The glossary: the words we use, explained plainly.

A 301 redirect is a server response saying that a page has moved permanently to a new address, and sending both the visitor and the search engine there.

An A/B test compares two versions of the same element — a headline, a button, an email, a landing page — by showing each to a random half of the audience and measuring which one produces more of the action…

An abandoned cart is an order a shopper started and never finished: products went into the cart, sometimes as far as the payment step, and then the session ended.

Ad assets are the extra parts Google Ads shows with a search ad: links to other pages, short claims, a phone number, an address, an image and a logo.

Ad frequency is the average number of times one person saw your ad over a chosen period: impressions divided by reach.

Ad targeting is the set of rules that decide who sees a campaign: location, age, interests, behaviour on your site, or a list of customers you already have.

An admin panel is the protected part of a website or system where the team does its daily work: orders, customers, stock, deliveries, users and permissions, reports.

An agency retainer is a monthly arrangement: a business books an agreed amount of work each month for a fixed fee instead of paying project by project.

An AI agent is a program that does not only answer but carries out steps on someone’s behalf: it reads data from several systems, fills things in, sends them and records what it did.

An AI chatbot is a program on a website that answers visitors’ questions in ordinary language instead of sending them to a form or a phone number.

AI Overviews are the answers Google writes above its search results for some queries, with a few sources linked beside them.

AI product photography is product imagery in which the scene, the background or the light around the goods is generated, while the product itself stays a real photograph.

Analytics is the work of collecting, measuring and reading the data a digital effort produces: who arrived, from where, what they did and what it cost.

Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link — the words someone clicks to reach another page.

An API (application programming interface) is the agreed set of rules through which two pieces of software exchange data and trigger each other’s functions.

Average order value, or AOV, is revenue divided by the number of orders in the same period: what a customer spends in one purchase.

B2B (business-to-business) describes trade between companies rather than with individual consumers: raw materials sold to a manufacturer, software licensed to a firm, consultancy delivered to another business.

A B2B portal is a closed online shop for trade customers: the buyer signs in and sees the prices agreed with them, their discount, their payment terms and their order history.

B2C (business-to-consumer) describes selling directly to individual people and households rather than to other companies.

A bid strategy is the rule your ad account follows when it decides what to pay for an impression or a click.

Blogging is the practice of publishing regular written entries on a site of your own.

A boosted post is a payment that pushes an already published Facebook or Instagram post in front of more people.

Bounce rate is the share of visitors who leave after seeing a single page without any further interaction.

Brand architecture is how the brands inside one company are arranged: what runs under the company name, what carries a name of its own, and how the two appear together.

Brand awareness is the share of the people in your market who know you exist and can connect your name with what you actually do.

Brand bidding means running paid search ads on keywords that carry your own company, shop or product name.

A brand book, also called brand guidelines, is the document that sets the rules for using a brand: where the logo may go, which colours and typefaces belong to it, and what must not be done with them.

A brand colour palette is the small set of colours a company appears in everywhere: on its site, in social media, on packaging and on documents.

Brand identity is the visible system a company is recognised by: the logo, the colours, the typefaces, the way photographs are taken and the rules for arranging them on every carrier.

A brand strategy is the decision about what a brand stands for: who it is for, who it competes against, what it promises and what makes it different.

A brand typeface is the font a company sets its words in: on the site, in quotes and proposals, on signs and on packaging.

Brand voice is the way a company sounds everywhere it writes: social posts, emails, replies to comments, ads and error messages.

A brochure website is a small company site of a few pages — home, services, about and contact — that shows what a business does and how to reach it.

A business email is a mailbox on the company’s own domain — name@company.bg rather than an address at a free mail service.

A buyer persona is a written profile of one typical customer: their role, their situation, what they are trying to achieve, what stops them and how they decide.

Caching is keeping a ready-made copy of a page or file so it does not have to be rebuilt or downloaded again on every visit.

A call to action is the element that asks the visitor to do one specific thing — buy, book, download, write.

Call tracking shows which phone calls came from an ad, from search, or from one particular campaign.

A campaign objective is the choice made at the start of every Meta campaign that tells the system what to optimise for: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion or sales.

A canonical URL is the address you tell search engines to treat as the main version of a page reachable at several addresses.

Cash on delivery, or COD, is a payment method where the customer pays the courier on receipt and the courier forwards the money to the shop.

