BOOMER ENTREPRENEUR

BOOMER E-TERM GLOSSARY

The following information is to help understand some of the terms and abbreviations used on the Internet and in e-commerce. Please submit any new word or term that you feel should be on this glossary to john@boomer-entrepreneur.com for consideration. Thanks. John.

Click letter of term you for which you are searching.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A __________

APP-An affiliate program provider. This is a website or company that provides services to sellers and affiliates to facilitate transactions. When a person clicks on an affiliate link to purchase an item, the potential buyer is routed through the APP where the sending affiliate is identified. If the prospective buyer becomes an actual buyer, the APP will handle the communication to the seller, credit the sellers account for the sale, and credit the affiliate's account for the commission. On a set schedule, the APP will send payments to the seller and the affiliate.

ASP – (Application service provider) – a company that hosts applications (software) on its own servers, and lets customers access them via the web. The provider may charge a fee for the service.

ASP – (Active Server Pages) – a technology used to create interactive web pages.

Affiliate Marketing Program Provider - See APP.

Affiliate Program Provider - See APP.

Autoresponder - a computer program that automatically returns a predetermined message to anyone who sends an email to a particular Internet address. The more sophisticated autoresponders send the email reply. It then creates a record of the originator of the email. It can be set up to send follow up emails to the originator on a pre-determined schedule.

B __________

B2B – (Business to business) - commerce that takes place between businesses (wholesale). The opposite is B2C, or business-to-consumer commerce.

B2C – (Business to consumer) - commerce that take place between a business and the end user (consumer - retail). The opposite is B2B, or business-to-business commerce.

Bookmark - a designated ocation on a web page that can be the location where a hyperlink positions the viewer on the page (hyperlink target). See hyperlink.

Blog - On the Internet, a blog (short for weblog) is a personal journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.

C __________

CGI – (Common Gateway Interface) - a computer program, or script, that allows web servers to forward requests for processing to other programs, which then return their results to the web server. CGI scripts are commonly used on web pages to manage form submissions.

CPA – (Cost per action) - term used in online advertising that refers to the fee paid by an advertiser for each predefined action taken as a result of an advertisement. An example is a mortgage company may pay $5 per application submitted using an online application form.

CRM - (Customer Relations Management) - the process of managing all aspects of the interaction between a company and its customers. CRM controls the relationships with the customer from prospecting through sales and longterm follow-up. There are many CRM software packages available for managing customer relations.

CSS - (Cascading Style Sheets) - Language used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted.

CTR – (Click through ratio) - the ratio of the number of times a user clicks on an online advertisement divided by the number of impressions (viewers who view the advertisement). The CTR is the measure of the effectiveness of the advertisement (the higher, the better).

ClickBank - A affiliate program provider (APP) that manages sales of primarily electronic products. See definition of APP.

Commission Junction - A affiliate program provider (APP) that manages sales of a wide variety products. See definition of APP.

Conversion rate - the ratio of orders to clicks on an advertisement. An example: - 100 people visit your website, and two people place orders, your conversion rate is 2 percent. Statistics from www.e-tailing.com show that the top 100 Internet retailers reported as follows: rates between 1% and 1.9% (22%), rates between 2% and 2.9% (20%) and only 20 achieved rates over 5%. Conversion rates are also used to measure other actions (signing up for a newsletter or completing an electronic application).

D __________

Drop shipping - an arrangement where a mail-order or Internet merchant accepts orders for products, and then pays a manufacturer or distributor to ship the product directly to the customer.

Dynamic Pricing - variable pricing between the buyer and seller as opposed to the traditional fixed pricing. Dynamic pricing includes auctions, reverse auctions (where buyers set the price they are willing to pay and then sellers bid for their business), trading exchanges, price matching, quantity pricing, and group pricing systems. Typically these systems will better reflect the true market value of the product involved. Examples of dynamic pricing in e-commerce today include eBay and Priceline.com.

E __________

e- prefix to any word to indicate that it is electronic or having to do with the Internet. Example: e-tailer. ebook, eBay.

ebook - a book that is stored in digitgal form and can be downloaded and read on the computer.

e-tailer – one who uses Internet to sell products.

H __________

HTML – (Hypertext Markup Language) - the authoring language used to create web pages. Originally, web page authors had to write in HTML to create sites. An improvement is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. These include Frontpage and Dreamweaver which allow people to create web pages without knowing HTML.

Hyperlink - (or link) - a hyperlink, when clicked, will transport a user to another location either on the same page or another page.

I __________

Impressions – the number of times that an advertisement or web page is presented to a viewer. Another term is ad view.

Interstitial - An online advertisement that appears in a new browser window while the user is waiting for another page to load. Popup ads are included in this category. Interstitial ads are the preferred way of delivering ads that contain large graphics, streaming media, or applets since they load in the background.

L __________

LAMP Hosting - web hosting service based on open source solutions (Linux operating system, Apache server, MySQL database, and PHP programming language).

Link - (or hyperlink) - a link, when clicked, will transport a user to another location either on the same page or another page. See hyperlink.

M __________

Meta tag - HTML tag that provides information about a web page, such as its title, description, and subject keywords. Meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Meta tags are used by search engines to read the tags and use the information when building their indexes.

O __________

Opt-in - a term used in email marketing and email newsletters where the customer or reader has actively given permission (opted) to receive the emails in question. It is different from Spam, which is an unsolicited email. Opt-in is used since readers are more likely to open and read email that they have asked to receive. A newer trend, "Double opt-in", is gaining popularity. This is where the reader must also confirm permission (usually by replying to a confirmation e-mail). This produces a record of confirmation to prove that the marketer is not a Spammer.

P __________

PHP - is a popular open-source programming language used primarily for developing server-side applications

R __________

RSS - An XML-based protocol used to serve news headlines and weblog entries in a streamlined, organized format that lets users subscribe to "feeds" of their favorite content.

Robot - a program that runs automatically and feeds information to search engines. It is sometimes called a webcrawler or spider.

S __________

SERP – abbreviation for Search Engine Results Page, which is the page of search results displayed in response to a query submitted to a search engine.

SKU – (Stock Keeping Unit)- is a common term in traditional and e-commerce for the unique identifying number to refer to a specific product in inventory or in a catalog.

Spam - electronic junk mail.

Spammer – one who sends electronic junk mail.

SSL - a protocol developed by Netscape to create a secure connection to a server using "public key encryption," to protect data as it travels over the Internet. SSL is now available in the public domain.

Search engine – websites on the Internet that help users find web pages on a given subject. These include Google, AltaVista, Yahoo. The search engines maintain databases of web sites and use programs called "spiders" or "robots" to collect information, which is then indexed by the search engine.

Spider – a program that runs automatically and feeds information to search engines. It is called a spider because it crawls through the Internet. It is sometimes called a webcrawler or a robot.

U __________

UNSPSC – (United Nations Standard Products & Services Code) is a global electronic commerce standard that offers a framework for classifying goods and services. Coding products and services according to a standardized classification convention is helpful for streamlining commerce among companies.

V __________

Viral marketing - on the Internet, a marketing program that passes on the sales message from one contact to another. Hotmail is cited as an example since its sales message is in every email it processes.

W __________

Webcrawler - a program that runs automatically and feeds information to search engines. It is so named because it crawls through the Internet. It is also called a spider or robot. It is also the name of a search engine website.

X __________

XML (Extensible Markup Language) - a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web.