needs to be corrected immediately to keep your website up and running.
• Ecommerce: Electronic Commerce. The process of online business transactions and selling from a website. Also known as electronic marketing for the purpose of buying and selling products or services online to retail or business consumers.
• Email Newsletter: A way of building a relationship and keeping in touch with your customers and prospects by writing and sending regular emails using email-marketing software, which manages the customers and emails for easy automation. You market to your subscribers by giving advice, information and products.
• Exit Strategy: An Exit Strategy is a strategic decision made when you start your business to withdraw from your business generally by selling.
• Exit Click: When a visitor leaves your website. By displaying and using Adsense advertisements on your site, you can make money when people leave or click off.
• Flash: Flash was formerly called “Macromedia Flash”, but has now been relabeled as “Adobe Flash” since Adobe purchased Macromedia software in 2005. Flash is streaming animation for web pages. Sometimes Flash is a portion of an html web page, and sometimes a web page is made entirely of Flash. Either way, Flash files are called “Flash movies”. These are special .swf format files that stream to your web browser screen as you watch them.
• Firewall: A security system that helps protect a computer from malicious attacks coming in from the internet.
• Front-end: This means marketing to prospects before they buy from you and become customers. Front-end is before they are customers and back-end is marketing to them once they have become customers.
• Fulfillment: Is when you outsource an area of your order process from taking orders to delivery of products to customers. Fulfillment houses are companies that can handle everything for you from manufacturer to delivery. This allows you to concentrate on marketing your business.
• Google: This is the most popular search engine available, and it attracts 80% of the search volume online. Ranks websites based on a mathematical algorithm but delivers very accurate results. When you focus on SEO this is the search engine to focus your efforts on.
• Gray Imports: A gray import is the genuine product, but sourced from a foreign market where prices are typically a lot cheaper and sometimes specifications are slightly different. The biggest issue with ‘true’ gray imports (and not knock off clones or replicas) is the manufacturer’s warranty and whether this is honored. Gray Market items are predominantly sold on the internet or through wholesale channels where it is difficult for the buyer to properly inspect the product prior to buying. The internet is a hot spot for gray imports and replica products.
• Gross Profit: Calculated as sales minus all costs directly related to making and delivering those sales. These costs can include manufacturing expenses, raw materials, labor, selling, marketing, shipping and other expenses.
• HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by using structural components for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items.
• In-House: This is the use of the company’s own money, resources, and staff for their business production of software, customer support, etc, as opposed to outsourcing the necessary work to other companies.
• Java: A programming system developed by Sun Microsystems and used to produce code and scripts to add various functions to your website.
• JPG or JPEG: Pronounced ‘Jay-Peg’ and is the most common online graphic image format. This format uses a compression technology that has the ability to reduce part of the data, without the difference being undetectable to the human eye. This allows for size reduction, resulting in smaller data storage, less bandwidth usage and faster load speeds.
• Landing Pages: Also known as squeeze pages. These are used as a powerful lead generation tactic, and optimizing these via split testing and multivariate testing can super-charge your profits. The idea is to get traffic into your email loop so you can build a relationship and then offer products.
• Links (Hyperlinks): Is a reference to a web document that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. Links join web-pages to make websites and link websites together to make the World Wide Web.
• Logistics: The process of shipping and delivering goods. From collection at the website company to delivery with your customer.
• Most Wanted Response (MWR): Also known as Call to Action. When a visitor lands on your website, what do you want them to do? Buy a product, opt in to your email newsletter, call a number?
• Multi-Channel Retailing: Selling online and offline and synchronizing the two methods.
• MP3: Where JPEG is compressed images, MP3 is the sound equivalent; compressed music and audio files. A data format that clips the sound at either end of the audible ranges to reduce its size.
• Multivariate Testing: This method of testing overcomes the time problem in split testing, by testing multiple variables on the same page at the same time. All this is tracked by multivariate testing software. Anything from headlines, images, guarantees, phone number placement, security logos, etc., can be tested simultaneously.
