The words we use, in plain English.

62 Shopify, ecommerce, website, and search terms you'll hear on a first call — defined in a sentence or two, with links to where they matter.

Shopify

App block: A piece of a Shopify app that a merchant can place inside a theme section from the editor, instead of pasting app code into theme files. Removing the app removes the block cleanly.
Checkout extensibility: Shopify's upgrade-safe way to customize checkout with UI extensions, branding settings, and Functions instead of editing checkout.liquid, which Shopify has retired.
Custom app: A Shopify app built for one store (or a small group) rather than listed on the App Store. Used for integrations, internal tools, and logic no public app handles. More
Headless commerce: Separating the storefront (front end) from the commerce engine (back end), connected by APIs. More flexibility and more cost; most stores are better served by a well-built theme.
Hydrogen: Shopify's React-based framework for headless storefronts, deployed on Shopify's Oxygen hosting. Useful when a brand needs a fully custom front end; overkill for most stores.
Liquid: Shopify's template language. Theme developers use Liquid to pull products, collections, and content into HTML; it is also used by other platforms such as Jekyll.
Metafield: A custom field attached to a product, variant, collection, customer, or order — care instructions, fitment, size charts, ingredients. Metafields let one template show different content per product.
Metaobject: A custom content type in Shopify — designers, locations, FAQs, ingredients — with its own fields, that can be linked to products and rendered anywhere in the theme.
Online Store 2.0: The current Shopify theme architecture. It lets merchants add, remove, and reorder sections on every template, use app blocks instead of code snippets, and drive templates from metafields. More
Section: A reusable, editable block of a Shopify theme — a hero, a product grid, a testimonial row — that merchants configure in the theme editor without touching code.
Shop Pay: Shopify's accelerated checkout that saves a buyer's shipping and payment details across every Shopify store. It typically lifts checkout conversion and supports installments.
Shopify: A hosted ecommerce platform that runs the storefront, checkout, payments, inventory, and orders for millions of stores. You pay a monthly plan; Shopify handles hosting and security. More
Shopify B2B: Native wholesale features on Shopify Plus: company accounts with multiple buyers and locations, catalogs and price lists, quantity rules, payment terms, and vaulted cards. More
Shopify Functions: Custom server-side logic that runs inside Shopify's checkout for discounts, shipping rates, payment methods, and cart validation. Built as a custom app; replaces Shopify Scripts. More
Shopify Markets: Shopify's tools for selling internationally from one store — local currencies, languages, domains, duties, and pricing per country or region.
Shopify Plus: Shopify's enterprise plan, starting around $2,300 a month. It adds checkout customization, native B2B, Shopify Functions for custom discounts and shipping logic, higher API limits, and expansion stores. More
Shopify POS: Shopify's point-of-sale system for physical retail. It shares inventory, products, customers, and gift cards with the online store. More

Ecommerce

3PL: Third-party logistics: an outside warehouse that stores inventory, picks, packs, and ships orders on a store's behalf. More
Abandoned checkout: A checkout a shopper starts but doesn't finish. Automated reminder emails and texts typically recover a meaningful share of them. More
AOV (average order value): Total revenue divided by number of orders. Bundles, free-shipping thresholds, and post-purchase offers raise it.
BOPIS: Buy online, pick up in store. Requires shared inventory between the online store and the shop counter, which Shopify POS provides. More
Conversion rate (CVR): The share of sessions that end in an order. Ecommerce stores commonly convert 1–3% of sessions; speed, trust, and product-page clarity move it most.
DTC (direct-to-consumer): A brand selling straight to customers through its own store instead of — or alongside — retailers and marketplaces. More
ERP: Enterprise resource planning software — NetSuite, Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics — that runs a company's inventory, purchasing, accounting, and fulfillment. Larger stores sync it with Shopify. More
GMV (gross merchandise value): The total value of goods sold through a store or marketplace before fees, returns, and discounts.
Google Merchant Center: Google's tool for uploading product feeds. It powers Shopping ads and the free product listings in Google Search, Images, and Shopping.
LTV (customer lifetime value): The total revenue — or profit — a customer brings over the whole relationship. Email, subscriptions, and loyalty programs exist to raise it.
PDP and PLP: Product detail page and product listing page (collection page). The PDP sells one product; the PLP helps a shopper choose between many.
PIM: Product information management: a central system for product data (descriptions, specs, images, translations) that feeds the store, marketplaces, and retailers.
Product feed: A structured file of every product's title, price, image, availability, and attributes, sent to Google Merchant Center, Meta, marketplaces, and comparison sites.
Replatforming: Moving a store from one ecommerce platform to another — WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, or Wix to Shopify — including products, customers, orders, and URLs. More
SKU: Stock keeping unit: a unique code for each sellable item, usually one per variant (a shirt in medium blue is its own SKU).
Subscription commerce: Selling products on a recurring schedule — coffee every two weeks, supplements monthly — with automatic billing and a customer portal to skip, swap, or cancel. More
Variant: A version of a product that differs by an option such as size, color, or material. Each variant has its own price, SKU, inventory, and image.

Websites

301 redirect: A permanent redirect from an old URL to a new one. It passes most of the old page's search value and is the single most important step in a redesign or migration. More
Block theme: A WordPress theme built for the block editor and full-site editing, with editable patterns and templates instead of a page-builder plugin. More
Care plan: A monthly maintenance agreement covering hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and a set amount of developer time for changes. More
CDN: Content delivery network: servers around the world that cache a site's files so pages load quickly wherever the visitor is.
CMS: Content management system: software that lets a team edit a website without code. WordPress, Webflow, and Shopify are all CMSs.
Core Web Vitals: Google's three user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). They factor into rankings. More
Landing page: A single page built for one goal — a campaign, an offer, a sign-up — with one call to action and nothing to distract from it. More
Lighthouse score: A 0–100 score from Google's Lighthouse tool for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. We ship every site at 90+ on mobile.
Page builder: A drag-and-drop plugin such as Elementor or Divi that sits on top of WordPress. Fast to start, but often slow, heavy, and hard to maintain over time. More
Staging site: A private copy of a website where changes are built and reviewed before they go live.
WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the standard for making sites usable by people with disabilities — contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text, captions, and more. Level AA is the common target.
Webflow: A visual website builder and hosted CMS that produces clean code without plugins. Strong for marketing sites; not built for large catalogs. More

Search, AEO & GEO

AEO (answer engine optimization): Structuring content so featured snippets, voice assistants, and AI Overviews can quote it directly — short answers first, clear headings, FAQ and schema markup. More
AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries at the top of some Google results that cite and link to source pages. Pages with direct, well-structured answers are more likely to be cited.
Canonical URL: The version of a page you tell search engines to index when the same content is reachable at several URLs — common with Shopify collections and filters.
Citation: Any listing of a business's name, address, and phone on another site — Yelp, Apple Maps, BBB, industry directories.
E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust — the qualities Google's quality guidelines use to judge content. Real authors, real proof, and real reviews demonstrate them.
GEO (generative engine optimization): Making a business the source that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude cite and recommend — through clear facts, consistent listings, and pages that answer real questions. More
Google Business Profile: The free listing that powers a business's appearance in Google Maps and the map pack: categories, hours, services, photos, posts, and reviews. More
llms.txt: A plain-text file at a site's root that summarizes the business and its key pages for AI models, similar in spirit to robots.txt and a sitemap.
Local SEO: Optimizing a business to appear for searches with local intent — “near me,” a city name — in the map pack and in organic results. More
Map pack: The three local business listings with a map that Google shows above organic results for local searches. Ranked by relevance, distance, and prominence (including reviews). More
NAP: Name, address, phone. Keeping it identical across your site, Google Business Profile, and directories is a basic local-ranking signal.
Rich results: Search listings enhanced by schema markup: star ratings, prices, FAQs, breadcrumbs, product availability.
Schema markup: Structured data, usually JSON-LD, that tells search engines and AI exactly what a page describes — a business, product, service, FAQ, review, or event.
Search Console: Google's free tool showing which queries a site appears for, clicks and impressions, indexing problems, and Core Web Vitals.
SEO: Search engine optimization: earning rankings in Google and Bing through technical health, useful content, and links from other sites. More
XML sitemap: A file listing a site's indexable URLs so search engines can find and crawl them efficiently.

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