Overview
This article contains definitions of terms that will be used across the front and back of your AmeriCommerce online store.
Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| 404 | "404 Not Found" appears on a page when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link. Located in Themes > Edit Theme > Pages |
| Active Catalog | This defines which categories will display on the site. Located in Settings > Catalog > Active Catalog |
| Adcode | The HTML that is placed on any page of an approved site by the publisher who owns the site, allowing ads to be shown on that page in a specific ad layout format. Located in Marketing > Power Features > Adcodes |
| Add-Ons | Add-ons are small pieces of software that add new features or functionality to your AmeriCommerce online store. Located in Tools > Apps & Add Ons SFTP for Bulk uploads/downloads |
| Admin | Short for "administrator". Administrators are users trusted with access to certain tools and functions and various other important aspects of the store. |
| Affiliate | Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. |
| API | Application Programming Interface - specifies how some software components should interact with each other. Used for many third-party programs and add-ons that work within AmeriCommerce online stores. |
| Attributes | Attributes and their groups allow your customer to filter products in a category based on commonalities about your products, much like a tag filter. Located in Catalog > Attributes |
| Audit History | A chronological record to provide documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time on the store. Can only be viewed by Administrators. Look for More Actions > Audit History for specific orders and it is also located in Reports > Power Features > View Audit History. You can specify what you want to view the log of in the search options. Use this page to find and analyze changes made to your store. |
| Authorize Only | When a payment gateway is set to Authorize Only, the payment can be processed only after the merchant has reviewed and authorized it. Until a payment has been marked as received the order status will be “Awaiting Payment”. |
| AVS | AVS is a Visa service to combat fraudulent activity for non-face-to-face transactions by cross-referencing the cardholder’s address information with the card issuer’s records. AVS is widely supported by Visa, MasterCard and American Express in the USA, Canada and United Kingdom. Cardholders with a bank that does not support AVS may receive an error from Internet stores due to the lack of data. |
| Base Price | The initial price of something without the additional charges that may be added, such as handling or shipping charges, sales tax, optional equipment charges, etc. |
| Bootstrap | Bootstrap is used by AmeriCommerce online stores responsive themes and it is a free collection of tools for creating websites and web applications. It contains HTML and CSS based design templates as well as optional Javascript extensions. It was developed by Twitter in 2011 as a framework to encourage consistency across internal tools. |
| C1,C2,C3 | Customizable Product Flags. These can be customized in the HTML Editor of the Theme. They typically are used to have a product be flagged as "Hot!" "Special", etc. |
| Campaign Coupon | A special type of discount that allow you to create large numbers of unique coupon codes without requiring a separate discount method for each coupon. You can generate multiple campaign coupons using a pattern. You can specify a unique campaign code that will be used on all of the campaign coupons. When you generate a new set of campaign coupons, you can define the discount action for all of these coupons by adding a new discount method with a rule type of coupon campaign code. Marketing > Power Features > Campaign Coupons |
| Category Tree | A list of subcategories, pages, images, or parent categories. |
| Child Category | Subcategory, a subordinate category or a division of a category. |
| Classification Code | Required when selecting Break Out Shipping but can be used without that option to help calculate more accurate shipping quotes in Product Specific Shipping Settings. |
| Custom Fields | A great tool for customizing AmeriCommerce online stores to meet your company's needs. They allow you to store information about customers, orders, products, or stores for use elsewhere in AmeriCommerce online stores. Located in Tools > Power Features > Custom Field Setup |
| Custom Forms | Like custom fields, they are customizable forms created using various custom fields. Great for content pages where you will need detailed information from your visitors. |
| Crawlers | Also referred to as a "web crawler", a crawler is an internet bot that systematically browses the internet for terms of web indexing. May also be called a web spider, ant, automatic indexer. Search engines and other sites use web crawling and spidering software to update their web content or index other site's content. They can copy the pages they visit for later processing by a search engine that indexes the downloaded pages so users can search them more quickly. They can validate hyperlinks and HTML code. |
| Custom Payment Type | Used either by the customer as a custom payment method such as purchase orders, echecking, etc. Also used by admins to balance out an order on the admin console. Located in Settings > Payments & Taxes > Custom Payment Types. |
| CVV | Card Verification Value - a security feature for credit cards containing a three digit number. |
| Dashboard | The landing page for AmeriCommerce online stores Admin Interface. Also known as the Admin Console Dashboard. This shows reports and detailed custom information by dragging and dropping and adding widgets. |
| Discount Method |
Allows the store owner to offer specialized discounts to customers. This is located under Marketing > Discounts |
| Embed Tools | Embedded commerce allows you to bring your products to your customers, wherever you may encounter them online. This page allows you generate add to cart links and forms with either products from your catalog, or you can create products on the fly. You can also generate Javascript snippets to display the contents of the customer's cart and more. This is located in Catalog > Embed Tools |
