E-Commerce Glossary

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API (Application Programming Interface)

APIs allow two or more computer programs to communicate with each other and work together seamlessly. Any time you pay with PayPal, book travel or summon an Uber, you’re using an API.

APIs provide the connections between various systems, such as payment gateways, shipping providers, and inventory management software, enabling smoother and more efficient operations, reducing the risk of errors and delays in processing orders. Payment gateway APIs facilitate the transfer of funds from a customer's bank account to the merchant's account, shipping APIs connect an e-commerce store to shipping carriers, enabling automatic tracking updates and streamlined shipping label  generation. APIs help to create a better experience for both merchant and customer. [This definition was partially written by OpenAI’s free version of ChatGPT-3. So far, the humans at Text Connects are still in charge. But check back.]

Bundling & Kitting

Merchandising strategy where products are combined or “bundled” and sold as one SKU, often at discount. Also called “kitting,” as in putting together a “kit” of products.

Gone are the days when e-commerce product fulfillment was simply “pick, pack & ship.” Trendy and trending e-commerce merchants are offering “subscription boxes” and bundling products with a single theme. Think of a “Pink Room” box for a young girl that arrives with only pink items: rug, bath robe, candles, bath beads, hair ties, etc. A delight for the girl, a potential nightmare for the warehouse.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Sometimes called e-CRM (electronic-Customer Relationship Management), because in the olden days many of the same “processes” might be handled by integrated technologies called, “a telephone and a 4x5 card.” Wait, why do we even need this acronym? Don’t we “manage” the relationship with customers by selling them something, invoicing them, and then following-up weeks or months down the road? Not in today’s marketplace. Organizations (nonprofits might use CRM for “donor management”) compete for the attention of prospective customers, and need to manage them as well paying customers, from womb to tomb.

Engaging with prospects or customers doesn’t necessarily start with a phone call or visit. It might start with someone visiting your website, or signing up for your email newsletter, or even a text message. Besides “tracking” such relationships and all the associated data, two things differentiate CRM. Its ability to use all the collected data to “score” leads, that is, to sort inbound leads, into buckets of the type and priority of follow-up (do they get an email, a phone call, a free plane ride to your headquarters?). Secondly, a robust CRM will enable you to “nurture” your prospects and clients, take them further “down the funnel” from prospect to a sold customer and ambassador for your product. Please note: if you only have 100 or so customers, upgrade the phone and card technologies to a spreadsheet. You’ll be fine, but imagine 1,000 or 100,000 customers each with an email trail, phone call notes, sign-up for a free trial, meeting notes, etc. That’s why you use a CRM. The bad news, most ERP systems (see the ERP entry) don’t incorporate CRM. The former is much more about operations: monitoring inventory, running payroll, updating financial reports that integrate with your system for tracking KPIs. CRM is all about sales.

Brands you might recognize in this discipline: Hubspot, Salesforce, SugarCRM, and PipeDrive. Good news: you will be able to find a good CRM at a reasonable price suited to your needs.

Composable Commerce

The evolution of Headless Commerce (see below) allowing online merchants even more flexibility in development and business processes.

First coined by the research firm Gartner in 2020, composable (e)-commerce is a different approach to e-commerce architecture and development. While headless is developer oriented, composable is more business oriented.

Merchants select best-of-breed components for all aspects of the customer experience. Going beyond the presentation layer and back-end, composable proposes a kind of microservice architecture.

Functions such as content management, payment management, and even the discrete add-to-cart capability could be called microservices. Gartner wants us to call them PBCs, packaged business capabilities, but we’ll skip another glossary entry for now. Just remember, PBCs are not necessarily microservices, they can be a compilation of them.

This orientation relies a lot on APIs to stitch these capabilities together. This entire approach assumes you have developers who excel at working with APIs.

While a compelling perspective, shifting to composable is not a light-lift.

Please note: Shopify is very much a platform for composable commerce.

