Sharpen Your Ecommerce Vocabulary and Learn Searchspring Terms.

Industry Terms

A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z

– A –

A/B Testing / Split Testing

A/B Testing is a method to determine which design, content, or functionality is more successful with your site visitors. It allows you to simultaneously test a variation of your page (or element of your page) that may impact customer behavior. You can run up to five A/B tests site-wide with Searchspring.

Above the Fold (ATF)

ATF is what you see on a digital screen before you start scrolling (comes from the newspaper term for the top half of a paper, above the fold).

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy in which your ecommerce business partners with online publishers so that they will promote and endorse your products and send customers to your website. Typically, the affiliate receives a fee for every website visitor or sale generated from the promotion.

Angular

Angular is a typeScript-based open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google and with a community of individuals and corporations. Angular is a complete rewrite from the same team that built AngularJS.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

ARR is a subscription economy metric (especially in SaaS) that tracks the amount of money coming in every year for a subscription.

API

Application Programming Interface – a software intermediary that allows different software programs or applications to dialogue – receive or send info.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)

A method for updating parts of a webpage without reloading the entire page.

Average Order Value (AOV)

AOV = Sum of Revenue Generated / Number of Orders
Searchspring offers an AOV report on your dashboard within the Searchspring Management Console. These insights allow you to drive targeted merchandising decisions.

– B –

Backout

Backout is the original search that a shopper reverts to within the search function when they don’t feel the results align with their intent.

Below the Fold

Below the fold is the part of a web page only seen by scrolling down. The first part of a web page a viewer initially sees is above the fold. Most readers will pay less attention to the content below the fold or potentially not see it at all, depending on how far they must scroll.

BOPIS

Buy online, pickup in-store (curbside pickup)

Bounce Rate

A bounce is a single-page session on your site. Analytics calculates a bounce when a session triggers only a single request to the analytics server.

Brand

A business that mainly sells its products under a specific name.

Brick & Mortar

A business with a physical retail location rather than doing business solely online.

Bundling

Bundling is the grouping of related products or services as a package or solution and is often offered at a reduced price to encourage conversion.

Business to Business (B2B)

B2B is the process of selling products or services to other businesses.

Business to Consumer (B2C)

B2C is the process of selling products or services directly to consumers.

Buy-to-detail Rate

A Google Analytics metric that looks at products added to shoppers cart relative to views of product detail pages.
[Unique Purchases of a Product] / [Product Detail Page Views] = Buy-to-Detail Rate

– C –

Call-to-Action (CTA)

A phrase or statement designed to get a person to perform a specific act, like buy now, click here, or sign up.

Cart Abandonment

When a visitor to a website adds products to their shopping cart/basket then exits without completing the purchase or checkout process.

Cart abandonment rate

An online shopping metric that shows the rate of potential customers who leave a site before completing their purchases compared to all the shopping carts created.

Step 1: [Completed Purchases] /[ Shop Carts Created x 100] = Percentage of Successful Transactions
Step 2: [100] – [Percentage of Successful Transactions] = Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart-to-detail rate

Cart-to-detail is Google Analytics metric that looks at products added to a customer’s cart relative to views of product detail pages.

[Times a Product Is Added to Cart] /[ Product Detail Page Views] = Cart-to-Detail Rate

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is a styling language used to declare the design elements of a website, including color, font, and layout.

Category

A category is a grouping of products or subcategories.

Chargeback

A chargeback is the reversal of a completed credit card transaction—typically because a customer disputes a charge and the merchant’s bank refunds the value of the transaction.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR)

CTOR reflects the effectiveness of the message and content in your email in getting recipients to click through and find out more about your business or offer.
[Unique Clicks] / [Unique Opens] x 100 = Click-to-Open Rate

Collection

A collection is similar to a category, often used by Shopify and its users to define a grouping of products or subcategories.

Content Management System (CMS)

CMS is an application managing web content, allowing multiple contributors to create, edit and publish. A commonly used CMS example would be WordPress.

Conversion funnel

A conversion funnel is a Google Analytics metric detailing the events that your customers follow to conversion. As your customers progress through the sales process, a percentage of them drop off at each step. Visualizing your sales data at each step results in a funnel shape.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the number of visitors to a website who complete the desired goal out of the total number of visitors. Often the conversion rate looks at the percentage of online store visitors who become paying customers.
[Paying Customers] / [Unique Visitors to Your Site] = Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO is the process of improving a website to increase or improve the quality of conversions.

Cookie

Cookies are small text files a website sends to a shopper’s browser to store data related to their interactions with the website. These text files get sent back to the server each time the visitor accesses the website. Cookies help with ad and content targeting. Cookies also save shopping cart information.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC is the amount you pay for each click on one of your PPC ads on platforms such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads. CPC is an important metric because the clicks and costs add up fast. If your CPC is too high, you will not be able to achieve a return on your ad investment.