Catalog ads, long known as dynamic product ads, build themselves from a shop’s product catalogue and show each person what they reached for — a model they viewed, a basket they abandoned.

Checkout is the last stretch of an online shop: the screens where someone enters an address, picks a courier and a payment method, and confirms the order.

Click fraud, or invalid clicks, is paid advertising traffic with no real interest behind it: bots, automated tools, repeated clicks from the same person, or clicks from a competitor.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the share of people who clicked an ad, a search result or a link in an email out of everyone who saw it: clicks divided by impressions.

A clipping path is a vector outline drawn over a photograph that cuts the product away from its background, so it can sit on white or on nothing at all.

A CMS (content management system) is the software your team uses to change what the site says — text, images, pages, products — without a developer and without touching code.

CMYK and RGB colour models are the two ways of describing a colour: RGB for screens, CMYK for print.

Colour correction is the work of bringing the colour in a photograph to the colour of the real product.

Community management is the daily work of talking to the people around a brand: answering comments and messages, moderating, and handling the questions people ask before they buy.

Content is everything a company publishes to be found, understood and trusted: pages, articles, photographs, video, product descriptions, answers.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a set of servers spread across many cities that keep copies of a site’s files and hand each visitor the copy nearest to them.

Content pillars are the three to five recurring subjects an account keeps returning to, so that every post belongs somewhere.

Context in digital marketing is everything around a message that changes how it is read: the device, the hour, the channel, what the person searched for just before, and whether they have dealt with the br…

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete the action you defined as the goal — an order, a form, a subscription, a download.

Conversion rate optimisation is the systematic work of getting more of the visitors you already have to complete the action that matters — an order, an enquiry, a registration.

Conversion tracking is the setup that ties a click on an ad to the action you have decided counts as a result: an order, a submitted form, a phone call.

A cookie consent banner is the panel a site shows on a first visit, asking whether it may load tracking scripts and store data in the browser.

Core Web Vitals are the three measurements Google uses to judge how a page feels to real visitors: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds, and whether it holds still.

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is ad spend divided by the conversions recorded in the same period — orders, enquiries or calls.

Cost per click (CPC) is what you pay when someone clicks your ad.

Cost per lead is the advertising spend divided by the number of leads it produced.

CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, is what an advertiser pays for every thousand times an ad is shown: spend divided by impressions, multiplied by a thousand.

CRM (customer relationship management) is both the approach and the system a company uses to keep every interaction with a customer in one place: enquiries, quotes, orders, conversations and complaints.

Cross-selling is offering a product that completes the one a customer is already buying — a case with a phone, filters with a coffee machine.

CSS (cascading style sheets) is the language that describes how a page looks: type, colour, spacing, layout and how all of it behaves at different screen sizes.

Cumulative layout shift (CLS) measures how much the content of a page moves unexpectedly while it loads and while it is being used.

Customer acquisition cost is the average amount spent to win one new customer: all marketing and sales costs for a period divided by the customers gained in it.

Customer retention is the share of the customers you began a period with who are still buying at the end of it.

A daily budget in Google Ads is the average amount you set for one campaign per day.

A data breach is any incident in which personal data becomes available to an outsider, is altered, destroyed or lost.

Data migration is the move of existing records — products, customers, orders, content — from an old system into a new one, with every field mapped and the result checked.

A data processing agreement (DPA) is the contract between a company and every supplier that stores or handles its customers’ data — the host, the email platform, the accounting software.

A DDoS attack tries to take a site down by having thousands of machines flood it with requests until the server stops answering real visitors.

A design brief is a short document in which the client sets out the goal, the audience and the limits of a job before the designer starts.

Design source files are the editable originals of a piece of design — the files every exported version was made from.

A dieline is the flat drawing of a package or a label: the lines along which the material is cut, creased and glued.

A digital wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay) keeps a buyer’s cards on their phone or in their account.

Display advertising is banner and image advertising shown on websites, inside apps and next to videos across Google’s network, rather than in search results.

A DMARC record is a line in your domain’s DNS telling receiving mail servers what to do with a message sent in your name that fails the SPF and DKIM checks.

A domain registrant is the person or company a domain name is registered to — in practice, its owner.

Duplicate content is identical or nearly identical text that can be reached at more than one address, on one site or across several.

Dynamic content is assembled at the moment of the request instead of being written once and stored: stock levels, prices, recommended products, search results, or text that differs for a signed-in visitor.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness — the qualities Google’s search quality raters look for when they judge whether content deserves to be believed.

