The plain-language glossary for everything we build.
A working dictionary of the terms that come up across our engagements — web development, e-commerce, AI, SEO, mobile, cloud, design, and business strategy. Each entry is a real definition, not vendor marketing.
A
Agent
An LLM-driven system that can plan, call tools, observe results and iterate toward a goal, rather than producing a single one-shot response.
AOV— Average Order Value
The average revenue per completed order over a given period. A core e-commerce metric that interacts directly with conversion rate and customer acquisition cost.
API— Application Programming Interface
A contract that lets two software systems exchange data and trigger actions over a network, usually via HTTP and JSON.
B
B2B Commerce
Selling to business customers online — with company accounts, tiered pricing, purchase orders, net terms and approval workflows — alongside or instead of DTC.
BOPIS— Buy Online, Pick-up In Store
A fulfilment option where a customer buys online and collects the order from a physical store, blending digital and retail operations.
C
Cart Abandonment
When a shopper adds items to their cart and leaves without completing checkout. Industry average sits around 70%, and recovery is one of the highest-ROI plays in e-commerce.
CDN— Content Delivery Network
A globally distributed network of servers that caches your content close to users so they get fast responses regardless of where your origin lives.
Checkout Extension
A unit of custom UI or logic that extends a hosted checkout (Shopify Checkout, for example) within the platform's safe, performant extension framework.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action — usually a purchase — out of all visitors to a page, funnel or site.
CORS— Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
A browser security mechanism that controls which origins are allowed to read responses from your API, enforced via HTTP headers.
CSP— Content Security Policy
An HTTP response header that tells the browser which sources of scripts, styles, images and other content are allowed to load on your page.
E
Edge Computing
Running application logic on servers physically close to users — at CDN points of presence — rather than in one central data centre.
Embeddings
Numerical vector representations of text, images or other data where semantic similarity becomes mathematical proximity in a high-dimensional space.
F
Fine-tuning
Continuing to train a pre-trained model on your specific data to teach it a domain, style or task. Less common now that prompting and RAG are stronger.
Function Calling
An LLM capability where the model decides to call a defined function with structured arguments, enabling reliable tool use in production systems.
G
H
Headless CMS
A content management system that stores and models content but has no built-in front-end, exposing everything through APIs so any channel can consume it.
Headless Commerce
An architecture that decouples the storefront from the commerce engine, consuming products, cart and checkout via APIs so the front-end can be anything.
Hydration
The process of attaching JavaScript event handlers and state to server-rendered HTML so a static-looking page becomes interactive.
Hydrogen
Shopify's React-based framework for building headless storefronts, with built-in commerce primitives, Oxygen hosting and Storefront API integration.
I
J
JAMstack
An architecture pattern that decouples the front-end (pre-rendered markup and JavaScript) from back-end services consumed via APIs, usually hosted on a CDN.
JWT— JSON Web Token
A compact, signed token format that encodes claims (like a user ID and expiry) and can be verified without a database lookup.
L
Lazy Loading
Deferring the loading of off-screen images, components or routes until the user actually needs them, reducing initial page weight and improving performance.
LLM— Large Language Model
A neural network trained on massive text corpora that can generate, summarise, classify and reason about natural language and code.
M
Marketplace
A multi-vendor e-commerce platform where third-party sellers list products alongside (or instead of) a first-party catalogue. Amazon, Etsy and eBay are the canonical examples.
Microservice
A small, independently deployable service that owns one bounded capability and communicates with others over the network, usually via APIs or message queues.
MLOps— Machine Learning Operations
The practices and tooling for taking ML and AI systems from notebook to reliable production, covering versioning, deployment, monitoring and evaluation.
Monorepo
A single version-controlled repository that holds multiple related projects — apps, packages, services — managed with shared tooling.
O
P
Payment Gateway
The service that captures card or alternative payment details on your behalf, authorises them with the issuer, and hands you a charge or token.
PCI DSS— Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
A security standard that any business handling card payments must comply with. Sets controls for storing, processing and transmitting cardholder data.
Prompt Engineering
The practice of designing inputs to an LLM — system prompts, instructions, examples, structure — to produce reliable, well-shaped outputs.
PSD2— Revised Payment Services Directive
EU regulation that mandates Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for most online card payments and opens bank APIs for licensed third parties.
PWA— Progressive Web App
A website that uses service workers, a manifest and modern browser APIs to behave like a native app — installable, offline-capable and re-engageable.
R
RAG— Retrieval-Augmented Generation
An LLM pattern that retrieves relevant documents from your own data at query time and feeds them into the prompt, grounding answers in your facts.
REST— Representational State Transfer
An architectural style for web APIs that models resources as URLs and uses HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to act on them.
S
Server Component
A React component that renders only on the server, returning serialised UI to the client without shipping its JavaScript to the browser.
Service Worker
A browser-resident script that sits between your site and the network, enabling offline support, caching strategies and push notifications.
Shopify Plus
Shopify's enterprise tier, offering higher limits, advanced checkout customisation, multi-store organisations, scripts/functions and B2B features.
SPA— Single Page Application
A web app that loads one HTML shell and then renders all subsequent views in the browser via JavaScript, without full page reloads.
SSG— Static Site Generation
Pre-rendering every page to HTML at build time so the CDN can serve them as static files — fast, cheap and cacheable everywhere.
SSR— Server-Side Rendering
Generating the HTML for a page on the server for each request, then sending it fully formed to the browser before hydration takes over.
Storefront API
A read-mostly GraphQL or REST API that exposes products, collections, cart and checkout to a custom storefront front-end.
Subscription Billing
Recurring billing models — weekly, monthly, annual — with retries, dunning, prorations and lifecycle events that turn one-time customers into recurring revenue.
V
W
Web Component
A native browser standard for building reusable, encapsulated custom HTML elements that work in any framework or no framework at all.
Web Worker
A browser API that runs JavaScript on a background thread, so heavy computation doesn't block the main thread and freeze the UI.
Webhook
An HTTP callback another system fires at your endpoint when an event happens — the standard way platforms push real-time updates without polling.
Workflow Automation
Wiring together apps, triggers and actions to remove manual steps from a business process. Tools range from no-code (Zapier, n8n) to custom code.