Cross-selling

Cross-seeling is a sales technique used to get customers to buy a product or service related to one they are already buying.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the cost of winning a customer to purchase a product/service.
[Costs Spent Acquiring Customers] / [Number of Customers Acquired] = Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV is the total amount of money a customer that a retailer expects them to spend with a business over their lifetime. There are different ways to calculate it. Some include AOV*number of purchases/yr*anticipated the number of years as a customer, and others subtract CAC from that equation.

Customer Relationship Managment (CRM)

CRM systems compile customer data across different channels or points of contact between the customer and the company. Combines practices, strategies, and technologies companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data.

– D –

Data Feed

A data feed is a way of sending structured and up-to-date information. Usually for use on a website, app, or another online tool. Two common types of data feeds are news feeds and product data feeds. Data feeds are also how Searchspring connects to a client’s eCommerce platform.

Direct to Consumer (DTC, D2C)

Selling direct-to-consumer, DTC, or D2C, means you’re selling your products directly to your end customers.

Domain

Domain names identify internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services, with a text-based label that is easier to memorize than the numerical addresses used in the internet protocols. A domain name may represent entire collections of such resources or individual instances.

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping moves products from the manufacturer directly to the customer on your behalf. They sell products to you at wholesale prices and assume the risk of unsold inventory.

DYM

Represents the Did You Mean search functionality that provides shoppers with alternative (and hopefully related) search queries when arriving on a zero results page (no results to the original search query).

– E –

Ecommerce

Ecommerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling products or services online.

Ecommerce Platform

An ecommerce platform is software that helps businesses to launch, host, and manage their online store. While different ecommerce platforms offer a variety of features, all of them enable merchants to build a branded online storefront to sell their products.

Common ecommerce platforms are Shopify, Magento (M1, M2), BigCommerce, Netsuite, Miva, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware).

Ecommerce Pure Play

An ecommcerce pure play is an investment term for a publicly-traded company that focuses its efforts and resources on only one line of business. As such, the performance of its stock correlates highly to the performance of its particular industry or sector. Many electronic retailers, ecommerce companies, or etailers are pure plays. All they do is sell one type of product online.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

ERP is a software platform used to help a business run more effectively by automating core processes.

– F –

Filtered search

Filtered search is a technique that involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a filtered navigation system, allowing users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on the classification of the items.

Filters

Filtered navigation is a feature in modern ecommerce websites that allows customers to refine their search results to surface relevant products to their needs.

Fulfillment

Fulfillment is the receipt, processing, packaging, and shipping of orders made through your online store.

– G –

Gateway (or payment gateway)

A gateway is an ecommerce service provider that communicates with your merchant account provider to authorize and process credit card payments.

Geo Targeting

Geotargeting in marketing is the method of determining the geolocation of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on their location.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a Google service that tracks & examines the traffic coming to a website.

– H –

Hierarchy

A hierarchy is a more advanced version of a product finder that causes the shopper to select their options in sequential order. Options for a hierarchy finder get sourced from a single attribute field, following a specific data pattern. Hierarchy finders require your attribute data must exist as a single field, following a hierarchical format.

Home Page

A home page is the main web page of a website.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

HTML is a universally-used, standardized markup language that uses a system of tags to communicate page effects to web browsers.

– I –

Indexing

Indexing is data synchronization between ecommerce stores and Searchspring.

Inline Banners

Inline Banners enable customers to configure banners that scroll between other components within screens, unlike traditional banners fixed to the bottom of a screen and behind which other content scrolls.

IntelliSuggest

IntelliSuggest is a proprietary algorithm tracking four milestones to deliver hyper-intelligent results to shoppers.

IntelliSuggest tracks views, clicks, add to carts, and purchases. IntelliSuggest uses this information elevates up to 10 products with the highest engagement on your search and category results pages.

Inventory

Inventory is items or products that a company has in stock.

– J –

Javascript

JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification. JavaScript is high-level, often just-in-time compiled, and multi-paradigm.

Javascript Object Notation (JSON)

JSON is a file type. JSON data reads information from a server for websites.

– K –

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is an SEO technique that overloads a webpage with as many keywords as possible, often without context, to manipulate a site’s search engine ranking. It is typically much less effective in generating revenue than focusing on writing for your audience.

– L –

Landing Page

A landing page is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email, or an online advertisement.
Landing pages are sometimes called lead capture pages, static pages, or destination pages.

Lifestyle Brand

Lifestyle brands seek to inspire, guide, and motivate people, with the goal of their products contributing to the definition of the shopper’s way of life.

