Ecommerce glossary
Plain-language definitions of the ecommerce, payments and shipping terms Indian sellers actually encounter — from UPI and RTO to canonical URLs and settlement cycles.
Selling
- Ecommerce
- Ecommerce is buying and selling goods or services over the internet, including the payment, order and delivery processes that surround the transaction.
- Storefront
- A storefront is the customer-facing website where your products are displayed and bought — your catalogue, product pages, cart and checkout.
- Social commerce
- Social commerce is selling that starts on a social platform — product discovery through Instagram, WhatsApp or similar, with the purchase completed either in-app or on a linked storefront.
- D2C (direct to consumer)
- D2C is a model where a brand sells directly to the end customer through its own channels, without a retailer, distributor or marketplace in between.
- SKU
- A SKU (stock keeping unit) is a unique code identifying one specific sellable variant of a product — a particular size and colour, not the product family.
- Product catalog
- A product catalog is the complete, structured set of products a store sells, including images, descriptions, prices, stock and category assignments.
- Bio Link Store
- A bio link store is a mobile-first online shop linked from social media profiles (Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp) that lets buyers browse products and purchase directly.
- Average Order Value (AOV)
- Average Order Value (AOV) tracks the average rupee amount spent by customers each time they place an order.
Payments
- UPI
- UPI (Unified Payments Interface) is India's real-time payment system, allowing instant bank-to-bank transfers from a phone using a UPI ID or QR code.
- Payment gateway
- A payment gateway is the service that securely collects a customer's payment at checkout, authorises it with the bank, and passes the money to the merchant.
- Settlement
- Settlement is the transfer of collected payment money from your payment gateway into your bank account, usually a few working days after the sale.
- COD (cash on delivery)
- COD is a payment method where the customer pays in cash when the order is delivered, rather than online at checkout.
- Chargeback
- A chargeback is a forced reversal of a card payment, initiated by the customer through their bank rather than by asking the merchant for a refund.
- Refund
- A refund returns money to a customer for a cancelled or returned order, processed back through the original payment method.
- Payment Gateway Settlement
- Payment gateway settlement is the process by which customer payments collected online are transferred to the merchant's verified bank account.
Orders & Shipping
- RTO (return to origin)
- RTO means a shipped parcel could not be delivered and was returned to the seller — commonly because the customer refused it, was unreachable, or the address was wrong.
- Fulfilment
- Fulfilment is everything that happens between an order being placed and the customer receiving it — picking, packing, dispatching and delivering.
- Inventory
- Inventory is the quantity of each product you currently have available to sell, tracked so that stock levels on your store reflect physical reality.
- Volumetric weight
- Volumetric weight is a shipping charge calculated from a parcel's size rather than its actual weight, used when a package is bulky but light.
- Order Tracking
- Order tracking provides real-time status updates to buyers regarding their purchase progress from confirmation to delivery.
- Return to Origin (RTO)
- Return to Origin (RTO) happens when an undelivered parcel is returned back to the seller by logistics couriers.
Marketing & SEO
- Conversion rate
- Conversion rate is the percentage of store visitors who complete a purchase — orders divided by visitors, expressed as a percentage.
- AOV (average order value)
- AOV is the average amount a customer spends per order — total revenue divided by number of orders.
- Cart abandonment
- Cart abandonment is when a shopper adds items to their cart but leaves without completing the purchase.
- Canonical URL
- A canonical URL is the single official address for a page, declared so search engines know which version to index when the same content is reachable through several URLs.
- Structured data
- Structured data is machine-readable markup added to a page that tells search engines what the content means — that a number is a price, or that a page describes a product.
- Sitemap
- A sitemap is an XML file listing the pages on a site that you want search engines to discover and crawl.
- Link in bio
- A link in bio is the single clickable URL a social platform allows in a profile, used to route followers to a destination such as a store.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a purchase.
Platform
- SaaS
- SaaS (software as a service) is software delivered over the internet on a subscription, with the provider handling hosting, updates and maintenance.
- Multi-tenant
- Multi-tenant means one software platform serves many independent customers, with each customer's data isolated from every other's.
- Guest checkout
- Guest checkout lets a customer complete a purchase without creating an account or password.
- Slug
- A slug is the readable identifier in a URL that names a specific page — the "blue-cotton-kurta" part of a product address.