E-invoicing means issuing, sending and storing an invoice in electronic form.

An EAN-13 barcode is the thirteen-digit article number a shop till and a warehouse scanner read from a product.

In marketing an ebook is a longer downloadable document — a guide, a handbook, a report — offered in exchange for a contact detail or simply as proof of expertise.

An editorial calendar is the plan of what gets published, where and when — articles, social posts, emails, campaigns.

Email marketing is the use of email to reach an audience that agreed to hear from you: announcements, offers, editorial, order follow-ups.

Embossing shapes the paper itself: a sheet is squeezed between a pair of dies, one raised and one recessed, and the motif stays lifted above the surface.

End-of-life software is a version whose maker has stopped publishing fixes for it: a PHP release, a database, a content management system or a single plugin that has passed its published end-of-life date.

Engagement rate measures how much of the audience that saw a post reacted to it — likes, comments, shares, saves — as a share of reach or followers.

An ERP system is one piece of software in which a company runs its stock, sales, purchasing, finance and production on a single database.

The EU AI Act is Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the European law that governs how artificial intelligence may be built and used.

The EU Omnibus Directive is the rule that a shop announcing a price reduction must show, as the previous price, the lowest price it charged for that product in the last 30 days.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is an EU directive requiring certain products and services, e-commerce among them, to be usable by people with disabilities.

Evergreen content keeps its value for years because it answers a question that does not change with the season or the news cycle — how something works, what a term means, how to choose.

Facebook is a social network with more than three billion monthly users and the advertising platform through which Instagram ads are also bought.

A featured snippet is a passage from one page that Google shows in a separate box above the ordinary results, with a link to the source.

Field data is speed measured on real visits, as opposed to lab data, which comes from one simulated test.

First contentful paint (FCP) is the time from the moment a page starts loading until its first content — text, an image, a graphic — appears on screen.

First-party data is the information a business collects itself, directly from its own customers and visitors: through its website, shop, orders, email list and conversations.

Flexographic printing, or flexo, prints from flexible polymer plates onto a roll of material — self-adhesive labels, film, pouches, corrugated board.

A font licence is the agreement that sets out how a typeface file may be used: on how many computers, on a website, inside an app or on packaging.

A form is the element through which a visitor hands you information: an enquiry, a registration, a checkout.

A free shipping threshold is the order value above which the shop pays the courier instead of the customer — free delivery over €70, say.

Friction is everything that makes an action harder than it needs to be: a confusing navigation, a slow page, a checkout that demands registration, a form asking for a company number from a private buyer.

GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, is the European law that sets out how organisations may collect, store and use personal data about people in the EU.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting a business quoted inside the answers that AI assistants and AI summaries in search engines write.

A ghost mannequin is a clothing photograph in which the mannequin has been removed in post-production: the garment keeps its shape and the inside of the collar shows, but the body underneath is gone.

Google Analytics 4 is Google’s free measurement tool for sites and apps, in which every interaction is stored as an event with parameters rather than as a page view inside a session.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts a company into Google Search and Google Maps, with its address, opening hours, phone number, photographs and reviews.

Google Consent Mode is the way a site tells Google’s advertising and measurement tags whether a visitor agreed to cookies, and to what.

Google Merchant Center is the free platform that holds a shop’s product data: price, availability, image, GTIN.

A Google penalty is a measure by which Google demotes pages or a whole site, or drops them from its results, for breaking its spam policies.

Google Performance Max (PMax) is a campaign type that takes one set of assets and one goal and runs ads across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps and the Display network.

A Google Safe Browsing warning is the red screen a browser shows instead of your page once Google has found malware or deceptive content on it.

Google Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows how a site looks in search: which queries it turns up for, how many clicks it gets and which pages are indexed.

Google Tag Manager is a free container that sits on a site and holds its tracking code — GA4, the Meta Pixel, conversion tags — so tags are added and changed there, not in the site’s code.

A hashtag is the # symbol followed by a word or phrase with no spaces, used on social platforms to file a post under a topic.

A headless CMS is a content management system with no website of its own: it stores and edits text, images and products and hands them over an API to a separately built website or app.

A heatmap is a picture of one page coloured by behaviour: where people click, where they move the cursor, and how far down they get before they leave.

Hot foil stamping presses a heated metal die through a foil ribbon onto paper.

