Glossary
The words of running a shop
What they mean, in a sentence or two. A general explanation, not legal or tax advice: for your own shop, ask your accountant.
- Abandoned basket
- A basket a customer filled and left without paying. A reminder email a little later brings some of them back to finish.
- The online shop
- Back-in-stock request
- A customer asking to be told when a sold-out product, or one size of it, is back. They are emailed when it is.
- Stock
- Barcode (EAN, UPC, GTIN)
- The number under the stripes on a product. EAN and UPC are its common forms, and GTIN is the name for all of them. Google and Meta use it to match your product to searches.
- The POS
- Chargeback, or dispute
- A customer asking their bank to take back a card payment, for example because an order never arrived. The shop can answer with proof, such as tracking; if it does not in time, the bank decides for the customer.
- Click and collect
- Ordering online and collecting in a shop. The shop is told when an order comes in, and the customer when it is ready.
- Click and collect
- DNS records
- The settings, held where a domain is registered, that say where its website and its email go. Connecting a domain to a shop means adding a few of them.
- Domains and email
- End-of-day report (Z report)
- A till’s summary of a day’s takings, by card and in cash, closed when the shop closes, with the cash counted against what the till expected.
- The POS
- GDPR
- The EU law on personal data. A shop must say what it keeps about customers and why, keep it safe, and give a customer their data, or erase it, when they ask.
- Security
- Gift card
- A code worth an amount of money, bought for somebody else to spend. Its balance goes down as it is spent, online or at the counter.
- Marketing
- HTTPS certificate
- What lets a browser show the padlock: proof that the site is the one at that address, and that what is sent to it cannot be read on the way.
- Domains and email
- Loyalty points
- Points a customer earns on each purchase and spends off a later one, online or in the shop.
- Marketing
- One-Stop Shop (OSS)
- The EU scheme that lets a business selling to consumers in other EU countries declare and pay that VAT in its own country, once a quarter, rather than registering in each one. It matters once those sales pass €10,000 a year across the EU.
- Reports
- Pick list
- The list of what to take off the shelves for the orders being packed, in the order the shelves come.
- Orders
- POS (point of sale)
- The till: the screen, scanner, card reader and cash drawer a shop sells with over the counter.
- The POS
- Purchase order
- An order a shop sends to a supplier for stock: what, how many and at what cost, and received into stock when it arrives.
- Purchasing
- Reverse charge
- For a sale to a VAT-registered business in another EU country, the buyer accounts for the VAT rather than the seller. The invoice shows no VAT and says it is a reverse charge.
- Reports
- Right of withdrawal
- In the EU, a customer who buys online may change their mind within 14 days of receiving the goods, without giving a reason, and get their money back.
- Orders
- SKU (stock code)
- A shop’s own code for one product in one size and colour, used to find it, count it and reorder it.
- Stock
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- Three DNS records that prove email from a shop’s address really came from it. Without them, order emails tend to land in spam.
- Domains and email
- Store credit
- Money a shop owes a customer, often from a return, kept for them to spend on a later order rather than refunded.
- Orders
- Variant
- One version of a product, such as a size and colour, with its own price, barcode and stock.
- The online shop
See it running before you decide
Walk round a real shop: its dashboard, its POS and its storefront. No sign-up, no card.