Glossary.
The terms that come up in payments, search and supply, in plain English.
Payments
- Merchant account
- An account that lets a business accept card payments, held with a payment processor and its sponsor bank. More
- Payment aggregator
- A provider such as Stripe, PayPal or Square that approves accounts instantly under one master account, and reviews them afterwards. More
- High-risk merchant account
- A merchant account for business types processors expect to have more chargebacks or regulatory questions, usually with closer underwriting and reserves. More
- Chargeback
- A payment reversed by the cardholder's bank after a customer disputes it. Too many put a merchant account at risk.
- Chargeback ratio
- Chargebacks as a share of transactions in a period. Processors set limits, and going over them can lead to fines or closure.
- Reserve
- Part of a merchant's sales held back by the processor for a period, to cover future refunds and chargebacks.
- MATCH list
- A list card networks keep of merchants whose accounts were closed for specific reasons. Being on it makes a new account harder to get.
- Backup processor
- A second processor already connected to your checkout, so a closure or outage at the first one becomes a switch instead of a shutdown. More
- Underwriting
- The processor's review of a business before approving a merchant account: what it sells, its website and its processing history.
Search & AI
- SEO
- Search engine optimisation: the work that gets a website's pages ranked in Google and other search engines. More
- GEO
- Generative engine optimisation: making a business easy for AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to understand, cite and recommend. More
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-written summaries shown above some search results, drawn from web pages it considers reliable.
- Structured data
- Code on a page (schema.org) that tells search engines and AI tools exactly what the page is about: a business, a service, an FAQ, a product.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at a site's root that summarises the site for AI assistants, with links to its key pages.
- Google Business Profile
- A business's listing on Google Search and Maps, with its address, hours, reviews and photos. The core of local SEO.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's measures of how fast and stable a page feels to visitors. Part of how pages are ranked.
Supply & fulfillment
- 3PL
- Third-party logistics: a partner that stores your stock, packs your orders and ships them for you. More
- Dropshipping
- Selling products your supplier ships directly to your customer, so you hold no stock. More
- Kitting
- Assembling several items into one package or bundle before it ships.
- White label
- An existing product sold under your brand, with your label on it. More
- Private label
- A product made for your brand to an agreed specification. More
- Factory-direct
- Ordering straight from the manufacturer, usually in large quantities, for the lowest unit cost. More
- MOQ
- Minimum order quantity: the smallest order a supplier will accept for a product.
- Lot number
- The identifier for a batch made together. It links each unit to that batch's documentation.
- COA
- Certificate of analysis: a lab document reporting test results for a specific lot. More
- HPLC
- High-performance liquid chromatography: a lab method commonly used to measure the purity of a sample, reported on many COAs.
- Research use only (RUO)
- A label meaning a material is supplied for laboratory research, not for human or veterinary use. More
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