| eProduct | Any product that is sold that is not an actual item to be shipped like digital products such as documents and images and other files. This is located in the Product Editor. |
| Mapping | Used in Exports and Imports. Mapping tells the system what fields and columns to include that will needed to be imported and exported from the store's catalog, database, etc. |
| Merge Codes | Site merge codes are one of the ways AmeriCommerce online stores let you put merged data into a page anywhere you want. This allows your customers to get the exact look and feel you want on your storefront. The basic format of a site merge is ##MERGENAME##. |
| Meta Keywords | Used for search engine ranking. The keywords are typically what a customer or viewer would search for in a search engine to find the store. |
| Meta Tags | Tags used in HTML or XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page's head section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes. |
| MFR | Short for Manufacturer. |
| MicroStore | A specific list of products located on it’s own page created to be marketed towards specific customers and customer types. |
| Notifications | Email templates sent to the customer and administrators |
| Order Status | The status of the order whether it be Pending, Approved, Declined, etc. Located in Orders > Orders. |
| Parent Category | The category containing sub-categories. |
| PPC | Pay per click is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked. This information can be tracked in the rule engine by adding a rule to use PPC Keywords, and it will check the incoming Pay Per Click keywords for a defined value, or if set to matches any value. Can restrict this to be from a certain origin as well. This is located in Tools > Rule Engine > Visitor Traffic & Analytics |
| Pricing Calculator | The pricing calculator will take a price or cost as an input and produce thousands of specific prices from it. It can produce quantity pricing grids, customer type pricing and discounts, markups and add profit margin to a base. This system is highly powerful and flexible allowing even for variant level price calculations, multiple price calculations on a single product and much more. |
| Product Details | The detailed information that will show when a customer is viewing the product from the store front. |
| Profile | All blog posts are posted with a given profile, either a store profile or an admin user profile. Additionally, all comments are posted using either a customer profile or one of the other two aforementioned profile types. |
| Redirect | If you already have specific content indexed in search engines, it will be good to point them to the corresponding content within AmeriCommerce online stores. Located in Settings > Search Engine > URL Redirecting. |
| Regex | Regular expressions (often shortened to "regex") are a declarative language used for pattern matching within strings. They are useful for the production of data validation. |
| Responsive | Responsive web design is an approach to crafting sites to provide optimal viewing experience with easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors. A site designed that is responsive adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid proportion-based grids, and flexible images. |
| Sandbox | A testing environment isolating untested code changes for terms of experimentation from the production environment. It provides revision control and protects live servers and data, from changes that could be damaging which could be difficult to revert. They replicate the minimal functionality neccessary to accurately test programs and other code under development. |
| Site Map | A list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. It can either come in the form of a document used for planning Web Design, or a page that lists the pages on a web site typically organized in heirarchical fashion. |
| Sort Order | The order that a feature is sorted. The lower the number, the higher the sort order. |
| SQL | SQL is a standard language for accessing databases. |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, cryptographic protocols designed to provide communication security over the internet. |
| Tell a Friend | A form of E-Marketing that gives an incentive to share and refer others to a store. The referrer gets an incentive to refer others, and the store gets more customers. Also known as "Referal Programs" in other forms of eCommerce marketing. |
| Text Only Editor | Format of the text editor that only allows for HTML and coding as opposed to the WYSIWYG editor. |
| User Roles | A group of permissions set to a user of the store allowing and disallowing specific functions and abilities to view, and edit various portions of the store. These typically refer to Administrator, Marketing, Customer Service, Guest. |
| Value | An expression which cannot be evaluated any further. The members of a type are the values of that type. Value objects are things like numbers, dates, etc. |
| Variant | Specific variations of a product whether in terms of size, weight, color, swatch, etc. |
| Variant Inventory | Allows the use of product variants for multiple products, as well as inventory tracking for each specific item associated with a specific product. |
| Visitor Sessions | The sum of activity for one user/guest/customer of the store. |
| Wish List | A list compiled of specific items and products a user would like to purchase in the future. These can be distributed to others likely to purchase as a gift. The goal of a wishlist is to faciliate communication between the gift receiver and giver, and in a way like a Saved Cart one can share. |
| WYSIWYG | "What You See Is What You Get", an editor in which content (text and graphics) displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product which might be a printed document, web page, or slide presentation |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all free open standards. XML was designed to transport and store data. HTML was designed to display data and XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags |
Other Useful Terms
The following terms can also be found in AmeriCommerce online stores, but mostly in areas that sync with your store.