HTML (hypertext markup language) is the language that gives a page its structure and meaning: headings, paragraphs, lists, links, images, forms.

Image optimisation is preparing a site’s pictures so that each weighs no more than the screen showing it needs, with no visible loss of quality.

Impression share is the percentage of possible impressions your ads actually received.

Impressions are the number of times your search result or ad is shown to someone.

An inbound link, or backlink, is a hyperlink from someone else’s site to a page of yours.

Inbound marketing earns attention instead of buying it: content that answers a real question, found by people already looking, followed by a relationship rather than an interruption.

An INCI ingredient list is the ingredient declaration on a cosmetic pack, written in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients: aqua, glycerin, parfum.

Indexing is the moment a search engine stores your page in its index, after crawling it and rendering it.

Influencer marketing is paying someone with an audience on social media to put your product in front of it — as a post, a video or a series of stories.

An infographic presents information, data or a process visually — text, illustration and diagram together — so that a relationship becomes obvious faster than a paragraph could make it.

Instagram is a social network built around images and short video, with stories, reels and a shop layer on top.

Interaction to next paint (INP) measures how quickly a page visibly responds to a click, a tap or a key press.

An interactive PDF catalogue is a catalogue file whose contents, product codes and contact details are clickable: the index jumps to a page, a product opens its page in the shop.

Inventory management software is the program a company keeps its stock in: goods in, goods out, transfers between locations, stock counts and cost price.

JavaScript is the programming language that adds behaviour to a page: menus, filters, validation, maps, anything that reacts without a reload.

A key visual is the one image a campaign is built on: a single scene or product shot, one headline, and the way the logo, the colour and the type sit around them.

A keyword is the word or phrase a person types when they are looking for something.

Keyword cannibalisation is what happens when two or more of your own pages compete for the same query.

A keyword match type decides how close a search has to be to your keyword before the ad can show.

Keyword research is the work of finding out which words and questions your potential buyers type into search engines.

A KPI (key performance indicator) is a metric chosen in advance to show whether an activity is reaching its goal.

A landing page is a page built for the traffic that arrives on it — from an ad, an email, a social post — with one message and one action.

Landing page experience is Google’s rating of how useful the page is that someone reaches after clicking an ad.

Largest contentful paint (LCP) is the time from the start of loading until the biggest visible element on the screen appears, usually the hero image, a slider or a large heading.

Lazy loading is a technique in which images, embedded videos and maps below the first screen are downloaded only when the visitor scrolls close to them.

A lead is a person who has shown interest and left a way to be contacted — a form, a call, a subscription.

Lead ads are Facebook and Instagram ads carrying a form that opens inside the app, already filled in from the person’s profile.

Lead nurturing is the steady, useful contact kept with someone who is interested but not ready to buy: answers, examples, and the occasional reminder that you exist.

Lead scoring is a way of ranking enquiries by how likely they are to become a sale, with points for how closely each one matches your good customers and for the interest it has shown.

Lifecycle stages are the steps a person moves through in their relationship with a company — from first hearing the name, through enquiry and purchase, to repeat orders and recommendation.

Lifestyle photography shows a product or service in use — in a hand, in a room, on a table, on a person — rather than alone on a clean background.

Lifetime value is the total revenue a customer is expected to bring over the whole time they stay a customer, not just on the first order.

Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours.

LinkedIn is the professional network, used for hiring, business development and industry publishing.

llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of a website that gives AI assistants a short description of the business and a list of its most important pages.

Local SEO is the work that makes a business show up for searches tied to a place — “dentist in Ruse” or “near me” — and on Google Maps.

Location targeting decides where your ads can appear: a country, a region, a town, a postcode, or a radius drawn around an address.

A logo concept is a finished proposal for a mark: one idea, drawn through and shown on the carriers where it will be used.

Logo copyright belongs by default to the person who drew the mark, and an exclusive right to it passes to the client only under an express written contract.

A logo redesign is a change to an existing mark that cleans up its shape and resets it for today’s carriers while keeping the brand recognisable.

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase — three words or more, usually a full question.

A lookalike audience is a group Meta builds by finding people who resemble a source list you supply — customers, site visitors, or people who watched a video.

A loyalty programme is a standing rule that gives a returning customer something back — points, a discount, early access — for buying from the same shop again.

Malware on a website is code somebody else put there that works for them, not for you: it redirects visitors, hides links to other sites, reads what customers type into forms, or sends spam from your server.

