Ecommerce operator glossary.

A shopper adds products to the cart (or starts checkout) but leaves before completing the purchase.

The transfer of a conversation from an AI support system to a human agent, including the transcript, customer identity, retrieved store data, and the reason for escalation.

A system that interprets a request, retrieves approved information, calls external tools or APIs, and decides when to act, ask, or escalate.

An operational checklist. Data truth, policies, API scopes, escalation, and measurement. That decides whether your store can run AI agents safely.

Revenue divided by the number of orders over a period. The typical size of a paid order, not a session or a customer lifetime.

The share of sessions that leave without meaningful engagement beyond the landing page. Definition differs between classic bounce and GA4 engagement.

A cardholder dispute that forces the issuing bank to reverse a transaction through the card network, pulling funds from the merchant after the sale.

Containment rate is the share of customer conversations or tickets that an AI agent resolves end-to-end without a human agent touching the case. It is often called AI-only resolution rate, and it only matters when checked against quality and reopen metrics.

The share of sessions or visitors that complete a defined action, usually a purchase, in a given period.

The fully loaded cost to win one paying customer in a defined period. Media, and often creative, tools, and labor you choose to include.

The expected revenue or gross profit a customer generates over the full commercial relationship, not a single order.

Deflection rate is the percentage of support demand resolved without a human reply, using an explicit definition, channel scope, and time window. It is broader than containment and easy to game if abandoned contacts count as wins.

A fulfillment model where the store sells products it does not stock; the supplier ships each order directly to the customer.

The connected systems and owners across acquire, convert, support, fulfill, retain, and measure. Not a shopping list of apps.

Customer and prospect data you collect directly on owned channels (site, app, email, checkout, and support) under your relationship and consent rules.

Total merchandise sales volume in a period, usually the face value of goods sold, before or with incomplete deduction of fees, discounts, and returns depending on definition.

In AI, a hallucination is a fluent, confident output that is false, unsupported, or invented, yet presented as if it were a fact. It can appear in chatbots, copilots, product writers, search answers, code assistants, and any other LLM-powered system.

Human-in-the-loop means an operator reviews and approves a system decision before it executes, usually for refunds, cancellations, and other exceptions where automation alone is not safe.

How many times a business sells and replaces inventory in a period, commonly COGS divided by average inventory value.

A knowledge base is the curated set of facts your AI actually trusts when answering customers, not every document on your shared drive.

The first page a visitor sees after a campaign click. Built so the message matches the ad and the next action is obvious.

The final logistics leg that moves a parcel from a local hub or facility to the customer’s door (or pickup point). Often the costliest and most ticket-prone part of shipping.

How products are selected, presented, priced, and promoted so the right SKUs are findable and buyable on-site and in campaigns.

A pre-launch QA ritual that checks whether support AI correctly answers from live order states. Unfulfilled, partial, delivered, cancelled, guest checkout. Without inventing tracking or policy facts.

A structured file or API stream of product attributes used by Google Shopping, Meta, marketplaces, and other channels to list and match your catalog.

A technique where an AI model answers questions by first fetching approved facts from a controlled knowledge store, then generating a response grounded in that retrieved text.

The share of orders or units that customers send back in a defined period. Used to track fit, expectation mismatch, and reverse-logistics cost.

Revenue attributed to advertising divided by ad spend. For the same period and attribution rules you define.

Shopify Admin API scopes are the permission flags that decide what an app or AI support tool can read or write in a store; for AI support, you grant the smallest set that lets the bot do its job and nothing more.

An internal code that uniquely identifies a sellable product variation for inventory, catalog, fulfillment, and reporting.

A sellable SKU has zero (or effectively unavailable) inventory when demand still exists, causing lost sales, oversell risk, and broken promises to shoppers.

Selling products or access on a recurring billing cycle (boxes, refills, or memberships) where retention and dunning matter as much as the first order.

Outsourced warehousing, pick-and-pack, and shipping so a specialist holds your inventory and fulfills DTC orders under agreed SLAs.

Ticket deflection means a shopper resolves a support issue through self-service, automation, or an AI agent without ever opening a human-handled ticket. A true deflection ends with the right answer and no repeat contact for the same problem within a short window.

A pattern where an AI model asks an application to run a function, such as a Shopify order lookup, and then answers using the returned data.

Photos, videos, reviews, and social posts created by customers or community members and reused as social proof in ecommerce marketing and merchandising.

An offer that moves a shopper to a higher-value version of what they already intend to buy, or a relevant upgrade, raising revenue per order without starting a new product search.

"Where is my order?". The high-volume support intent asking for shipment status, tracking, and delivery timing after checkout.

The HTTP interface WooCommerce exposes so apps and AI agents can read and write store data. Orders, products, customers, refunds. Under keys you control.