Compostable Commerce

[Published April 1, 2024, with apologies to Gartner and those working for a more sustainable world. :-) ]

The revolutionary new approach to e-commerce that treats every digital interaction as an opportunity for renewal and regeneration.

In the world of compostable commerce, nothing is wasted--not the websites, not the shopping carts, not even the online payments.

Customers browse virtual storefronts made from biodegradable code. At checkout, they select carbon-neutral shipping options that deliver purchases in dissolvable packaging, ready to be composted alongside the order confirmation.

The backend infrastructure powering these eco-friendly e-commerce experiences is designed with sustainability in mind. Servers, databases, and APIs are built to eventually break down, their digital remains nourishing the soil for the next generation of online commerce.

It's a closed-loop system where nothing is discarded, only repurposed. The ultimate goal of compostable commerce? To leave no digital footprint, creating an e-commerce ecosystem that is truly green from start to finish.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

The “E” for Enterprise in the acronym ERP has a double, if not triple, meaning. Back in ancient times (the 1960s) Enterprise could simply refer to a large-scale business; think Fortune 500. By the early 1970s, Enterprise Resource Planning referred to software created to run day-to-day business operations for a large-scale organization in an integrated/interoperable, and automated manner. ERP could include solutions for accounting, purchasing, project management, supply chain operations, risk and compliance management, and even more. Typically, not CRM (see CRMentry).

Today, the automation component might rely on AI (artificial intelligence) or other sophisticated tools. That doesn’t mean ERP is only for the big gorillas. Smaller and mid-market companies can access ERP software without, as some vendors say, ERP prices.

Big names in ERP you may know: SAP, Oracle, Netsuite, Microsoft, and Epicor.

Headless Commerce

An e-commerce architecture that “de-couples” the front-end presentation layer from the back-end where the database and e-commerce engine live.

“I want a divorce!”Headless commerce means that the front-end “head” or presentation layer is divorced from the back-end commerce engine. Front-end is where your inventory is showcased, back-end is where your product database, shopping cart, etc., is managed. Headless gives much greater freedom to design unique customer experiences.

It lets you present your merchandise on nearly any digital device or screen without having to “rebuild” for every new sales channel. Remember, multi-channel wins the day these days.

Shopify Plus offers its own headless commerce solution as do many others. Warning: Headless Commerce isn’t a perfect fit for every company. It will take significantly more time and energy to implement. You’re building or buying a CMS, need a developer, and more infrastructure.

Middleware

Nope. Middleware is not the weight loss sauna shorts “As Seen on TV.” The classic definition of middleware is software that enables one or more kinds of communications (computer communications, not a phone call!) or connectivity, to applications, tools, and databases, beyond those available from the operating system. Some call it “software glue.” Your laptop running Windows 11 uses middleware in the background to connect to Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel. Maybe you have used Zapier to create a “Zap,” a no-code integration of two separate and standalone applications. Say you want to receive a Slack message whenever a row is updated in Google Sheets. Use Zapier to make that happen.

At enterprise scale, complex middleware may need to be custom built for connecting to different systems or applications. The applications you want to connect might have been developed in different programming languages or rely on different data sources and likely were even developed by two different software vendors. Rather than a full-blown systems integration project, that may actually be impossible without access to the code behind these applications, you can turn to middleware. Many Shopify store owners already use middleware from Celigo to connect their NetSuite accounting/ERP system to their e-commerce stores. Or Workato middleware as a bridge between cloud-based and on-premise applications. [Editor’s note: we’ve got translator, glue, and bridge, as metaphors for middleware; we promise to stop using any new ones.]

Additional middleware brands: SnapLogic, MulePoint’s AnyPoint platform, and Boomi.

Popups

The “box” or partial- to full-page overlay that often “pops up” the first time you land on an e-commerce site with an offer for a discount, sale item(s) or newsletter signup.

Popups are meant to grab the shopper’s attention and highlight an offer, such as a discount you'll receive in exchange for sharing your valuable email address. Can be confusing because the same type of attention grabber could be called: Popover, Overlay, Modal (think computer “dialog box”), Light Box, Interstitial, Hover Card, and plain old Alert. Whatever they are called, they are effective. And sometimes annoying.

Responsive Web Design

With responsive web design a site will adapt and deliver the best viewing experience to a user whether on desktop, laptop, tablet, phablet(!) or phone.

The variety of electronic devices we use today demands online stores look and work great regardless of device or screen orientation. Think of the content we consume, from text, images, and photos, to videos, online calculators, and more. You can imagine this to be a tough task. Ever visited a website on your phone and experienced left-to-right scrolling or content cut off? That is non-responsive design and can kill a potential sale.

Responsive design is not an “add-on” component or cost for clients of Text Connects. All the sites we build are responsive. Period.

Shopify

One of the leading e-commerce platforms in the world. Powers more than one million online stores in 170 countries generating $40 billion annually for its online merchants.

Founded in 2004 by three “dudes” looking for a better way to sell snowboards online for their Snowdevil brand. In 2006 the system they built debuted as Shopify. Today, users include solo entrepreneurs to big brands like Kylie Cosmetics, Red Bull, and Turtle Beach. Driven in part by the pandemic, in Q2 of 2020, Shopify stores actually surpassed sales at eBay. The original Ruby-on-Rails developer of Shopify, Tobias "Tobi" Lütke, is the CEO to this day. Snowboarding? 2004? We think they called each other either dude-- or brah. Just sayin’.

Shopify Magic

Introduced in early February 2023 as part of the Shopify Editions Winter ‘23 release, Shopify Magic provides AI-generated product descriptions for Shopify Plus stores. A user can select from five different writing “tones,” enter a few product features/keywords and artificial intelligence (AI) takes over to create a compelling product description.

Let’s be honest, if you only have a couple of new products coming online and you need product descriptions, it can even be fun to play Shakespeare and create clever product descriptions for some new items.

When a truckload of new products need to be in your online store–and pronto–plus you need to give consideration to keywords you want to rank for, fun can fly out the window. Drudgery–and deadlines–now loom!

Shopify Magic may be the solution. Allowing you to play with tone, key words, and even rewrites on the fly to create a product description that suits your product, your customers, and you.

UX

User Experience or UX refers to the continuum of what a shopper experiences from beginning to the end of visiting and purchasing online.

Websites were once judged by their UI (User Interface), the human-computer interaction. Savvy merchants now also focus on the end-to-end User Experience. This goes well beyond great product selection and site design. It includes site search, shopping cart functionality, order packing, even branding of the box an order arrives in, and more. UX cuts across all areas of the business to exceed shoppers’ expectations.

WCAG 2 (WCAG 2.1 A / AA / AAA)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are international standards for maintaining content more accessible for people with disabilities.

Currently, we are on version 2.1, which was released in June 2018. The Guidelines provide a laundry list of items that are all used to provide support for your customers with different disabilities. Some are color/content updates to allow people with color and visual impairments to see / read your site. Others are related to utilizing a keyboard to navigate your site, and finally there are Guidelines that help with voice / screen readers.

While a website is not REQUIRED to maintain the WCAG standards, companies located in the US must maintain these standards to qualify for meeting the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) website requirements. In short, they are standards for U.S. sites--you can read more about ADA requirements in our blog post here.

WordPress

A popular, free open-source content-management system (CMS) that is used to build websites and manage site content including blog posts, forums, and online stores.

Released in 2003, today it is the platform for 60 million sites. Strictly speaking, it is not built for e-commerce and requires a “plugin” to sell products online. WooCommerce, also free, was built specifically to add this capability to WordPress and is widely used. Shopify, as well as other software, can be used as a plugin to power e-commerce on WordPress. Shopify is also a kind of CMS where the “content” products and services.