• Net Profit: Often referred to as the bottom line, net profit is calculated by subtracting a company’s total expenses from total revenue, thus showing what the company has earned (or lost) in a given period of time (usually one year). Also called net income or net earnings.
• Off-Site SEO (off-page SEO): Using SEO strategies external to your website to boost rankings in Google, including but not limited to: link building, article marketing, link reputation, link popularity.
• On-Site SEO (on-page SEO): Using SEO strategies within your website to boost rankings in Google, including but not limited to: page titles, header tags, internal linking, PageRank distribution, use of the ‘no follow’ tag and more.
• Operations (Order Management): The fulfillment of customer orders from sale to shipping, which includes handling returns and supporting orders and warranties backed by customer support.
• Outsource: The process of contracting work to another company or individual frequently at a lower cost. Many businesses use outsourcing to save money instead of hiring employees, and it can often be used for anything from web design to writing content.
• Personalization: Tailoring your website, marketing and specifics to fit your customers’ needs exactly based on their user data. For example, when you have data of the type of products your customer orders, you can focus those products in their emails and on their homepage when they log into their account on your website.
• Pay Per Click (PPC): A form of advertising where you place an advert or product on a website and tailor this to fit your target market. When the advert is clicked by a potential customer to go to your website the advertiser pays money. For example, Google Adwords are PPC ads.
• Recommendation Engine (Recommendation Systems): Integrated software systems on your website that collate actual customer buying data allowing you to personalize and match your products to your customers’ buying interests and behaviors, and tailor your marketing to each specific customer.
• RSS (Real Simple Syndication): RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing): This is a type of Internet marketing promoting websites so they become more visible through search engine results. Popular SEM vendors are Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is used to increase traffic to your website by generating higher search results in Google and the other main search engines Yahoo and MSN (Now Bing). This is a 2 step process of On-Site SEO (on-page) and Off-Site SEO (off-page). When working optimally in synergy, this is extremely powerful for rankings and consequently your sales and profits.
• Shipping: The process of delivering goods, from your business to your customer.
• Site-Wide: Across the whole website.
• Skype: A provider of internet based voice communications. With Skype you can make free calls over the internet to other people on Skype for as long as you like, to wherever you like. It is free to download. Using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) as a method to carry voice calls over the main telecommunication networks.
• Social Media: A type of medium and website relying upon user interactivity and participation where the content is generated by users. Bookmarking is a major component where users share information. Popular social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. Customer product reviews and blog comments can be considered social networking elements.
• Split Testing: Is the process of running two or three different designs of the same page against each other, to test and track the results. When a winning page becomes evident, you discard the losing pages, create a copy of the winner, substitute a single element such as a headline or image and measure the results. You then keep refining various single elements of the page to increase response, conversions or even triple sales.
• Traffic: Visitors to your website. It can be measured daily, weekly, monthly or annually and the more traffic you get the more sales you can expect.
• Turnover: Turnover is the volume of business over a period of time. If a company is selling goods, then stock turnover is also the number of times that their inventory of goods is sold over a given period.
• Up-Sell: Up-sell is a marketing term for suggesting higher priced products or services to a customer who is considering a purchase.
• Uptime: Opposite to Downtime and a measurement of the reliability of your hosting and its ability to keep your website live online.
• Usability (Web Usability): Is an approach to make websites easy to use for your customers, prospects and visitors, without requiring them to undergo any specialized training. It is about making your website intuitive so it makes sense to everyone.
• URL (Uniform Resource Locator): A website addresses starting with ‘www’.
• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): An international standards organization for the World Wide Web headed by Tim Berners-Lee. It is made up of different organizations that work to maintain the standards of the Internet, and it currently has over 300 members.
• Web 2.0: A term used to describe modern web applications that work through informational sharing. Some examples of these are online communities, web applications, social media websites, video sharing websites, hosting services, blogs, and wikis. These all involve users changing the content of the website by being interactive with the information provided.
• Wikipedia: (Pronounced Wi-ki-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual, free-content encyclopedia project that anyone can edit and contribute to.
