The Amazon & D2C Glossary
Every term, acronym, and metric a founder meets on Amazon — explained the way we’d explain it to a client. No jargon to decode jargon.
Deep-dive pages are rolling out letter by letter — terms without one yet show their one-line definition. Open any term for the full page.
0–9 5 terms
1P (First Party) Glossary
1P (First Party) is the wholesale route onto Amazon: you sell your inventory to Amazon itself through Vendor Central, and Amazon becomes the retailer.
3P (Third-Party Seller) Glossary
3P (Third-Party Seller) is you, the independent merchant, selling directly to shoppers on the Amazon marketplace through Seller Central.
3PL (Third-Party Logistics) Glossary
A 3PL (Third-Party Logistics provider) is an external warehousing and fulfilment partner: the company that receives your freight, stores it, picks, packs, and ships it — whether the destination is a customer’s door or an Amazon fulfilment centre.
3-Year Joint Business Plan (3Y JBP) Glossary
A 3Y JBP — a 3-Year Joint Business Plan — is a 36-month wholesale agreement between a 1P vendor and Amazon’s retail division.
3PS (Third-Party Service) Glossary
A 3PS (Third-Party Service) is any external provider doing operational work for your Amazon business outside Amazon’s own ecosystem: logistics partners, software tools, tax compliance firms, reimbursement services, ad agencies.
A 49 terms
A2Z (A-to-Z Guarantee) Glossary
The A-to-Z Guarantee (A2Z) is Amazon’s buyer-protection program covering orders from third-party sellers.
A9 Glossary
A9 is the search-and-ranking algorithm that decides what a shopper sees when they type something into Amazon.
AA (Amazon Advertising) Glossary
Amazon Advertising (AA) is the platform’s pay-per-click ad suite — Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and the programmatic tiers above them.
AB (Amazon Business) Glossary
Amazon Business (AB) is the B2B layer of the marketplace: verified businesses, institutions, and government buyers purchasing with business-only pricing, quantity discounts, tax-exempt workflows, and procurement documentation.
AB GV (Amazon Business Glance Views) Glossary
AB GV (Amazon Business Glance Views) counts the detail-page loads by verified corporate buyers on Amazon Business — B2B traffic, isolated from regular consumer traffic. It’s the B2B equivalent of the sessions metric you already watch on the retail side.
ABVP (Amazon Brand View Pro) Glossary
ABVP (Amazon Brand View Pro) is a premium, paid analytics platform from Amazon Ads that measures a brand’s total presence on Amazon: share of voice, shopper engagement, and organic versus paid performance across the retail and advertising ecosystem.
Acapulco Glossary
Acapulco is a Vendor Central shipping arrangement: it merges your standing purchase orders into full-pallet or full-truckload loads bound for specific Amazon facilities.
Account Deactivation Glossary
Account deactivation is Amazon switching your selling privileges off: listings removed from the catalog, payouts frozen, sponsored campaigns halted.
A+ Content Glossary
A+ Content is the rich description section brand-registered sellers get where the plain-text product description used to be: comparison charts, lifestyle imagery, spec modules, and brand-story blocks — full-width graphics that answer the questions your bullets didn’t.
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) Glossary
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) is ad spend divided by ad sales — the percentage of your advertising revenue that went back out the door as advertising cost.
ACT (Amazon Customer Traffic) Glossary
ACT (Amazon Customer Traffic) is the total count of unique shoppers landing on your detail pages — organic search visitors, paid ad clicks, and external referrals rolled into one number. It’s the top-of-funnel measure of how visible your catalog actually is.
ACU (Average Cost per Unit) Glossary
ACU (Average Cost per Unit) is your true landed cost per item: everything spent to produce, prep, and transport one saleable unit to a warehouse, divided by the units received. Manufacturing, inbound freight, customs duties, inspection, and prep fees — all in the denominator, none forgotten.
ADV (Average Daily Volume) Glossary
ADV (Average Daily Volume) is your product’s daily sales velocity: total units sold in a period divided by the days in that period. The simplest metric in the business — and the one every other inventory decision is built on.
