Every field and industry has its language, and so does ecommerce. If you are new to ecommerce, there are some ecommerce terminologies and terms you should get used to first. You won’t have to worry about being left out when not understanding specific ecommerce terminologies or about having to look up the meaning of an ecommerce term. We’ve got you covered with everything you need to know about ecommerce terminology in this post.
Contents
What Is Ecommerce Terminology?
Ecommerce terminology implies ecommerce terms used mainly in the subject of ecommerce. They allow you to understand relevant concepts within the big topic of ecommerce.
75 Must-know Ecommerce Terms for Every Online Entrepreneurs
1. 301 Redirect
301 redirect is an HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser to signal a permanent redirection from one URL to another. All users who request an old URL will be automatically sent to a new URL. A 301 redirect is commonly used to maintain the website’s domain authority and search rankings when the URL of the site is changed.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is an advertising arrangement in which a company pays commissions to third-party publishers (affiliates) to generate traffic or leads to the company’s product or service.
3. Average Time on Site
Average Time on Site refers to the average time visitors have spent viewing your site. It is usually measured in seconds or minutes.
4. Blog
A blog is an online journal or informational website with an informal conversational style of information or a discussion. An ecommerce website’s blog is used to boost the rank of a website and increase its visibility.
5. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave a web page without visiting other page sites or without taking any action. The rate is used to measure the effectiveness of a website in motivating a visitor to discover a website.
6. Brick and Mortar
Brick and mortar refer to a business with a physical store that customers can go to and make a purchase.
7. Business to Business (B2B)
Business-to-business describes selling services or products to another company.
8. Business to Consumer (B2C)
B2C describes direct transactions between a seller and a consumer.
9. Bundling
Product bundling is a creative marketing strategy wherein several similar products or services are sold together as packages/combos.
10. Buyers Persona
A buyer persona is a detailed description or a person who represents your target customer. It is usually created based on deep market research and data of your existing customers.
11. Call-to-Action (CTA)
A call to action is a marketing message that triggers conversion and persuades your target audience to take action. Some typical CTAs you probably have seen are “Buy now”, “shop now”, “click here”, “learn more now,” and “subscribe now”.
12. Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment refers to the act of potential customers who add items to an online cart, but instead of completing the purchase, they choose to exit the site instead.
13. Chargeback
Chargeback is the reversal of a completed credit card transaction designed to protect credit card holders from fraud. Typically, chargeback happens when a customer disputes a charge, and then the merchant’s bank has to refund the value of the transaction.
14. CMS – Content Management System
CMS is a type of technology used to create, publish, edit, and manage various website content, including content on landing pages, blog posts, and so on.
15. Conversion
Conversion is the term for transforming or converting an online store visitor into a successful customer. It is not always about financial transactions, it happens when a visitor does what you want them to do, for example, make a purchase, fill out a contact form, etc.
16. Cookies
Cookies are small text files that a website to a user’s browser to store data related to how the user interacts with the website. Normally, when a user visits a website, a pop-up requests the user to share cookies. The main purpose of cookies is for ad and content targeting.
17. Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel is a process that has to be followed to take the desired action or reach a goal, for example, converts.
18. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who ultimately become paying customers or take the desired action.
Read more: Hands-on Tips To Skyrocket Ecommerce Conversion Rate
19. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is the process of improving the visitor’s website experience to increase the chance of conversions.
20. Cross-Selling
This is a practice of presenting customers who have purchased similar or related items based on the current shopping cart or their last purchases. Online retailers widely use this marketing tactic to drive sales.
21. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM refers to a set of practices and technological applications for organizations to manage and analyze customer interactions throughout the customer life cycle. Its purpose is to improve customer relationships and help a business achieve its goals.
Read more: Best CRM For Small Business – List Of 2022
22. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Click-through rate is the percentage of clicks on a specific link or advertisement appearing on a page to the total number of visitors who browse through that page. It is one of the metrics to determine a campaign’s success.
23. Customer Journey
Customer journey involves the experiences a customer goes through while interacting with your brand, starting with awareness about your business’s product or service and ending with making a purchase.