Mandatory food labelling is the set of information EU Regulation 1169/2011 requires on every packaged food sold in the Union.

Marketing attribution is the rule that decides which of the channels a buyer passed through gets the credit for a sale.

Marketing automation is software that runs repeatable marketing work on its own: a welcome sequence, an abandoned-cart reminder, a follow-up triggered by a download.

A marketing funnel is the road from never having heard of you to placing an order, cut into stages so you can see where people drop out.

A media plan is the document that sets out where, when and on what budget a campaign’s ads will run, and what each channel is expected to deliver.

Meta Business Manager, now called a business portfolio, is the account where a company keeps its Pages, ad accounts, datasets and catalogues and hands out access to people and agencies.

The Meta Conversions API (CAPI) is the connection that sends events — an order, an enquiry, a payment — from your own server straight to Meta, instead of leaving it all to the browser pixel.

The Meta Pixel is a piece of code on your site that reports what visitors do — view a product, add to basket, buy — back to Meta.

A microsite is a small site of a few pages, separate from the main one, built for a single campaign, product or event.

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is the first working version of a piece of software: it does one clear job for real users and nothing else.

Mobile marketing is everything aimed at people on a phone or tablet: search and social ads seen on small screens, messages, app notifications, location-based offers.

Mobile optimisation is the work of making a site usable on a small screen and a slow connection: a layout that reflows, tap targets large enough for a thumb, images sized for the device, and a page weight…

A mockup is a realistic picture of a design on the product itself: a label on a bottle, a box on a shelf, a business card in a hand.

Multi-warehouse inventory means the quantity of each product is held separately for every location — a central warehouse, a shop floor, goods on consignment.

A multilingual website presents the same content in two or more languages, each at its own address, so a search engine can index every version and show the right one to the right person.

The N-18 Ordinance is the Bulgarian regulation that sets out how sales are recorded and what an online shop owes the tax administration.

Native advertising is paid content shaped to match the medium it appears in, so it reads like the surrounding editorial rather than an interruption.

Negative keywords are the words and phrases you tell an ad platform not to show you for, so the budget stops paying for clicks from people who will never buy.

The NIS2 Directive is EU legislation that requires medium and large organisations in 18 sectors to manage their cybersecurity risks and report significant incidents.

A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a contract in which the parties promise to keep the information they exchange secret and to use it only for the agreed purpose.

Offset printing carries ink from a plate to a rubber blanket and from there onto the paper.

On-page SEO is the work done on the page itself — the text, title tag, meta description, headings, internal links and images — so that it answers one question clearly.

On-premise software runs on a server the company owns or rents, instead of inside the vendor’s cloud service.

An online marketplace is a platform where many sellers reach one shared audience and the platform takes a commission on every sale.

An online product catalogue is a site that shows the whole range — photographs, descriptions, stock — without taking payment: the order comes by email, by phone or through a sales rep.

Online shop terms and conditions are the document that sets out how an order is made: who the trader is, when the contract is concluded, what the price includes and how a customer withdraws.

Optimization score is a figure from 0 to 100% that Google Ads shows next to an account and each of its campaigns, together with a list of recommendations.

Organic traffic means the visits a site receives from the unpaid results of search engines such as Google and Bing.

Overselling is taking an order for stock that is no longer there — the shop accepts and confirms a purchase for an item the warehouse has already sold.

The OWASP Top 10 is a list of the ten most critical categories of security risk in web applications, revised every three to four years by the OWASP Foundation.

Packaging recycling symbols are the marks printed on a pack that say what it is made of and how it should be thrown away.

A packshot is the photograph of the product itself on a clean background, shot so that one file works in a shop, in a catalogue and in an advert.

PageSpeed Insights is Google’s free tool for measuring how fast a single page loads, with a score from 0 to 100 given separately for mobile and desktop.

A Pantone colour (PMS) is an ink mixed to a numbered recipe before it reaches the press, instead of being built from the four process inks.

A parcel locker is a cabinet of compartments in a public place from which a customer collects an order with a code, without waiting in for a courier or minding opening hours.

A payment gateway, or virtual POS, is the service that lets an online shop take card payments, with the card details normally entered on the provider’s page rather than inside the shop.

PCI DSS is the card industry’s data security standard, required of every business that accepts card payments.