Aged Inventory Glossary
Aged Inventory is stock that has sat in Amazon fulfilment centres past 180 days. The classification is Amazon’s way of saying your inventory has stopped being an asset and started being a tenant — one that charges rent.
Aged Inventory Surcharge Glossary
The Aged Inventory Surcharge is Amazon’s fee on stock stored in its network past roughly 181 days — escalating by age tier, charged monthly, per cubic foot, on top of standard storage fees.
AGL (Amazon Global Logistics) Glossary
AGL (Amazon Global Logistics) is Amazon’s own cross-border freight service: book at the factory — mostly China and Vietnam — ship ocean or air directly into FBA or AWD, with customs clearance and delivery appointments handled inside one portal in Seller Central.
AGS (Amazon Global Store) Glossary
AGS (Amazon Global Store) is a program that lists your domestic FBA products on international Amazon marketplaces — Amazon handles translation, pricing, and the cross-border order against your local inventory, buying from you and reselling internationally.
AHD (Account Health Dashboard) Glossary
The AHD (Account Health Dashboard) is your compliance cockpit inside Seller Central: Order Defect Rate, late shipments, pre-fulfilment cancellations, valid tracking, policy violations, and IP complaints — each with its threshold, each color-coded by how close you are to the edge.
AHR (Account Health Rating) Glossary
The AHR (Account Health Rating) is Amazon’s 0–1,000 score summarizing how safely you behave as a seller — defects, violations, and compliance aggregated into one number, tracked over a rolling window, with a threshold below which automated enforcement begins.
AITBB (Anything In The Buy Box) Glossary
AITBB (Anything In The Buy Box) measures whether the Featured Offer slot on your listing is occupied at all — by anyone. It’s the health check for the buy button itself: is there an Add to Cart on this page right now, yes or no?
Amazon Bazaar Glossary
Amazon Bazaar is Amazon’s budget-shopping storefront for emerging markets — Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia — running the same sub-$10 catalog engine as Amazon Haul under a different brand.
ABA (Amazon Brand Analytics) Glossary
Amazon Brand Analytics (ABA) is the first-party data suite inside Seller Central for brand-registered sellers: Top Search Terms, Search Query Performance, alternate-purchase behaviour, and demographics — actual shopper behavior recorded by Amazon, not a tool’s estimate.
AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) Glossary
AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) is Amazon’s clean-room analytics environment: a privacy-safe space where advertisers join Amazon’s ad-event data with their own first-party data and run SQL-level analysis across the full customer journey.
AMG (Amazon Media Group) Glossary
AMG (Amazon Media Group) is the legacy name for Amazon’s managed-service advertising division — the enterprise team that ran display, video, and custom campaigns for big budgets.
AMP (Amazon Marketing Package) Glossary
AMP (Amazon Marketing Package) is a promotional bundle 1P vendors buy through Vendor Central for major retail moments — Prime Day, Q4, Back-to-School.
AMZ, AMZN or AZ Glossary
AMZ, AMZN, and AZ are all shorthand for Amazon. AMZ is the casual, community-wide abbreviation — forums, Slack groups, seller chats. AMZN is the official NASDAQ ticker, used in financial contexts. AZ is the lazy-quick form that shows up in filenames, dashboards, and internal shorthand.
AMZL (Amazon Logistics) Glossary
AMZL (Amazon Logistics) is Amazon’s in-house last-mile delivery network — the navy-blue vans and flex drivers that move packages from fulfilment centres to doorsteps. It exists so Amazon doesn’t depend entirely on UPS, FedEx, and national posts for the delivery promise.
AMZNCC (Amazon Carton Content Code) Glossary
The AMZNCC (Amazon Carton Content Code) is the barcode applied to each carton you send to Amazon, encoding exactly which SKUs and quantities are inside that specific box.
Andon Cord Glossary
The Andon Cord is Amazon’s emergency stop for problem listings, borrowed from lean manufacturing (where pulling a physical cord halts the assembly line).
