E-Commerce Glossary.

This refers to as permanent redirection from one URL to another so as to send site visitors and search engines to the new URL than the one they originally typed automatically.

301 Redirect is a key practice in order to maintain the website’s domain authority and search rankings when the URL of the site is changed for any reason. The Status code of 301 in turn means that the page has been permanently moved to a new location.

A 3PL is an outsourcing service for businesses. They help companies with the operational logistics of their supply chain like transport, warehousing, pick and pack, inventory, forecasting, and fulfillment.

In eCommerce, this term means a visitor has visited the website and has left the webpage without making the desired action. It is a situation wherein a buyer has placed items in his shopping cart but leaves without purchasing them due to any reason.

It is also called cart abandonment. There are many other types of abandonment like booking abandonment, shipping abandonment, etc. but in the tech world, shopping cart abandonment is widely used

A/B or, 'Split' testing, is when companies show different versions of the same web page to different website visitors at the same time. The goal with A/B testing is to find out which version is the best at causing visitors to take action like buying a product or clicking to view more.

Web accessibility is all about designing and developing websites, tools and technologies so that people with disabilities can use them with ease. 

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.

This Google Analytics report summarises and ranks the importance of marketing channels in a consumer’s conversion journey. It helps you identify the channels responsible for generating leads and visits to your website so you can nurture would-be customers and convert them.

An API is a set of protocols, specifications, or instructions allowing two software applications to interact and exchange data. It is used for developing software applications where it acts as an interface between different software programs and allows interaction.

It helps developers to use these standard commands to perform operations so that they do not have to write the code from scratch. Additionally, APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components.

This is a process of granting permission to someone to allow them to give orders or make decisions or take an action.

Example – In multi-user systems, there is a right given to system administrators to define roles for different users which gives them access to the system and privileges for the use of certain file directories or system data. This is called giving authority to the users to perform an action.

Thus, authorization is seen as both; the setting up of permissions by a system administrator and the actual checking of the permission values that have been set up when a user is getting access.

Average Time on Site is mostly seen in web analytics reports which refer to the amount of time the visitor has spent on the webpage they visited while browsing. This is the time measured in minutes or seconds and can be misleading in the analytics report sometimes because it does not calculate the actual reading time of the visitor on the webpage.

The accurate time on the webpage cannot be estimated as there could be instances when the visitor may be interacting with the pages and site content or they could have left the browser window open and were not actually viewing the webpage.

Example – If Average Time on Site is calculated as 10 seconds for a long blog post, then it is assumed that visitors are not reading the post unless in a rare case you have an extremely fast reader reading it.

AOV is an important e-commerce metric, it is the average amount each customer spends with you in a single order and you calculate it by dividing your revenue by the total number of orders placed. Increasing AOV by only a small percentage can seriously increase your overall revenue. Many brands increase their AOV by upselling, cross-selling or offering free shipping if the customer spends over X.

B2C is business-to-consumer selling. It's when a business sells its products (or services) to the end-users or consumers. B2C has become incredibly popular with the increase in online retail and e-commerce.

A blog is nothing but an informal conversational style of information or a discussion that is updated regularly on a website or a webpage and is run by an individual or a small group.

The word blog was derived from the combination of the words Web and Log. Individuals or small groups concentrate on specific topics and focus on detailing the subject in informal diary-style text entries.

Blogs often have images and links to other websites and it also provides forums for discussions. Some use these as a platform to jot down their personal journey or diary.

E-commerce metric.  A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your website. 'Bounces' happen when someone visits your website and leaves without visiting a second page or interacting with the page they land on.

The bottom of the Funnel is referred to as the Transaction phase or Purchase stage of the online buying process. At this stage the visitor has done all the research and is about to make a purchase, thus leading ahead to become a ‘New Customer’.

The bottom of the Funnel is preceded by the ‘Top of the Funnel‘ which means product/service comparison stage and the ‘Middle of the Funnel‘  which means validation stage.

As you move from traditional retail, this is going to be your new identity. A brick-and-click store for any business with at least one physical location and an eCommerce-enabled website. This is an upgrade to the brick-and-mortar we are so familiar with.

As a business, you should consider this model and it gives the best customer experience, where they can enjoy the convenience of shopping online with the security and the human touch of visiting a store. You can capitalize on having your customer’s attention in both the real and the virtual world.