24. Discount Code
A discount code (or coupon code) is usually a series of numbers and letters offered to customers to encourage purchase at a discounted price. This is an important marketing strategy to attract more traffic to the website.
25. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is an order fulfillment method where the goods are directly shipped from the manufacturer to the retailer/customer. In other words, a dropshipping business does not stock or own inventory, they act as the middleman between the manufacturer and the customers.
26. Domain name
A domain name, also known as a website address, is a unique name that users usually type in a browser’s search bar to directly find your website and locate your business on the Internet.
27. E-commerce
E-commerce, also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce, is buying and selling products and services through the Internet or the transfer of money and data to complete sales.
28. E-commerce Platform
An E-commerce platform is a software application that allows merchants to build and manage their online businesses.
29. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on promoting a business’s products and services to a target audience through email. Normally, the email list involves users who have signed up for newsletters and sales notices.
30. Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a metric measuring how actively visitors engage with your piece of content or ad. It reflects the percentage of people who visited your site, saw the ad, and engaged with it.
31. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google that analyzes website traffic and provides the website owner with useful statistics for SEO and marketing purposes.
32. Google Ads
Google Ads refers to an advertising service provided by Google.
33. Google Keywords
Google keywords are trending words or phrases describing a specific product or service based on what users are searching within Google. Businesses usually track keywords throughout ads and other marketing tactics.
34. Hashtag
A hashtag is a label for content, in simpler words, a phrase preceded by the hash character (#) to help users who are interested in a specific topic quickly find relevant content on that same topic. Hashtags are usually used on social media platforms.
35. HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
Hypertext markup language, also known as the “code” of a website, is a coding language that structures a web page. HyperText refers to hyperlinks that may exist on an HTML page, markup language refers to how tags are used to create the overall look of a website.
36. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach that attracts qualified prospects and new customers via content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO that are tailored to the target audience’s specific needs and shopping journey.
37. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing refers to a marketing strategy involving a brand partnering with an influencer to market one of its products or services to increase visibility, target a specific audience, and generate sales.
38. Instagram
Instagram is a popular photo and video sharing application and social networking platform acquired by Facebook in 2012. Users can not only edit and upload photos and videos but also connect with brands, celebrities, thought leaders, friends, family, and more with Instagram.
39. Inventory
Inventory is the number of products in stock and available for immediate sales and shipment.
40. Keyword Ranking
Keyword ranking refers to your website’s rank on a search engine results page for a particular keyword. When users type in a specific keyword in the search bar that’s somehow related to your page’s content, whichever spot your URL is listed is your keyword ranking.
41. Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is an SEO technique that overloads a webpage with as many keywords as possible to manipulate a site’s ranking in the Google search engine and drive traffic to the site. It is easy to notice and usually annoys readers, and also considered a webspam. Instead of using keyword stuffing techniques, you should focus more on writing content that is somehow useful for your audience.
42. Landing Page
A landing page is a single webpage that a user “lands” on after clicking on a link, often from an email or ad. Once users are on the landing page, they are encouraged to take action with many “call-to-actions”, such as buying a product or becoming a member of a special buying group.
43. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional and social networking platform that is employment-oriented and allows you to share work-related details with other members and connect with other individuals. People usually use LinkedIn to find jobs and internships and strengthen professional relationships.
44. Marketing
Marketing refers to any action a business takes to get potential customers interested in a business’s product or service through market researching, promoting, advertising, selling, and distributing a product or service. It plays a crucial role in raising brand awareness, generating traffic, increasing revenue, building trust, and tracking metrics for a business.
45. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is using software to effectively automate marketing functions and manage marketing processes across multiple channels.
46. Merchant
A merchant represents a person or a company that sells a product or service.
47. Merchant Account
A merchant account is a business bank account that enables a business to accept and process payments through card transactions. It is a must for any online business since it needs at least a merchant account to allow and receive card payments.
48. Metrics
Metrics are numbers and measurements that tell you how the process is performing and provide you with the base for any needed improvement.
49. Mobile Commerce
Mobile commerce, or m-Commerce, is the use of wireless handheld devices such as a mobile phones to sell and buy goods and services from a site online. Some common wireless handheld devices are mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, etc.
50. Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization is optimizing your website to ensure that any visitor who accesses the website through mobile devices has a wonderful user experience. Some examples of mobile optimization are ensuring content is properly displayed on mobile devices’ screens and optimizing photos that fit well on diverse devices.
51. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a marketing tactic focusing on boosting a site’s ranking and gaining organic traffic from search engine results.
52. On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization, or on-page SEO, refers to all measures that website owners can take within the website to improve its ranking in the search engine results.
53. Off-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization, or off-page SEO, refers to measures focusing on promoting your website and brand around the web (outside the actual website) to improve its position in the search rankings.
54. Open Rate
Open rate is the rate of email subscribers who open the mail that you send them.
55. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is website traffic that comes from free sources, such as organic search results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
56. Pageviews
Pageviews, also called page impressions, are the number of views by visitors a website or webpage gets over a specific period and is measured to help the site owner find a strategy to get more website traffic.
57. Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is software that reads and transfers payment and transaction information from a customer account to a merchant account.
58. Page Rank
Page rank is a web page ranking system that evaluates where a web page ranks with Google or other search engines. The higher the page rank of a webpage, the closer it is to the number one spot and the more qualified it is.
59. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click marketing is an advertising model in which advertisers pay a fee every time their ads get clicked on. The visitor is directed to the advertiser’s retail website.
60. Profit margins
Profit margins measure a business’s earnings compared to its revenue, representing the percentage of sales that has turned into profits. In other words, profit margins measure how well a company controls its cost. The higher the number is, the better the business can manage its cost and the more profitable it is.
61. Payment Service Provider
A payment service provider, or merchant service provider, is a third party that allows an online business to accept cert forms of online payment, for example, accepting credit cards or debit cards through the e-commerce website.
62. Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment is a mathematical formula used to evaluate the efficiency of profitability of an investment and determine the probability of gaining a return from an investment. The ROI formula is: ROI = ((Profit – Investment cost) / Investment cost) x 100.
63. Shopping Cart
A shopping cart is software that allows customers to add different types of products they want to purchase on a website to a list. It is the virtual representation of an actual shopping cart to keep the items you want to purchase.
64. Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)
Stock keeping unit is a scannable bar code in the form of letters and numbers printed on product labels to help identify products and track inventory movement. In e-commerce, SKU is used to provide sales data.
65. Social Media
Social media refers to digital communication channels that allow users to create content and share it with the public. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tiktok, and LinkedIn are the most popular social media platforms.
66. Software as a Service (SaaS)
Software as a service (SaaS) is a method of distributing applications over the Internet as a service. It enables users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet and allows a business to avoid the need to handle installation and maintenance.
67. Transaction
A transaction is the record of purchasing an order online from a business or other seller that involves money in exchange. For instance, if you buy a watch for $20000 and pay for it, it is a transaction.
68. Trend
In e-commerce, a trend is simply a topic that has many posts on social media, websites, or any application and gets a lot of attention from people for a short period. Business owners usually use trends to see which products customers are searching for.
69. Third-Party Payment Processor
A third-party payment processor is an external service that allows an online business to accept various forms of payments without having its merchant account. Paypal is a popular third-party payment processor that many online businesses take advantage of.
70. Upselling
Upselling is a sales technique that aims to convince customers to upgrade purchase or buy a premium and more expensive version of a product to maximize the value of the purchase and make a larger sale.
71. User Experience (UX)
User experience refers to the feeling a user has when interacting with a product, service, website, application, or system.
72. User Interface (UI)
The user interface refers to the user-facing design of a webpage or application on devices (computers, mobiles, etc.).
73. Viral Content
Viral content is a piece of media material such as an article, a photo, or a video that spreads rapidly via website links and exposure and shares on social media platforms. It usually gets many views, reactions, and shares.
74. Web Analytics
Web analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing, and reviewing the website data to understand the behavior of visitors to a website.
75. Wholesale
Wholesale refers to businesses that sell directly to retailers in large quantities of goods.
Final thoughts
Now that you know all these ecommerce terminologies, you will be more prepared to communicate in the ecommerce world and take control of your e-commerce business.
With thorough research, well-prepared business plan and resources, and a great website, you will be off for a great start.
