Above the Fold- the portion of a Web page visible once the page has loaded and without scrolling, normally located at the very top section of a page; a key location on a website for advertisements and banner ad placement

Affiliate Program- automated marketing program that allows you to pay others for referring traffic and sales to your website; other websites place your banner ads or buttons on their site, receiving a referral fee in return when customers make a purchase on your site due to that affiliate link

Bandwidth- the amount of data that can be transmitted through an Internet connection in a fixed amount of time, or the rate at which the information can be passed (the connection speed)

Banner Ad- a small, interactive ad placed on a web page acting as a hyperlink to an advertiser’s website or another internal page within the same website; typically rectangular in shape and located above, below or on the sides of the website’s main content

Banner Rotator- a program that randomly rotates banner ads on a website, displaying a different banner ad each time the site is visited or refreshed, often cheaper than having a static ad on a website

Browser- a software program used to display web pages; needed in order to access the Internet
(ex. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator)

Click-and-Mortar- a store existing online and in the physical world as well

Color Swatch- a representative portion of the color of a product; a smaller strip cut from a larger piece of material

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) - all aspects of interaction a business has with its customer, whether sales or service related

Data Export- the ability of one application to format data for another application; when the sending application reformats the data for the receiving

Data Import- the ability of an application to read and use data produced by a different application; when the receiving application does the reformatting

Digital Certificate- an attachment to an electronic message used for security purposes, most commonly used to verify that a user sending a message is who he or she claims to be and to provide the receiver with the means to encode a reply

Domain Name- a name that distinguishes your business from others on the Internet, allows Internet users to find your web site quickly and easily
(ex. yourbusinessname.com, or .net, .org, .us, .info, .biz.)

Drop Shipping- the shipping of a product directly from the manufacturer to the customer (in this case the retailer does not carry inventory, making their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price)

E-Business (Electronic Business) - the process of conducting business electronically or over the internet

E-Commerce (Electronic Commerce) - one entity paying for goods or services from another entity via the internet, taking place either between two businesses or between a business and a customer

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) - the transfer of data between different companies using networks, such as VANs or the Internet, increasingly becoming an easy mechanism for companies to buy, sell, and trade information

E-mail Marketing- a form of direct marketing using electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial, informational or fundraising messages to a large audience

Encryption- the encryption of data for security purposes

Flash- a graphics animation computer software product

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) - a commonly used method for sending files between two computers over the internet

Hard Disk Storage- the amount of space available on your website to store files, such as images, HTML, ASP files, etc.

Hit- the retrieval of a web object, such as a page or a graphic, from a Web server
(Number of hits=Number of times that object has been viewed or downloaded)

Home Page- the main page of a Web site, usually the first page customers see

Hosting- provides storage of the user’s information, images, video or any content accessible via the Internet, on the hosting provider’s server

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - language of the web, a set of tags used to define the content, layout and the formatting of the web document; web browsers use HTML tags to define how to display the text

Hyperlink- an element in an electronic document that links to another place in that same document, or to an entirely different document

Keyword- a word or phrase used by a search engine to seek out relevant web information

Live support- a Web service allowing businesses to communicate, or chat, in real time with visitors of their Web site, providing immediate customer support and information to online clients and customers


Logo- a trademark designed for easy and specific recognition of a company

Merchant Account- allows a business to accept credit cards, debit cards, gift cards and other forms of electronic payment via the web
(see also PayPal)

Metatags- a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page (such as which keywords represent the page’s content), used by search engines when building their indexes

Newsletter- an informative letter mailed to subscribers

Opt-in E-mails- promotional e-mails sent only to people who specifically request them, opposite of SPAM promotional e-mails which are sent to a large list of recipients without regard to whether or not they actually want that information

Page Impression- the exact number of times a website has been visited
(also referred to as hits)

Paid Inclusion- a search engine marketing model in which a website pays a fee to a search engine that then guarantees that website will appear in the returned search results for specifically named search terms

PayPal- founded in 1998, PayPal, an eBay Company, is similar to an online banking service, enabling any individual or business with an e-mail address to securely and quickly send and receive payments via the internet

Point of Sale System (POS System) - allows you to quickly sell products to customers who are physically in your store, linking that transaction to your web database

Purchase Order (PO)- a commercial document issued by a buyer to a seller, indicating the products, quantities and agreed prices for products or services that the seller will provide to the buyer
(Usually contains: PO number, date, billing address, shipping address, requested terms, and a list of products with quantities and prices)

ROI Tracking- tracks the return on investment for advertising and marketing efforts, shows how customers are getting to ones site via the internet

Search Engine- computer program used to search and catalog (index) the millions of pages of available information on the web (Ex. Google and AltaVista)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)- a series of methods aimed at increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by increasing the site’s ranking in the search results of a search engine

Shopping Cart- the virtual cart in an online store; a user can put items in the “basket” or take them out and then proceed to checkout when ready to purchase; shopping carts can be sold as independent pieces of software or offered as part of an all-in-one service

Subdomain- a domain that is part of a larger domain name
(ex. shop.yoursitename.com)

SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) - provides secure communications on the Internet, ensuring that private credit card information sent via the web is safe and encrypted

Template- surrounds each page, standardizing and constraining the page’s common elements; provides support for the navigation of a site and remains constant throughout the site as you browse through the store

Traffic- the amount of activity over a communication system during a given period of time; the measurement of the amount of visitors to a website

URL- an Internet address (for example, http://www.hmco.com/trade/), usually consisting of the access protocol (http), the domain name (www.hmco.com), and optionally the path to a file or resource residing on that server (trade)

User Session- the session of activity a user with a unique IP address spends on a website during a specified amount of time, helps measure the amount of traffic to a website; begins when user accesses application and ends when user quits application

Web Analytics- the study of the impact of a website on its users
(ex. how many people visited a site, how they got there, what they searched for, etc.)

Wish List- a list of products one plans to purchase at a later time

XML (Extensible Markup Language) - a specification developed by the W3C; a pared-down version of SGML designed especially for Web documents; allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations