E-commerce

The share of product page visitors who add the item to their cart. It isolates how well the product page itself sells, separate from whatever happens later at checkout.

In practice A low add-to-cart rate points at photography, description, or price. A healthy rate with low completed orders points at checkout instead.

When someone adds items to a cart and leaves without buying. Rates are high across every industry, and surprise shipping costs and clumsy checkouts are the usual causes.

In practice A single reminder email recovers a meaningful share of these. It is one of the highest-return automations available to any store.

Importing product data — titles, descriptions, prices, images, variants — from a supplier feed or spreadsheet into your store. The unglamorous step where most e-commerce launches actually stall.

In practice Supplier feeds arrive inconsistent, with missing images and descriptions written for a different audience. Budget real time for it, or the launch date moves.

The sequence of steps between “add to cart” and a completed order. Every extra field and every forced account creation costs you sales, which is why guest checkout is worth defending against anyone who wants the email address.

In practice Each additional step is a place to lose someone who had already decided to buy. Fewer fields is almost always the higher-revenue choice.

The narrowing path from visitor to buyer, measured at each step so you can see where people fall out. Knowing the leak is at checkout rather than on the product page changes entirely what you should fix.

In practice Without funnel measurement, a drop in sales gives you no direction. With it, you get a specific step to work on.

Running your store’s engine — products, cart, payments — separately from the storefront customers actually see, connected by an API. It lets you sell through a custom site, an app, or a counter kiosk without duplicating the catalog.

In practice Useful when the catalog needs to reach a second destination. Overkill when it does not, and the added complexity is a real ongoing cost.

Keeping stock counts matched across your online store, point of sale, and warehouse so the website cannot sell something you no longer have. Without it, overselling is a question of when rather than if.

In practice Selling the last unit twice on a Saturday costs you a refund, a bad review, and the customer. It is worth solving before volume makes it frequent.

Stock Keeping Unit — your own unique code for one specific sellable item, down to size and colour. Every serious inventory, accounting, and online store system keys off it.

In practice Invent them casually and you pay for it for years. A scheme decided in an afternoon before launch saves a migration later.

The interface a commerce platform such as Shopify exposes so an outside site can read products and manage carts. It is what makes a fully custom-designed storefront possible without giving up the platform’s checkout and payment handling.

In practice The practical appeal: you keep PCI compliance and fraud handling on the platform’s side while controlling everything the customer sees.