– M –

Margins

The difference between your cost for acquiring products and the selling price is the margin.

Marketplace

The marketplace is the world of trade or economic activity. Examples: Amazon, Walmart, eBay.

Meta Fields

Meta Fields are primarily a feature on Shopify. You can use Meta Fields to add custom fields to objects such as products, customers, and orders. Common uses for Meta Fields house layered information like color mapping or size charts.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is income a business can count on receiving every single month.

– N –

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural language processing is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence. It is concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages, specifically how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data.

Navigation Bar (Navbar)

A navigation bar is a set of buttons on a website and can include a search box.

– O –

Omnichannel

Omnichannel is a cross-channel content strategy that organizations use to improve their user experience and drive better relationships with their audience across points of contact.

One-way synonym

A one-way synonym is a unidirectional synonym. For example, the word fruit is synonymous with the words banana, strawberry, and apple; however, if you search the word banana, strawberry isn’t relevant.

Open Rate

The open rate indicates how many people view or open the email. It is most commonly expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the total number of emails sent (excluding bounced emails).

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the way users find a website through a search engine query. The results populate based on relevance to the search query. Google or other search engines arrange results based on page rankings, so higher-ranked pages appear closer to the top. Users that have found sites this way are said to have found them organically.

– P –

Parent Category

A parent category is an entity used in catalogs to group a set of products in a hierarchy. For example, Music is a parent category, and Rock, Jazz, and Classical are child categories.

Parent Product

The parent product is the general item, while a child is more specific. For example, a phone case is available in Red, Blue, and Floral. That means Red, Blue, and Floral cases are children of the parent Phone Case.

Partial shipment

A partial shipment is when you send only part of an order to a customer and fulfill the order in multiple deliveries.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when viewers click the ad.

Point-of-Sale (POS)

The point of sale, or point of purchase, is the time and place where a retail transaction completes.

Product Detail Page (PDP)

A product display page, or product detail page, provides information on a product. PDPs are not controlled by Searchspring, but we can place our recommendations on these pages.

Product Listing Page (PLP)

Product listing pages display a list of products based on searches or category filtering. Searchspring can power PLPs.

– R –

Responsive Design

Responsive design is an approach to web design where web pages are optimized to display differently on computers, phones, or tablets.

Retailer

A retailer is a business that sells products from multiple brands or manufacturers.

– S –

Saluki

Saluki is Searchspring’s latest search algorithm.

Search Box

A search box is usually a single-line text box or a search icon, enabling users to search a database.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

Search queries

Search queries are the phrases entered into a search. Search queries are considered as a whole when searched.

Search terms

Search terms are individual words entered into a search and considered in isolation when searched.

Searchspring Management Console (SMC)

The Searchspring Management Console is where you take advantage of all of Searchspring’s powerful features on your site. Here you can configure your site’s search results behavior, configure dynamic merchandising campaigns, dive into powerful analytics, and more.

Semantic Search

Semantic search focuses on searching the overall meaning of the query.

SERP

SERP stands for search engine results page.

Session

A session is a group of interactions a visitor has on your website. This gives an idea of how often shoppers use site search during their visits (or sessions) on your site.

Sorting

Sorting enables customers to change the order of product listings. Popular sorting methods include relevancy, name, and price.

For example, your customers may be searching for a particular product name. Allowing them to arrange items alphabetically (ascending or descending in direction) gives them the control they need to find products faster.

Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)

An SKU is an inventory management term standing for stock keeping unit. An SKU is a specific item for sale, such as a product or service, and all attributes associated with the item type distinguish it from others.

Storefront

An electronic storefront is an ecommerce solution for merchants who want to host a website that advertises their products or services and where customers buy online.

Subcategory

A subcategory is a category listed under a parent-level category.

For example, a parent-level category is Baby Proofing. The subcategory is Kitchen Safety. Under Kitchen Safety are Cabinet Locks, Drawer Locks, etc.

– T –

Time On Page

Time on page is how much time the customer spends on a single page on the website.

Time On Site

Time on site is how much time the customer spends on the website.

Top Level Category

The top level category is the first level of a category hierarchy. For example, if you have set-up: Women’s > Tops > Tanks, Women’s is the top level category.

Transaction

A transaction is an agreement between a buyer and a seller to exchange goods or services for payment.

– U –

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

A uniform resource locator, commonly called a web address, references a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it.

Upselling

Upselling encourages customers to buy an upgraded product instead of the original.

User experience (UX)

UX is the overall experience of a person using a product like a website or a computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

User interface (UI)

UI is how a person controls a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience, enabling users to interact with the software or hardware naturally and intuitively. Nearly all software programs have a graphical user interface or GUI.

– V –

Validation

Validation detects new product fields and deletes old ones during site implementation or changes.