For a full list of terms check out Smashing Magazine's Article on Web Industry Jargon here!
Back End:
The back end of a website is the part hidden from view of regular website visitors. The back end generally includes the information structure, applications, and the CMS controlling content on the site.
Browser:
Browser refers to the program a website visitor is using to view the web site. Examples include Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer.
- BrowserShots lets you check cross-browser compatibility of any site
- Accessible Design Guide from Viewable with Any Browser
CSS:
Cascading Style Sheets
Also referred to simply as CSS, Cascading Style Sheets are used to define the look and feel of a web site outside of the actual HTML file(s) of the site. In recent years, CSS has replaced tables and other HTML-based methods for formatting and laying out websites. The benefits to using CSS are many, but some of the most important are the simplification of a site’s HTML files (which can actually increase search engine rankings) and the ability to completely change the style of a site by changing just one file, without having to make changes to content.
Example:
<style>
p { text-align: center; color: red; }
</style>
CSS Framework:
A CSS framework is a collection of CSS files used as the starting point to make XHTML and CSS web sites quickly and painlessly. They usually contain CSS styles for typography and layout.
DNS:
Stands for Domain Name Service (alternately Domain Name System or Domain Name Server). Basically, it’s the thing that converts IP addresses into domain names. DNS servers are provided with the IP address of your web server when you assign your domain name to those servers. In turn, when someone types your domain name into their web browser, those DNS servers translate the domain name to the IP address and point the browser to the correct web server.
FavIcon:
Favicons are tiny (generally 16×16 pixels, though some are 32×32 pixels), customizable icons displayed in the web address bar in most browsers next to the web address. They’re either 8-bit or 24-bit in color depth and are saved in either .ico, .gif or .png file formats.
- favicon.cc is an online favicon generator
- FavIcon from Pics creates a favicon from an image
- How to Create a Favicon.ico from PhotoshopSupport.com
Font Family:
Font family is a group designation for defining the typefaces used in CSS documents. The font family tag generally lists multiple fonts to be used, and usually ends with the generic font category (such as “serif” or “sans-serif’).
Font Style:
In CSS, the font style refers solely to whether a font is italic or not.
- CSS font-style Property from w3schools
- CSS Font Style from Hscripts.com
Font Weight:
The font weight refers to how thick or thin (bold or light) a font looks.
- CSS font-weight Property from w3schools
- font-weight from Mozilla Developer Center
FRONT-END
The front-end is basically the opposite of the back-end. It’s all the components of a website that a visitor to the site can see (pages, images, content, etc.) Specifically, it’s the interface that visitors use to access the site’s content. It’s also sometimes referred to as the User Interface.
- Ten Usability Heuristics from Useit.com
- Writing an Interface Style Guide from A List Apart
Hexadecimal:
Also referred to a “hex” numbers, they are a base-16 numbering system used to define colors online. Hex numbers include the numerals 0-9 and letters A-F. Hexadecimal numbers are written in three sets of hex pairs. Because screen colors are RGB (Red, Green, Blue), the first pair defines the red hue, the second pair defines the green hue, and the third pair defines the blue.
Widget:
It's a small application with limited functionality that can be installed and executed within a web page by an end user. We use these in our themes to show products, links, and more. More on widgets: