eCommerce Glossary
E-commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet.
eCommerce
Conversion funnel
A Google Analytics metric that details the events that your customers follow to conversion. It’s called a funnel because a percentage of visitors leave your website at each event along the journey. At conversion, there are fewer potential customers than there were at the start.
eCommerce
Conversion rate
Conversion rate looks at the percentage of online store visitors who become paying customers. More on improving your conversion rates here. Here’s how to calculate conversion rates: [Paying Customers] / [Unique Visitors to Your Site] = Conversion Rate
eCommerce
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
CRO is a marketing effort to drive conversions by improving an ecommerce website’s layout, content and design, landing pages, and sponsored search ads.
eCommerce
Cookies
Cookies are small text files a website sends to a visitor’s browser to store data related to that visitor’s interactions with the website. These text files are sent back to the server each time the visitor accesses the website. Cookies are mainly used for ad and content targeting, and for saving shopping cart information.
eCommerce
Cross-selling
When a seller offers additional products that complement, enhance, or relate to a product being sold is cross-selling. For example, mobile phone coverage plans with a mobile phone. More on cross-selling and upselling in this guide.
eCommerce
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value is the predicted revenue that a customer can generate for your business during all their interactions with your online store. More on increasing CLV here.
eCommerce
Discount code (or coupon, or promo code)
A code, usually a short series of numbers and/or letters, that online shoppers enter at checkout for special offers or discounts. Learn everything you need to know about discounts in this guide.
eCommerce
Discount rate
Discount rate is the fee that an online merchant pays to its third-party payment processor for processing credit card payments—typically a small percentage of each payment processed.
eCommerce
Drop shipping
Drop shipping is the process of an online store working with wholesale suppliers for the delivery of products by passing them shipping information about each customer order.
eCommerce
Email marketing
Promotion of your products and services to a targeted audience through email. Email marketing gets one of the highest ROIs when compared to other marketing channels. See how CM Commerce can enhance your ecommerce email strategy with automation and workflows. See Email Marketing Glossary
eCommerce
Event-triggered email
Event-triggered emails are sent to subscribers based on specific events, such as a special offer tied to a subscriber’s birthday or wedding anniversary. Also known as transactional or automated emails. CM Commerce sends event-triggered emails with zero effort for any Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or PrestaShop stores.
eCommerce
Fulfillment
Fulfillment is the receipt, processing, packaging, and shipping of orders made through your online store. Learn more in our guide to automating fulfillment.
eCommerce
Gateway (or payment gateway)
An ecommerce service provider that communicates with your merchant account provider to authorize and process credit card payments.
eCommerce
Growth hacking
Growth hacking is a marketing approach that blends analytics, traditional marketing, and product engineering to sell products, advertise services, and gain exposure rapidly. Read more about growing a store in this guide.
eCommerce
Inventory
Inventory is a retailer’s or ecommerce store’s products on hand, waiting to be sold.
eCommerce
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. This is typically much less effective in generating revenue than to focus on writing for your audience. Learn how to grow your site traffic organically in this guide.
eCommerce
Landing page
A landing page is a single webpage on a site where a visitor arrives after clicking a link, often from an email. Such pages can exist to prompt a visitor to complete a call to action, such as signing up as an email subscriber or becoming a member of a special customer group.
eCommerce
Listing fee
A fee that some online auction websites charge sellers to list products or services.
eCommerce
Margin (or profit margin)
Profit margin is the difference between what a retailer pays for or spends to create a product and how much it earns on each sale of the product. More on creating a profitable store here.
eCommerce
Merchant account provider
Merchant account provider is an online account service provider that lets ecommerce businesses accept debit and credit payments, and temporarily holds the money until it’s transferred to the business’s bank account.
eCommerce
Mobile commerce (m-commerce)
The use of wireless electronic mobile devices such as cellphones, smartphones, and tablets to buy and sell products and services online.