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; when 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

Volusion’s Affiliate Program: http://manual.volusion.com/Affiliate-System/19.htm

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)

(The speed of the connection for your Volusion store is virtually unlimited; the amount of data transmission allowed depends on solution size)

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, Mozilla Firefox, 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

(Each of Volusion’s solutions include Color Swatch functionality)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

all aspects of interaction a business has with its customer, whether sales or service related

(Each of Volusion’s solutions include built-in CRM tools)

Data Export

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

Volusion’s Import/Export: http://manual.volusion.com/Importing-Exporting/24.htm

Data Import

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

Volusion’s Import/Export: http://manual.volusion.com/Importing-Exporting/24.htm

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)

Volusion’s Automated Drop-Shipping: http://manual.volusion.com/Vendors-Drop-Shipping/11.htm

Electronic Business (E-Business)

the process of conducting business electronically or over the internet

Electronic Commerce (E-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

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

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

Volusion’s E-mail Marketing: http://www.volusion.com/manual/newsletters.asp

Encryption

the encryption of data for security purposes

Flash

a graphics animation computer software product

Volusion’s Flash Design Services: http://volusion.com/web-design-flash-anim.asp

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

a commonly used method for sending files between two computers over the internet

(Each of Volusion’s solutions include full FTP Access)

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 particular object has been viewed or downloaded)

Home Page

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

Volusion’s Homepage Design Services: http://volusion.com/web-design-homepage-design.asp

Hosting

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

(Volusion uses Premium RackSpace Hosting)

Hyperlink

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

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

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)

(Each of Volusion’s Solutions include full HTML Access)

Keyword

a word or phrase used by a search engine to seek out relevant web information
(see Search Engine)

Live Support (Live Chat)

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

Free Volusion Live Chat: http://volusion.com/livechat_software.asp

Logo

a trademark designed for easy and specific recognition of a company

Volusion’s Logo Design Services: http://volusion.com/web-design-logo-design.asp

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)

Merchant Account Terminology: http://www.volusion.com/merchant-service-terminology.asp

Volusion’s Merchant Account Services: http://volusion.com/merchant-account-credit-card-processing.asp

Meta Tags

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
(see Search Engine)

Newsletter

an informative letter e-mailed to subscribers

Volusion’s Newsletter Services: http://manual.volusion.com/Newsletters/16.htm

Opt-in E-mails

promotional e-mails sent only to people who specifically request them, the 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 that enables any individual or business with an e-mail address to securely and quickly send and receive payments via the Internet

Volusion is integrated with PayPal: http://volusion.com/merchant_service.asp

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

Volusion’s POS System: http://manual.volusion.com/Placing-Orders/12.htm

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)

Volusion’s PO System: http://manual.volusion.com/Vendors-Drop-Shipping/11.htm

Return on Investment (ROI) Tracking

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

Volusion’s ROI Tracking: http://manual.volusion.com/Analytics-Reporting/23.htm

Search Engine

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

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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

How to become SEO Friendly within Volusion: http://manual.volusion.com/Search-Engine-Optimization/20.htm

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate

provides secure communications on the Internet, ensuring that private credit card information sent via the web is safe and encrypted

Volusion’s SSL Certificate: http://volusion.com/ssl_certificate.asp

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

(Each of Volusion’s solutions include a Shopping Cart and View Cart functionality, giving users the ability to see items in their cart before a purchase is made)

Subdomain

a domain that is part of a larger domain name
(Ex. shop.yoursitename.com)

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

Volusion’s Template Design Services: http://volusion.com/web-design-template-design.asp

Volusion’s Paid Templates: http://ecommerce-templates.volusion.com/

Volusion’s Free Templates: http://www.volusion.com/web-design-templates.asp

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 the user accesses the application and ends when the user quits the 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.)

Volusion’s Analytics and Reporting: http://manual.volusion.com/Analytics-Reporting/23.htm

Wish List

a list of products one plans to purchase at a later time

(Each of Volusion’s solutions include a Wish List)

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