Glossary

PSD2 is the EU's second Payment Services Directive, requiring strong customer authentication (SCA) and opening bank data to licensed third parties via APIs.

A product variant is a purchasable version of a product defined by options like size or color, each with its own price, SKU, and inventory.

A product catalog is a store's complete, structured set of products with titles, prices, images, SKUs, inventory, and variants.

Producer responsibility (EPR) makes whoever first places a product or packaging on a market responsible for registration, reporting, and recycling.

PPC is an advertising model where you only pay when someone clicks the ad, with the price per click set by an auction.

POAS (Profit on Ad Spend) is profit from advertising divided by ad spend, measuring profit instead of revenue the way ROAS does.

Pixel swapping is when two parties exchange tracking pixels and let each other's pixel fire on their own pages to share audiences and conversion data.

The Pareto principle is the 80/20 rule: roughly 20% of causes typically account for about 80% of the results.

A parcel shop is a pickup point in e.g. a kiosk or supermarket where the customer collects their parcel instead of home delivery.

Paid social is paid advertising on social platforms like Meta and TikTok, where you bid in auctions to reach targeted audiences.

Organic traffic is the unpaid visits from search engines like Google, as opposed to clicks you pay for through ads.

Order status shows where an order is in the process. In Shopify there are three tracks: order, payment, and fulfillment status.

An upsell step is a defined point in the purchase flow where the customer is offered a higher-value variant or upgrade to raise order value.

Open Graph is meta tags in a page's head that control the title, description, and image shown when a link is shared on social and messaging apps.

Omnichannel connects online store, physical retail, POS, and marketplaces so inventory, customer data, and orders are shared in one seamless experience.

MPN is the manufacturer's part number for a product or spare part, used with the brand in product feeds when a GTIN is missing.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard giving AI agents one uniform interface to external tools, data, and APIs — including Shopify.

A meta description is an HTML meta tag with a short summary of a page that Google may use as the snippet in search results.

A marketplace is a commerce platform where many sellers offer products under one brand and checkout, e.g. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Zalando.

A quantity discount is a price reduction where the per-unit price drops when a customer buys more units or reaches a defined quantity tier.

A loss leader is a product you deliberately sell at or below cost to pull customers in and make the profit on the rest of the basket.

A lookalike audience is an ad audience where the platform finds new users who resemble a chosen source group, such as your best customers.

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific search phrases with low individual volume but clear intent and typically higher conversion.

Link building is the work of earning relevant links from other websites so Google sees your pages as more trustworthy and authoritative.

A landing page is a focused page built around one conversion goal, usually the destination of an ad, email, or campaign click.

Inventory management is controlling stock levels, purchasing, and locations so your store avoids both stockouts and tied-up capital.

A fulfillment warehouse is an external logistics partner that stores your stock and picks, packs, and ships orders for your store.

A customer group bundles customers by shared traits like tags, purchase history, or location so you can target pricing, offers, and marketing.

Cross-selling offers relevant add-on or complementary products to a customer who is already buying, in order to raise order value.

A credit note is an accounting document that reduces or cancels a previously issued invoice — e.g. for a return, cancellation, or pricing error.

Conversion tracking measures when visitors complete valuable actions like a purchase or signup and links them back to the channel behind.

Conversion rate is the share of sessions or visitors that complete a desired action such as a purchase, calculated as conversions divided by traffic.

Campaign tracking ties visits and sales to specific campaigns using UTM parameters and analytics, so you can see what actually works.

JSON-LD is Google's recommended structured data format: JavaScript in a script tag that describes your page using schema.org vocabulary.

ITP is Safari's built-in tracking protection that blocks third-party cookies and shortens the lifetime of cookies set via JavaScript.

Influencer marketing is partnering with creators who recommend your products to their followers – often tracked with discount codes and links.

An acquiring agreement is the contract between a store and an acquirer that grants the right to accept card payments like Visa and Mastercard.

An acquirer is the bank licensed by the card schemes to process a merchant's card payments and settle the funds into their account.

Impressions are the number of times an ad or search result is shown, regardless of clicks. The basis for CTR and reach in marketing.

A heatmap is a color-coded overlay that aggregates many visitors' clicks, scroll depth, and mouse movement to reveal behavior patterns.

Headless commerce decouples the storefront frontend from the commerce backend, connected via APIs, so you can build your own custom storefront.

Google Tag Manager is a free tag management system for deploying and updating tracking and marketing tags through a web interface without editing site code.

A GTIN is a global GS1 item number that uniquely identifies a product across stores, barcodes, and product feeds.

GPSR is the EU General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988, requiring consumer products to be safe, traceable, and have an EU responsible person.

Smart Shopping was a Google Ads campaign type that combined Shopping ads and remarketing with automated bidding. Now replaced by Performance Max.

Google Remarketing shows ads to people who previously visited your store, across the Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, and Search (RLSA).

GDPR is the EU data protection regulation that governs how personal data may be collected, processed, and stored.

GA4 is Google Analytics' event-based platform where every interaction is measured as an event across website and app.

A funnel is the steps a customer moves through from awareness to purchase — and a tool for finding where most of them drop off along the way.

Fulfillment covers picking, packing, shipping, and returns for ecommerce orders — from payment until the parcel reaches the customer.

A shipping module is an app or integration that manages delivery methods, shipping rates, labels and tracking in your Shopify store.

Filtering lets customers narrow a collection by attributes like price, size, color, availability, and product type.

A product feed is a structured file of product data that channels like Google Shopping and Meta use to list your items.

A favicon is the small icon shown in browser tabs, bookmarks, and Google's mobile results that helps customers recognize your online store.