It is a marketing strategy wherein several similar products or services are combined together and sold as one package solution. Businesses often sell these bundled products at a reduced price so as to attract more customers.

This concept has proved to be very convenient when more than one product or services has to be purchased from one company. These products or services which are sold as a single combined unit could consist of dissimilar products that appeal to a group of customers.

It is a metric that allows you to determine unique purchases per number of views of the product details page. Buy-to-Detail Rate helps you to understand what products users are purchasing after browsing through the product details. Thus you can identify the products on your list that make the most sales and the ones that do not contribute to it.

Buy-to-Detail Rate = Total Unique Purchases of a product / Product Detail Page views.

Buyers Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your prospective customer based on market research and real data of your existing customers. While preparing a buyer's persona it's important to consider their journey, behavioral pattern, demographics, goals, etc.

A buyer's persona reveals insights about buyers’ decisions, their specific attitudes, concerns, and criteria. It is a research-based modeled representation of:

a. Who are the buyers and their goals?

b. How do they think and what drives their behavior?

c. On what terms are they making buying decisions?

Webpage. A category landing page is usually the first page a person visits due to a specific search they've performed in a search engine like Google. The content on your landing pages is key to piquing the interest of a visitor and encouraging them to continue exploring your site or perhaps purchase.

A content management system (CMS) is an application that is used to manage web content, allowing multiple contributors to create, edit and publish content, essentially helping you to build a website without needing to know or write any back-end code.

E-commerce metric. Conversion rate is the percentage of customers or website users completing an action on your website, this might be making a purchase, signing up to your mailing list or any other action you want visitors to your site to make. Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of times an action is completed by the total number of website visitors which can be done for you on your analytics platform.

This is a process of enhancing the user experience of a website to improve the chances of convincing the visitors to complete their online goals. This involves tweaking the web layout, content, and design as a whole so that the goal of hiking the conversion rate is achieved. The process involves a clear understanding of web design basics, human psychology, and statistics.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a central place where businesses can store customer and prospective customer data, track customer interactions and share this information within their business. It allows them to manage relationships with customers, helping the business to grow.

CCS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a type of coding or language that's used to make great-looking websites! CSS helps you present your web pages in the best way including incorporating different colors, layouts, and fonts.

CTA or Call to Actions are used on websites, social media, and other digital platforms to grab the attention of potential leads or to convert existing leads into customers. Their purpose is to get the visitor to take a specific action. These come in all shapes and sizes but the most common CTAs you might see are buttons like "Add to cart" or "Click to find out more".

Customer Experience (CX) is exactly that, it's how a customer feels about their experience with a business. It involves every way a customer interacts with a company - including the marketing materials they see before they become a customer, the sales experience, the quality of the product or service itself, and the customer service they receive post-purchase.

Cookies are simple computer file made of text that, when you accept cookies, is sent from a website to the user's computer and stored on their web browser in case they return to that website again! The information stored by cookies lets websites remember you, your website logins, shopping carts, previous history, and more so they can personalize your experience and make it more convenient.

It is a holistic solution designed to help you manage your website and other components of digital marketing all together in one system. It provides you with a sales-ready website that allows easy updates, has a responsive design for the website and gives it a personalised look and feel.

Thus it is a system that allows a content provider to use a variety of techniques to improve search results and rankings.

A cookie is a small amount of data generated by a website given to a web browser by a web server. This piece of information is stored on the client side on the user's own computer and is then used for future use.

The main purpose of cookies is to remember information about you and records your preferences when using a particular website.

This is a practice of selling additional services or products to customers who have already made a purchase. It involves encouraging existing customers to buy related or complementary products while buying the selected items. This is a marketing tactic most widely used by online retailers.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a style sheet language used to format the presentation of a web page or document written in a markup language. CSS helps to provide uniformity across several pages of the website by defining text styles, table sizes, and other aspects of Web elements. Thus this gives web developers and users more control over the layout of web pages.

The term cascading derives from the fact that multiple style sheets can be applied to the same Web page. CSS was developed by the W3C.

This metric is a prediction of the total value (Total net profit) an eCommerce company would make from the lifetime relationship with any given customer. Other marketing terms for CLV are Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), or Lifetime Value (LTV).

Online businesses can measure the profitability achieved from a customer depending upon this predicted monetary value generated from the entire relationship of the customer with your online store.

CAC is an important business metric that refers to the cost associated with acquiring and convincing potential customers. This helps to determine how to allocate resources while gaining new customers.

It includes expenses related to the product cost as well as research, marketing and incentives involved. The value of the customer to the company and the Return On Investment of acquiring the customer can be calculated through this.

Click Through Rate is a ratio that shows the number of clicks on a specific link or ad to the total number of visitors browsing through that page or ad. CTR is measured for a webpage, advertisements, or links in emails which helps to determine the success of online marketing campaigns.

The CTR helps online retailers to understand the effectiveness of keywords and the performance of the ads or email campaigns.

An eCommerce system today includes an overarching infrastructure that includes analytics from search engines, social platforms, mobile apps, and other corners of both the internet and the world of commerce. Together, this is called Digital Commerce.

Knowing the vast extent of conducting business online also allows you to better prepare for marketing your business, helps you gather information about your customers’ purchase behaviors, and cater to them accordingly.

In eCommerce, a discount code is also called a Coupon code or Promo code. These codes consist of letters and numbers which are computer-generated and used to activate discounts or special offers on the site.

These are available via email or advertisements and are to be entered in the respective promotional box on the website (shopping cart or checkout page) to avail of the discount.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is a type of malicious cyber-attack by hackers or cybercriminals to make an online service or network resource inaccessible for its intended users. It works by flooding a site with thousands or millions of requests from multiple IP addresses which overwhelms the site or server causing it to crash.

Digital Marketing is any form of marketing that uses things such as online video, display ads and social media posts that appear on your computer, phone, tablet, or other devices to promote a business. A big part of digital marketing is measuring the impact and effectiveness of digital campaigns using metrics and analytics.

Digitally Native Vertical Brand (DNVB) is a brand that was born online and that sells and ships its own products, controlling its entire customer experience from the factory to the consumer.

E-commerce metric. Email deliverability is a metric used to measure the number of emails that reach your intended recipients' inboxes without issues like bounces, spam, and bulking.

Dropshipping is a form of retail business where a store or seller accepts customer orders but doesn't keep products sold 'in stock'. Instead, in a form of supply chain management, it transfers the orders and their shipment details to either the manufacturer, a wholesaler, another retailer, or a fulfillment house, which then ships the goods directly to the customer.

Search engine optimization (SEO) services with strategies focused on eCommerce businesses. Typically a strong strategy targeting product pages, category pages, and other content within the online store.

Engaging your audience with products and services promoted through email. These email lists usually consist of users that have signed up or expressed an interest in the site or organization.

Engagement Rate is a metric that is used to measure how much a visitor gets engaged with the given piece of content or ad. It shows a percentage of the people who came to the site, noticed the ad or content, and could engage with it.

Factors that influence the engagement of the visitor to a specific piece of content are users’ comments, likes, and shares. This helps to gauge the user's interest and willingness to know more about the specific bit that is displayed.

Event-triggered-email is an automated email message which is sent to the list of subscribers when a particular event occurs. The events are determined from the information the subscriber has entered while registering on the site. For instance, a special message or discount coupon is sent to a subscriber on their birthday or anniversary date which was provided by them at the time of registering.

Triggered-based emails have proved to be advantageous in email marketing as it makes the customer feel valued and helps in retaining them
 

An FAQs page is a page on your website made up of answers to questions that are commonly asked by your customers and allows them to find out key information about your product or brand without having to leave your site. It also helps you reach new customers, if they're searching a common FAQs question on a search engine they're likely to find your website.

In eCommerce terminology, fulfillment is also called Order fulfillment and is referred to as a sequence of steps a company undertakes to process the order from the point of sale to the delivery of goods with customer satisfaction.

Once the business has picked up and you are getting tons of orders, it is vital to have a fulfillment and distribution process in place. There are many SMEs or eCommerce businesses that outsource this process to companies that specialised in fulfillment.

An FTP is a file transfer protocol, and just like the name suggests it's a way of securely transferring files between computers. It works by using an 'FTP server'. If you send files using FTP, they're uploaded to the FTP server from a personal computer. When you're downloading files, they're transferred from the server to your personal computer.

Law. GDPR, or, The General Data Protection Regulation act 2018 is a legal framework that sets guidelines for organisations, groups, or individuals who collect and process personal information from people who live in the European Union (EU) - but this impacts companies globally. Regardless of whether they're based in the EU, If an organisation is targetting or collecting data from people in the EU they're subject to fines if they violate the privacy and security standards set in the act.

The leading provider of search engines, Google uses an algorithm that gathers search results for keywords that users type into the search field and organizes them based on the best possible matches. Google also provides businesses with products and services such as Google Analytics and Google AdWords which are digital marketing tools that are used to expose the visibility of a product or service.

An advertising service that allows business to set a budget and then runs the promotions that you have written. Ads are typically composed of SEO keywords.

One of the most widespread analytics service on the internet. Google Analytics tracks and reports website traffic into graphs and charts for easy access to traffic trends over designated periods of time.

Trending words or phrases based on what users are searching for within Google. Keywords are often tracked and used throughout ads and other marketing tactics. Matching keywords from a search are displayed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

It is a label or a phrase preceded by a hash character (#) used in social networks and microblogging services to identify the messages of specific topics. When customers use hashtags, the message that has been tagged to it is revealed.

A hashtag archive is consequently collected into a single stream under the same hashtag. For example, on the photo-sharing service Instagram, the hashtag #bluesky allows users to find all the posts that have been tagged using that hashtag #bluesky.

Hashtags are widely used on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. When you use hashtags, you help people who are interested in your topic find your posts and Tweets.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a type of computer language that is used to create most web pages and online applications that we use. "Hypertext" refers to the hyperlinks that an HTML page might contain, like if you wanted to link the word "Google" in some copy on your website to the actual webpage Google. "Markup language" refers to the way tags are used to create the page layout and elements within the page - it's what makes a page look aesthetically pleasing.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects that are fitted with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of collecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet. Take your smart speaker, for example, the physical object - the speaker - was fitted with technologies and now we can ask Alexa what the weather is or what's in our calendar for the day.

 An inbound link is referred to as a link on third-party websites that points to your website. In SEO terminology, it is also known as a Backlink. Inbound links are vital for SEO as Google and other search engines consider such relevant links as a sign that the content on that page is useful. Thus, this determines the Page Rank on Google which influences the position of your website in the search engine.

Hence inbound links are very important to reach the majority of internet users as Google accounts for around 80% of the searches performed on the internet.
 

Inbound marketing is an approach that uses content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO to attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for online businesses.

It provides improved customer experience by offering potential customers information via company sponsored newsletters, blogs and entries on social media platforms.

This strategy uses many forms of pull marketing like content marketing, SEO, events, and more to create brand awareness. Potential customers can find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.
The best example of Inbound marketing is HubSpot.
 

Infographics also called Information Graphics are graphical visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present data easily and in an understandable format. These are widely used as they can quickly communicate messages or simplify the presentation of large amounts of data.

Infographics help present complex information quickly & clearly and are seen in a public environment like traffic signs, subway maps, weather charts, etc.
 

A script language in the code that makes web pages interactive.

It is a value that helps organisations to evaluate the success of achieving the key business objectives. There are 2 types of KPIs, high-level KPIs that focus on the overall performance of the enterprise and low-level KPIs that look at processes in departments such as sales, marketing or a call centre.It is actually a measurable value that demonstrates the success based on specific business goals and targets. The type of KPI that organisations select depends upon the industry and the part of the business you are looking to track.

Keywords are words or phrases that are used to trigger search results or describe a content. There are 2 ways in which keywords are used on the Web: 1) As search terms for search engines and 2) Words that identify the content of the website.

When a specific keyword is searched, the advertiser’s ad that uses that keyword automatically appears on top of the searched pages. One keyword represents a single search query, while keywords that use two or more words are called keyword phrases.

These keywords are used as metadata to describe images, text documents, database records and web pages. For example, a photographer may tag his nature photos with words such as ‘nature’, ‘trees’, ‘flowers’ or ‘landscape’. Thus when he wants to locate the pictures of flowers, he will simply type in the keyword ‘flowers’.
 

Keyword Stuffing is a SEO technique wherein a large number of keywords are loaded onto a web page to artificially increase ranking of the page in search results and drive more traffic to the site.

Keyword Stuffing is considered webspam or an unethical practice due to which the website can be banned or penalised temporarily or permanently on major search engines.

Now-a-days, search engines are well equipped to deal with this sort of obsolete SEO technique. For example, Google has parameters that can check for keyword stuffing which is hidden away from a casual website viewer.
 

Specifically where your site ranks with a certain keyword on a search engine results page

A landing page is the first web page of a website which is advertised on the search engine that visitors arrive at, after clicking the link on the results page. This page contains data or information on the keywords searched and is usually considered as a Deal Page because visitors make up their decision to move on, from the landing page.

A landing page is a standalone page which can be reached by the visitor by clicking on the pay-per-click ads, social media links or display banners and have been designed with a specific business purpose in mind.

It is also called a ‘Lead Capture Page’ or ‘Destination page’ that appears in response to clicking on the search result. There should be no global navigation to lead to the primary website from this page in order to guide your visitors toward your intended conversion goal.

It is referred to as an amount of money that online auction or trading sites charge for listing their products online. This listing fee put up by such sites depends on the value of the items to be sold  as well as the starting price of these items.

Listing fee is also called as Insertion fee and are non refundable. The listing fee can amount to an increase if you wish to take advantage of priority listing.

It is a marketing classification used to describe a prospective consumer or organisation who expresses interest in a business’s product or service. Businesses gain access to sales leads through advertising, trade shows, direct mailings and other marketing efforts. You can also purchase leads from third-party companies.

It is actually a label applied to a prospect that has passed the engagement stage and is ready to be pursued for conversion into a customer. At this stage they have already provided their contact information and have shown interest in making a transaction.
 

It is a retail marketing term used to describe the practice where large volumes of products are sold to smaller amounts of people in contrast to selling a handful of products to many people. It is actually a transition from hit-focussed marketplace to millions of niche marketplace.

This business phrase was first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 where he described this as niche marketing in it’s purest form. The idea is to attract a significant amount of traffic by adding up the volume of products.

Best example for this practice is Amazon where millions of products are provided with only a handful of visitors every month but with a vision to gradually add up into substantial traffic flows and sales.
 

Long-Tail Keyword is a type of keyword phrase that is more specific and usually longer than more commonly searched keywords. These keywords consists of either three or some times five words in the phrase and are mostly used to target niche demographics than mass audiences.

Long tail keywords get less search traffic but will usually have a higher conversion value. These are more specific but often less competitive than generic keywords.
 

Marketing automation refers to the use of software to automate the marketing processes for effective marketing of goods and services on different online channels and automating repetitive tasks.

Marketing automation is an integral component of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) where processes like customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management can be carried out efficiently.

This technology allows organisations to streamline and automate the marketing tasks and workflows and manage them. This helps them to increase operational efficiency and achieve the ultimate goal of growing the business revenue faster.

mCommerce also called as mobile commerce refers to the use of wireless handheld devices for buying and selling of goods and services online. These wireless electronic devices are mobile phones, smart phones, tablets or personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Mobile commerce was originally coined by Kevin Duffey at the launch of the Global Mobile Commerce Forum in 1997, where he mentioned about delivery of eCommerce capabilities in the consumer’s hand via wireless technology.

It simply means ‘A retail outlet in a customer’s pocket.

A Merchant Account is a type of business bank account that allows businesses to accept and process payments through debit or credit cards. Therefore a merchant account is an agreement between a retailer, the merchant bank and payment processor to settle transactions via debit or credit cards.

Merchant accounts are a must for online businesses which means if you want to operate an eCommerce business that allows card payments, then you need at least one internet merchant account to serve the purpose.

Here firstly the money of the purchased goods get deposited in the merchant account and then eventually gets transferred to the business bank account. This transfer usually occurs on a daily or weekly basis.
 

A metric is a measurement, when dealing with SEO and analytics, that evaluate items such as revenue, keyword rankings, website traffic or referrals.

Microsite is referred to as a web page or a small cluster of pages that acts as a supplement to the primary website. It is a specific content site which is designed to live outside of the company parent website and has a separate URL than its homepage.

Microsite is also called as a Minisite and are used for branding or promotion purpose. For example, some companies use them to highlight a specific campaign or target specific buyer personas while others use them to narrate a short story or to inspire a specific call-to-action.