A penetration test, or pentest, is a controlled attack on a website or an application, carried out with the owner’s permission to show which weaknesses can actually be used.

Performance marketing is marketing for sales: advertising is judged by a measurable result — an order, an enquiry or revenue — rather than by impressions and likes.

PPWR is Regulation (EU) 2025/40, the EU rulebook for packaging and packaging waste, which has applied since 12 August 2026.

Prepress is the step between the approved design and the printing press: colours are converted to CMYK, bleed is added, fonts are embedded or outlined, and image resolution is checked against the final size.

Print resolution, measured in DPI, is how many dots a press lays down per inch, and therefore how many pixels a file needs at its final size.

A product configurator is the screen where a customer builds the product from choices — size, material, colour, engraving — and sees the price and the lead time before ordering.

A product feed is a file or a URL that lists your products in a form a machine can read: id, title, description, price, availability, image and the link to the product page.

Product information management (PIM) is where product descriptions, attributes, images and translations are written, approved and kept before they go out to a website, a marketplace and a product feed.

Product reviews are the ratings and comments buyers leave on a particular product, and the next buyer reads them before deciding.

Product variants are versions of the same product that differ by size, colour, flavour or pack.

Quality score is the 1-to-10 rating Google gives each keyword in a search campaign.

Reach is the number of different people who saw a post or an ad at least once in a given period.

Reels are the short vertical videos on Instagram and Facebook that play full screen and get shown to people who do not follow the account.

Remarketing, also called retargeting, is advertising to people who have already been on your site or engaged with your profiles.

Render-blocking resources are files a browser must download and process before it can show any of the page — usually stylesheets and scripts loaded at the top of it.

A responsive logo is a set of versions of one logo made for different places: the full lock-up with symbol and name, a shorter version, and a small mark for square spaces.

A restricted ad account is an advertising account on Meta, Google or TikTok that the platform has stopped from running ads — over a policy breach, a payment problem or an automated check.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the revenue advertising brought in divided by what was spent on it.

Return on investment (ROI) is what an investment leaves behind once its cost is taken out, written as a percentage: profit minus cost, divided by cost.

Returns management, or RMA, is the route a sold item takes back to the shop: the customer opens a request, gets a number, sends the parcel and receives the money.

The right of withdrawal lets a consumer return an online order within 14 days without giving a reason.

Search intent is the goal behind a query: to learn something, to reach a particular site, to compare options or to buy.

Security headers are instructions a web server sends to the browser with every page, limiting what can happen to that page once it loads.

A self-adhesive label is a label supplied on a roll that sticks to a pack with no water and no glue pot.

An SEO audit is a structured review of a website that shows what is holding back its visibility in search and which pages earn traffic today.

A service level agreement, or SLA, is the part of a contract that states how quickly a supplier answers a request, how quickly it fixes the problem, and during which hours those times apply.

Session recording replays a single visit — cursor movement, scrolling, clicks and the moves between pages — as a short film.

A shipping label, or waybill, is the courier’s document for a parcel: it records who sends it, who receives it and where it goes, and carries the tracking number.

An SKU, or stock keeping unit, is the internal code a company gives to one sellable item — a specific model in a specific colour and size.

Social commerce is selling inside the social platforms themselves: a product catalogue on Facebook and Instagram, price tags on posts and reels, and a purchase that starts there.

Social listening is the practice of tracking public conversations that mention your brand, your product or your subject across social platforms, forums, review sites and comment threads.

A social media audit is a review of the accounts, the ad account and the results, made before anyone decides what to change.

A social media giveaway is a campaign where a small action — following the account, commenting under the post, answering a question — buys a ticket in a draw for a prize.

Software as a service, or SaaS, is software used through a browser on a subscription, instead of being bought and installed on a server of your own.

A software licence is permission to use software someone else owns, together with the terms: for what purpose, by how many people, on how many machines, for how long, and what you may not do with it.

Source code is the text of a program as a developer writes it: readable by a person and open to change.

Spot UV varnish is a clear coating applied only to chosen areas of a sheet — a logo, a headline, one outline — and cured under an ultraviolet lamp.

An SSL certificate is the electronic document that proves which domain a site belongs to and lets the connection run encrypted over HTTPS, with the padlock in the address bar.

A staging environment is a private copy of a website or online shop, hidden from customers and search engines, where changes are tried before they reach the live site.

A storyboard is a video planned frame by frame: a sketch or reference picture for each scene, with what is seen and heard, the text that appears on screen and how many seconds it lasts.