Facebook Pixel (Meta Pixel) is JavaScript code that sends events from your website to Meta for conversion tracking, audiences, and ad optimization.

Facebook Analytics was Meta's free analytics tool that measured behavior across web and apps. It was shut down on June 30, 2021.

An exit-intent popup is a popup triggered when a visitor is about to leave the page, usually to capture a signup or recover a sale.

EPR makes producers and importers responsible for financing the collection and recycling of their products and packaging at end of life.

EPC (earnings per click) is the average revenue a click generates, used mainly in affiliate marketing to compare which offers pay best.

Email marketing software is tools to build, send, automate, and measure newsletters and flows, with segmentation and analytics.

A custom field is a user-defined data field that adds structured information to products, customers, or orders — in Shopify called metafields.

EAN is a 13-digit GS1 article number that uniquely identifies a product and is encoded in the barcode on retail goods.

The Danish e-mark is the national trust certification for online stores, ensuring secure shopping, clear terms and buyer protection for consumers.

Dropshipping is a model where your store sells products a supplier stocks and ships directly to the customer — with no inventory of your own.

Double opt-in requires a new subscriber to confirm their signup via a link in an email before the address is added to your list.

DNS translates domain names into IP addresses via records like A and CNAME – the basis for pointing your domain at your Shopify store.

DMARC is a DNS policy built on SPF and DKIM that tells receiving servers what to do with unauthenticated email from your domain.

DKIM cryptographically signs your outgoing email so the recipient's mail server can confirm the message is genuine and unaltered in transit.

A data processing agreement is a GDPR-required contract governing how a processor handles personal data on behalf of a controller.

Contribution margin is the sales price minus variable costs and shows how much an order contributes toward fixed costs and profit.

D2C (direct-to-consumer) is a model where a brand sells directly to the end customer without wholesale or retail intermediaries.

A CTA (call to action) is the button or link that asks the user to take the next step, such as 'Add to cart' or 'Sign up'.

CSV is a text-based file format where each line is a row and fields are separated by a delimiter – Shopify's standard for importing and exporting data.

CPC (cost per click) is the price an advertiser pays per click on an ad. Average CPC = total spend divided by total clicks.

Core Web Vitals are Google's three user experience metrics: LCP for loading, INP for responsiveness, and CLS for visual stability.

Cookie consent is a visitor's active permission for a website to set or read non-essential cookies, such as analytics and marketing cookies.

A content gap is a topic, keyword, or customer question competitors cover or rank for that your store is missing or covers worse.

Consent mode is Google's signaling framework that adjusts how Google tags measure and set cookies based on a user's consent.

A CNAME is a DNS record that points a subdomain to another domain name instead of to an IP address.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total profit you can expect from a single customer over the entire relationship with your store.

A 404 error is an HTTP status code shown when a URL cannot be found — often a deleted product or a changed link in your store.

A 301 redirect is a permanent HTTP redirect that sends both users and search engines from an old URL to a new one.

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant and model family that, via API, can write copy, analyze data, and power support in online stores.

Churn rate is the share of customers or subscribers who leave in a period, calculated as customers lost divided by customers at the start.

Checkout is the final steps where a customer moves from cart to completed order, entering contact, shipping, and payment details.

A chatbot is software that answers customer queries via chat — either rule-based or AI-driven — and on Shopify it is typically added as an app.

A chargeback fee is an administrative fee your payment provider charges when a customer disputes a card payment.

A CDN is a network of servers spread across the world that delivers images, CSS, and JavaScript from a location close to the user.

Cart abandonment rate is the share of started shopping carts that never turn into a purchase – a core metric for checkout friction.

A canonical URL tells search engines which page is the preferred one when the same content is reachable at several addresses.

A cache keeps copies of data, pages, or files so repeat requests are served faster without re-fetching or regenerating the content.

CAC is the customer acquisition cost: total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers in the same period.

A usability test is a UX method where real users are observed completing specific tasks, so you find friction in your online store.

Bounce rate is the share of sessions with no further interaction. In GA4 it is simply the inverse of engagement rate.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) lets the customer get the item now and pay later, often in interest-free installments, while the provider carries the credit risk.

A payment window is the hosted payment page or iframe from your payment provider where the customer securely enters their card details.

A payment gateway encrypts and passes payment data from your checkout to the acquirer and processor so a card payment can be authorized.

A B2B online store sells to businesses with customer-specific pricing, quantity discounts, and payment terms such as Net 30.

Attribution assigns conversion credit across the channels and touchpoints that influenced a customer on the way to a purchase.

Average Order Value (AOV) is the average revenue per order — total revenue divided by the number of orders.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link that signals to users and Google what the destination page is about.

A recommendation engine suggests relevant products from behavior and product data and powers personalized recommendations in an online store.

Alt text is the alt attribute on an image that screen readers read aloud and that Google uses to understand what the image shows.

AI in ecommerce means using artificial intelligence to personalize and automate functions like search, recommendations, text content, and customer service.

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where a partner earns commission for each tracked sale or lead, not for exposure.

Above the fold is what shoppers see without scrolling — it often decides whether visitors stay or leave your store.

Open rate is the share of delivered emails recorded as opened, usually measured via an invisible tracking pixel.

An A record is a DNS record that points a domain name to an IPv4 address so traffic to your domain reaches the correct server.

A 3PL is an external logistics partner that stores your inventory and handles picking, packing, shipping, and often returns for your store.

CLS measures how much visible elements unexpectedly shift while a page loads — one of Google's Core Web Vitals.

Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of impressions that result in a click, calculated as clicks divided by impressions and shown as a percentage.