Such sites usually comprises of Tweet and Follow Us buttons that work as call-to-action with no navigation bar or any links to go to other websites. Microsites have less complicated design and have specific targeted information that serves the purpose.

It refers to a stage where marketers publish and distribute content that align to a buyer’s needs in order to engage them with your brand. Here there are 3 phases before you can achieve your business goal which are:

1) Marketing the relevant products or features
2) Measuring the prospect’s willingness to buy
3) Heading the right prospects closer to purchase

This is also called a Sales Funnel or a Buying Funnel. The Mid-Funnel tactics include Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Webinars etc.
 

Mobile Marketing also called as Wireless Marketing is a form of marketing which uses modern mobile technology to promote personalised goods or services to a user via mobile devices like smartphones, tablets or PDAs.

The features of this mobile technology provides time and location sensitive information to customers and information which is personalised in nature. It is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smartphones or tablets through websites, emails, SMS, social media or mobile applications.

It is a practice of ensuring that your visitors who are accessing the website through mobile devices have a brilliant user experience, both practically and visually. This is achieved by optimising the website content in such a manner that the visitors can accomplish what they want to do on their mobile devices.

Mobile optimization involves reformatting the website by keeping larger navigation buttons, only having purpose rich content and optimised images that fits well on any handheld devices. This helps larger mobile audiences to remain engaged while making the key buying decision.
 

The process of buying products or services on a mobile or wireless handheld device.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. This determines customer loyalty for a company’s brand, products or services.

This metric was developed by management consultant Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in collaboration with the company Satmetrix in 2003 with an intention to determine the customer satisfaction score.

Net Protector Score depends upon the perspective of company’s customer base which could be either promoters, passives and detractors. A simple question: ‘Would you like to share your experience of transacting with the company with your friends or colleagues? can help gauge the willingness of your customer base in promoting your company’s product or services.

News Feed also called Web Feed is a service by which users are provided with frequent transmission of data consisting of news updates. These are received by subscribers in XML format as summaries or links of updates about those people who are in your friend’s list as well as the odd advertisement.

On the Facebook social networking site, a News Feed is a list of updates on your own Facebook home page. There are different news feed formats like RSS and its different versions as well as ATOM.

No-Follow link attribute is an element that instructs the search engines bots not to follow the link. This means its a notification to search engines saying ‘Do not count this link’ so that they will not crawl the link and pass any link juice to it.

When No-Follow link is used there is no boost in the Page Rank and does not help page’s placement in the SERPs.

A no follow link is created with the no follow link HTML tag, which looks like this:

                                                       <a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

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 it “organically.”

On-Page Optimization refers to all the measures taken within the website in order to improve the web page listing or position in search rankings. It is one of the very first step of SEO that can help you increase your overall CTR (Click-Through-Rate) ratio.

On-Page Optimization includes optimising the web content, improving the meta description and title tags as well as HTML code and keyword placement. This not only helps getting good page ranking on search engines but also increases overall readability of the site.
 

Off-Page Optimization refers to all the measures taken external to the actual website in order to improve its position in search rankings. Off-Page Optimization is a long-term process and includes acquiring many high-quality backlinks (incoming links) to your page from the authority sites.

This usually does the background work for better search results and builds your online reputation. This technique involves not only getting back-links from other sites but also includes other practices like social networking, social bookmarking, blogs, videos etc.
 

Measures where a page is ranking with Google or another search engine. Higher ranked pages are closer to the number one spot.

Pay-per-click marketing is a form of “buying” site visits to increase traffic. Essentially advertisers pay for ad placement. A common form of PPC marketing is through search engines or search engine optimization. It is vital to select keywords that are ranking well to obtain a larger search volume and get more users to click on the ad.

This is a software that facilitates payment transaction by transferring information to Acquiring Banks and transmits responses from Issuing Banks like transaction approved or declined.

It is a merchant service that allows a merchant to accept credit card and other forms of electronic payments. Payment gateways help to protect sensitive information by encrypting the data they transmit to merchants and payment processors.

When referring to payment gateways used for Internet transactions, it may also be called an IP payment gateway. Popular payment gateways include PayPal/Braintree, Stripe, and Square.
 