Structured data, also called schema markup, is code in a page that tells machines what is on it: a product with a price and stock level, a business with an address, an article with an author and a date.

Subscription ecommerce is selling on a repeat payment: the customer pays every month, or on every delivery, and keeps receiving the product until they stop it.

System integration is the work of connecting two or more programs — a website, warehouse software, accounting, a CRM — so that data moves between them automatically instead of being retyped.

Technical debt is the work a team postpones by taking shortcuts, and has to do later before the site can change normally again.

Technical SEO is the part of the work that makes a site legible to search engines: crawling and indexing, addresses and redirects, the sitemap, page speed and how the site behaves on a phone.

A technical specification is the document that says exactly what will be built: which pages and functions, who supplies what, by when, and the conditions under which the work is accepted.

Third-party scripts are code a site loads from other companies’ servers: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, chat widgets, review badges, embedded videos and maps.

TikTok Spark Ads are ads made from an organic TikTok post that is already live — on the brand’s own account or, with an authorisation code, on a creator’s.

Time to first byte (TTFB) is the time from requesting a page until the browser receives the first part of the server’s response.

Topical authority is the standing a site earns with search engines by covering one subject thoroughly — a page for every important question, with links between them.

Total blocking time (TBT) is the sum of the milliseconds during page load in which the browser is too busy — usually running scripts — to respond to a tap or a click.

Total cost of ownership, or TCO, is everything a website will cost over a chosen period: the build, hosting, the domain, licences, maintenance, content, payment fees and the work of leaving the platform later.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a login that asks for a second proof of identity on top of the password: a code from an app on your phone, a hardware key or a fingerprint.

Uptime is the share of time a website answers requests normally, written as a percentage of a month or a year.

User roles and permissions are the rules that decide who can see and change what in an admin panel.

User-generated content, or UGC, is photos, video and reviews made by customers rather than by the company.

UTM parameters are short tags added to the end of a link’s address that tell your analytics where a visitor came from.

Vanity metrics are the numbers that look good in a report but change no decision — followers, likes, impressions, video views.

The VAT One-Stop Shop, or OSS, lets an online shop declare in a single return the VAT it owes to every EU country where it has consumer customers.

A vector logo is a mark stored as mathematical curves instead of a grid of pixels, so it scales up to the size of a shop sign without going soft.

Vendor lock-in is the position a business is in when it cannot change supplier, platform or host without losing the site, the data, or most of what it has spent on them.

Vertical video (9:16) is video framed upright, nine units wide to sixteen tall, so that it fills the screen of a phone held the normal way.

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine on a hosting company’s physical server, with its own share of processor, memory and disk and its own operating system.

A warehouse management system (WMS) is the software that runs the work inside a warehouse: receiving deliveries, putting stock away in named locations, picking orders, packing and dispatch.

Web accessibility is the property of a site that lets people with disabilities use it — with a screen reader, by keyboard alone, with low vision or without sound.

A web application firewall (WAF) sits in front of a website and checks every request before it reaches the application, stopping the ones that look like an attack.

Web fonts are font files a site sends to the browser so that text appears in the typeface chosen in the design, not in whatever fonts the visitor’s device has installed.

Web hosting is the service that keeps a site’s files and database on a server connected to the internet, so the site answers when someone opens its address.

A website backup is a complete copy of the site’s files and database, stored away from the site itself, from which the site can be put back into working order after a crash, a bad change or an attack.

A website builder is a paid online service where a site is assembled from ready-made blocks in the browser, with no code written, for a monthly or yearly fee.

A website migration is a move to a different platform, a different domain or a different set of addresses, in which the content, the URLs and the search rankings all have to survive.

A website stress test measures how many visitors a site takes at once before it slows down or stops.

A website template, also called a theme, is a ready-made design with the code behind it, bought once and filled with your own content.

Website updates are the regular replacement of the versions a site runs on: the platform core, modules and plugins, the theme, PHP and libraries, and the certificate.

A wine e-label is the page behind the QR code on a bottle, carrying the ingredient list and the nutrition declaration that EU rules have required on wine since 8 December 2023.

A withdrawal button is the on-screen function that lets a consumer withdraw from a contract concluded through an online interface as easily as it was concluded.

A wordmark logo is a mark made only of the company name, set in a chosen or drawn typeface, with no separate symbol.