9 Words That Have a Totally Different Meaning for eCommerce Professionals
By Mary Clare Riordan, Marketing Specialist
If your job, career, and/or life revolve around the ins and outs of eCommerce, then these definitions are for you.
Cookies
What it means to most people: A sweet baked treat best served with a glass of ice cold milk. Can’t go wrong with chocolate chip!
What it means to an eCommerce professional: Sneaky little small text files sent to a visitor’s browser that store information pertaining to that person’s visit on your site. You can use the stored information to better understand your customers and target them.
Amazon
What it means to most people: Isn’t that a rain forest in Brazil or something? I think I learned about it in the fourth grade.
What it means to an eCommerce professional: The end all and be all of eCommerce retail. Amazon tends to set the bar for what customers expect when shopping my store.
Promotion
What it means to most people: Go me! Moving on up! New title. More money. I’m making it rain!
What it means to an eCommerce professional: Offering a deal like a discount or a free gift to customers shopping my site. If done right, promotions can help you gain new customers and encourage loyalty from existing ones.
POS
What it means to most people: My ex-boyfriend is a realllll POS (if you know what I mean).
What it means to an eCommerce professional: Point of sale, or the system used to complete transactions. In order to achieve a complete omni-channel experience that serves your customers in-store while enabling the full capabilities of your eCommerce presence, a solid POS system must be in place.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
What it means to most people: I was too lazy to take my cart back to the corral in the Target parking lot.
What it means to an eCommerce professional: When a customer browses my site, adds products to their virtual shopping cart, and at some point before checking out, leaves the site before making the purchase. Here are some tips to avoid the problem of shopping cart abandonment on your site.
Pay Per Click
What it means to most people: A small, silver office supply that holds pieces of paper together. Oh, wait, no. Never mind. I thought you were saying “paper clip”!
What it means to an eCommerce professional: Pay per click (or PPC) is a way to drive traffic to your site by placing ads on other sites, such as Google, and paying the publishers of those sites whenever one of your ads is clicked.
Organic
What it means to most people: Look at me! I’m eating organic! I’m soooo healthy!
What it means to an eCommerce professional: Unlike PPC above, organic refers to when your brand or store shows up in search engine rankings because you’ve optimized your site in a way that’s relevant to certain search queries, not because you’ve paid for placement on a site.
Responsive
What it means to most people: For some reason, people aren’t responsive to me wearing pajamas at work.
What it means to an eCommerce professional: A design technique that uses a single code base to create flexible page layouts that adjust to the screen size of whatever device from which your customer is viewing your site. It’s just one of many design trends you should consider for your eCommerce site.
Traffic
What it means to most people: For us folks in Chicago, this is synonymous with the Dan Ryan, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or basically any road you’re driving around on in the city. It’s not pleasant!
What it means to an eCommerce professional: People are coming to my site! I’m selling things! But I better be prepared for when traffic surges!
Have any questions about these words or definitions? Feel free to contact us.
Mary Clare Riordan is a Marketing Specialist at LYONSCG and a graduate of Marquette University.