POS or Point Of Sale is the place where a customer pays for a product or service. This can be in a physical store at a till or virtually on a website or app at the online checkout.

A Page View is just what you think it is, it's how many times a page has been viewed, whether that's loaded once on a browser or reloaded multiple times - it's a common metric used to measure the success of a webpage.

QR stands for Quick Response - you might see it commonly as 'QR code' which are barcodes that can be read by a digital device like the camera on your phone. QR codes can track data, send you to a website or point you to an app to download and as it says in the name they do this - quickly.

This is referred to as a prospect that has expressed interest in buying your product and passes a set of lead qualifications in order to progress towards becoming a customer.

This is a part of lead tracking system where the visitor has demonstrated interest in the website’s content to become a Qualified Lead.

Visitor’s interest for building a relationship can be drawn from the following instances:

• Visitor may have filled in a web form
• Downloaded web content
• Signed up for a newsletter
• Virtually placed items in a shopping cart.

Each type of the above interaction helps to determine where the visitor is in the buying cycle or not.

Return On Ad Spend is a metric used to measure how effective a digital advertising campaign is essentially. Are you getting your money's worth? It helps businesses understand what ads are working, and which ones aren't so they can adjust their ad spend on the ones that are working.

Responsive Design is a design philosophy that provides a customised viewing experience for different browser platforms.

Web pages which are responsive in nature will detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly. The primary reason to keep your design responsive is to increase the reach of your application to a larger audience using an array of devices.
 

Search Engine Optimization is the process of enhancing websites to increase the visibility of the site and gain rankings. SEO is a form of digital marketing that uses Google and other search engines to bring users to a website by organic listings.

The page that lists all the results from a search query within a search engine. Search engines list relevant terms by analysing the query and the site to provide the best match.

An eCommerce shopping cart is the contents of what a user has added to his online order. All the products appear as a mass order on the page or in this case “in the cart.”

The visitors on a website and the number of pages that they visit and interact with.

The fluctuation of traffic or a specific period. Trends can be based on many factors such as season, time of day, or relevancy of product based on fads.

Purchasing an order online from a business or other seller.

Third Party Payment Processor is a company that handles merchant account payments from various channels such as credit or debit cards for merchant acquiring banks.

These processors often use their commercial bank accounts to conduct payment processing for their merchant clients.

Best example for this is PayPal that lets you accept online payments without a merchant account of your own. They let you use their merchant account under their own terms of service with very little setup required.

User-Generated Content (UGC) is any form of content that's created by individual people (not brands) and published to an online or social network. This could be anything from text, posts, images, videos to customer reviews of a product or experience.

User Interface is a way in which everything is designed to facilitate users to interact with an application or a website. This is also known as a Graphical User Interface (GUI)

A user interface is considered good if it provides a ‘user-friendly’ experience by allowing users to interact with the software or hardware in a natural and intuitive way. A powerful program with a poorly designed user interface has very little value.

User interface determines how commands are given to the computer and how information is displayed on the screen.

There are 2 additional types of user interfaces apart from GUI where users give commands by selecting and clicking on icons displayed on the screen and those are:

1) Command language where user is expected to know the machine and program-specific codes

2) Menus where users can select commands from lists displayed on the screen.

User Experience (UX) is what a user experiences when interacting with your product, website, or service including perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. It's what keeps your customers on your website, coming back to purchase or raving to their friends about you so it's pretty important.

Offering deals on similar products or showing related products in hopes to get users to buy additional items along with their purchase.

This is referred to as a media material like articles, images or videos that spread rapidly online through website links and social sharing channels. It is basically a kind of online content that appeals the users to share it or something that gets a lot of views, reads, clicks etc

Web analytics is a set of strategic methodologies that study the impact of a website on its users. In general term, it is a tool for web business owners and market researchers to assess and improve the effectiveness of a website and gauge traffic & popularity trends.

Web analytics software is used to measure details like number of visits, unique visitors’ count, their entry points, specific keywords used, their online session time, what did they search for and when & why did they leave the site.

Sitemap is a textually represented hierarchical model of a website's content pages. The list is provided with links to its counterpart sections of the website and are organised by topic in an XML format, thus the term – XML Sitemap.

XML document provides instructions to search engine crawl bots to search and display content/information users have requested for.