Glossary

Selling online and managing inventory

The words that show up as soon as a business makes, stores, ships, or sells products, online or in a store.

• ERP: Enterprise resource planning. One system where purchasing, inventory, production, sales, and accounting all live, instead of one piece of software for each job. Worth it when the same data gets typed into three different places. Overkill for a business that doesn’t have that problem.
• WMS: Warehouse management system. It knows where every item is and runs receiving, putaway, picking, and shipping. An ERP tells you how many you have. A WMS tells you which aisle they’re in.
• 3PL: Third-party logistics. An outside company that stores your goods, picks and packs your orders, and ships them. You hand over the execution, not the customer relationship.
• Marketplace: An online store where many sellers offer their products under one banner: Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart. You get its traffic, and you play by its rules.
• FBA and FBM: The two ways to ship on Amazon. With FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), your goods are stored at Amazon, which packs and ships them. With FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant), you keep your own inventory and ship it yourself. The first costs storage and fulfillment fees. The second costs time and labour.
• Amazon Seller and Amazon Vendor: Two separate business relationships. As a Seller, you sell directly to the end customer and set your own prices. As a Vendor, you sell wholesale to Amazon, which resells under its own banner and controls the listed price. Vendor is by invitation only.
• SKU: Stock keeping unit. A unique internal code given to each product and each variant. The seller creates it and decides how it works, so two businesses will never have the same SKUs for the same item.
• UPC and GTIN: Universal codes that any retailer and any platform can read. GTIN is the family of codes, and UPC is its 12-digit North American format. You buy them from GS1, unlike a SKU, which you make up yourself.

Managing projects and clients

What you use to keep track of the work, the time, and the people, whether the business sells hours, services, or products.

• Project management: Keeping track of who does what, in what order, by what deadline. A job site, a consulting project, and a product launch all run on the same principles. Only the vocabulary changes.
• Timesheet: The record of hours worked, by person and by project. Useful even if you don’t bill by the hour: without it, there’s no way to know whether a flat fee is making you money.
• Time billing: Turning logged hours into invoices. It gets complicated as soon as there are several rates, non-billable hours, or flat-fee agreements.
• Knowledge base: The place where the answers to the questions that keep coming back are written down. Inside the company, it saves explaining the same thing to every new employee. Opened up to customers, it cuts down on calls to customer service.
• CRM: Customer relationship management. One file per customer or per sales opportunity, where conversations, follow-ups, and history pile up. It replaces one person’s memory and a bunch of scattered notes.
• Customer service (ticketing): Every incoming request becomes a numbered ticket, assigned to someone, with a status. The point is that no request falls through the cracks.

Rent, buy, or build

Three ways to get software, three ways of paying for it.

• Rent (SaaS): Software as a service. You pay a monthly subscription to use software hosted somewhere else. Quick to get going, a cost that never stops, and you depend on the vendor for your data and for where the product goes next.
• Buy (perpetual licence): You pay once for the right to use the software, often installed on your own equipment. The whole cost hits up front, and updates and support are paid for separately.
• Build (custom): The software is developed for one specific need. It does exactly what you want, you’re the only one who owns it, and the upkeep is yours too.
• Low-code and no-code: Platforms that let you build a tool without writing code, or close to it. No-code puts together blocks that already exist. Low-code lets you add code where the blocks fall short. It’s a middle ground between custom-built and off the shelf.

Data and automation

How information moves from one system to another, or gets stuck in one of them.

• Single source of truth: The principle that every piece of data has one official place where it lives. When a price, an address, or an inventory level exists in four places, nobody knows which one is right.
• Data silo: Information locked inside a system that doesn’t talk to any other. Each silo works fine on its own, but nobody can see the big picture anymore.
• API: Application programming interface. The official door two programs use to exchange information without anyone stepping in. When a vendor says their tool “has an API,” they’re telling you it can be connected to everything else.
• CSV: Comma-separated values. A text file where each line is a record and each value is separated by a comma. Not pretty, but universal: when two systems have nothing else in common, they talk to each other in CSV.
• Automation: Having a machine do a task that used to be done by hand. A trigger, a condition, an action. The best candidates are tasks that are repetitive, predictable, and boring.
• Dashboard: The numbers that matter, up to date, in one place. It’s only as good as the data feeding it: a dashboard hooked up to silos mostly shows you contradictions.

Reaching your customers

The words that help you understand how customers search, and where they come in from.

• SEO: Search engine optimization. All the content and structure choices that make a page show up in Google’s results when someone searches for what you offer.
• GEO: Generative engine optimization. Same goal as SEO, different mechanics: getting cited by AI chat assistants, which answer the question directly instead of handing you a list of links.
• Search volume: How many times a phrase gets searched each month. It separates what you think customers are looking for from what they’re actually looking for.
• Search intent: What the person really wants when they type their search: to understand, to compare, or to buy. Two phrases with the same volume can bring in visitors at completely different stages.
• Pain point: The concrete problem that pushes someone to look for a solution. It’s put in the customer’s own words: nobody searches for “integrated management system,” they search for “I’m losing orders.”

Working methodically

The vocabulary of figuring out the problem and setting things up, the part that comes before choosing any tool at all.

• SOP: Standard operating procedure. The official way to do a task, written down so someone else gets the same result. It turns one person’s know-how into the company’s know-how.
• Workflow: The sequence of steps in a process, from what sets it off to the end result, spelling out who steps in and when. The SOP tells you how to do one step. The workflow tells you how the steps fit together.
• Flowchart: A picture of a workflow: boxes, arrows, decision points. Plenty of people in Quebec call it an organigramme, but in French that word also means a company’s org chart, which is why the right name matters.
• Bottleneck: The step that sets the pace for everything else. Improving the other steps changes nothing: until the bottleneck is dealt with, total output stays the same.
• Intranet: The company’s internal website: procedures, forms, announcements, reference documents, open to employees only. It replaces the shared folder nobody can ever find.
• Employee onboarding: A new person’s structured path into the job: accounts to create, training to give, documents to sign, first tasks. Written once, it works for every hire. Otherwise, it gets rebuilt from scratch every time.
• KPI: Key performance indicator. The handful of measures that tell you whether a procedure gets the result you expected, not just whether it was followed.
• ROI: Return on investment. The calculation that compares what a change cost with what it brought in, in money, in time won back, or in mistakes avoided. It justifies a project before it starts, and judges it once it’s delivered.