AOC (Amazon Owned Carrier) Glossary
AOC (Amazon Owned Carrier) is a vendor-side Direct Fulfilment term: when Amazon buys the goods but you ship them from your own warehouse, Amazon chooses and dispatches its own carrier to collect the order from you. Amazon controls the delivery leg; you control the stock.
AOV (Average Order Value) Glossary
AOV (Average Order Value) is revenue divided by orders — what the average buyer spends each time they buy. On Amazon it reads mostly through multipacks, bundles, and B2B quantity tiers; on your D2C site it’s the lever bundles, upsells, and free-shipping thresholds pull.
AP (Amazon Posts) Glossary
Amazon Posts is a free, image-based browsing feed for brand-registered sellers — social-media-style lifestyle posts that surface on detail pages, category feeds, and the Posts surface. Shoppers tap through to your products; you pay nothing for the impressions.
APB (Amazon Private Brands) Glossary
APB (Amazon Private Brands) is the portfolio of product lines Amazon owns itself — Amazon Basics, Solimo, Amazon Elements and siblings — built on marketplace data and positioned to capture proven demand at sharp prices.
API (Application Programming Interface) Glossary
An API (Application Programming Interface) is the set of official connections that let software talk to Amazon directly — on the seller side, the Selling Partner API (SP-API): pulling orders, inventory, and financial data; pushing prices, stock levels, and listing changes, without a…
APR (Annual Percentage Rate) Glossary
APR (Annual Percentage Rate) is the true yearly cost of borrowed money — interest plus mandatory fees, standardized so different financing offers can be compared honestly.
AR (Augmented Reality) Glossary
AR (Augmented Reality) on Amazon is the “view in your room” (or “try on”) feature: shoppers point their phone camera and see the product rendered at true scale in their own space — the couch on their floor, the artwork on their wall, the glasses on their face.
ARA (Amazon Retail Analytics) Glossary
ARA (Amazon Retail Analytics) is the 1P vendor’s reporting suite inside Vendor Central: sales, inventory, traffic (glance views), and marketing performance by ASIN — the wholesale-side counterpart of a 3P seller’s business reports.
ARAP (Amazon Retail Analytics Premium) Glossary
ARAP (Amazon Retail Analytics Premium) was the paid, subscription-tier upgrade of Amazon’s vendor analytics — deeper traffic breakdowns, conversion trends, demographics, path-to-purchase, and cross-ASIN comparisons.
ARN (Amazon Reference Number) Glossary
The ARN (Amazon Reference Number) is the unique tracking ID Amazon assigns to every inbound shipment — the key linking your freight, its paperwork, and Amazon’s receiving records into one auditable thread.
ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) Glossary
The ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) is the 10-character alphanumeric ID Amazon assigns to every unique product in its catalog — the primary key of the entire marketplace. Your listing, reviews, rank, ads, and inventory all hang off it.
ASN (Advanced Shipment Notification) Glossary
An ASN (Advanced Shipment Notification) is the electronic manifest sent to a warehouse before freight physically arrives — what’s coming, in which cartons, in what quantities, from which carrier, against which reference.
ASP (Average Selling Price) Glossary
ASP (Average Selling Price) is your mean revenue per unit sold over a period — the simple truth about what your products actually fetch, as opposed to what the price list says.
ATC (Add to Cart) Glossary
ATC (Add to Cart) counts how often shoppers put your product in their cart — regardless of whether they finish the purchase. It’s the mid-funnel intent signal: stronger than a page view, weaker than an order, and diagnostic gold in the gap between those two.
ATS (Amazon Transportation Services) Glossary
ATS (Amazon Transportation Services) is Amazon’s middle-mile line-haul network — the trucks moving freight between its fulfilment centres, sortation hubs, cross-docks, and supplier facilities.
AVN (Annual Vendor Negotiation) Glossary
The AVN (Annual Vendor Negotiation) is the yearly sit-down between a 1P vendor and Amazon — typically led by your Vendor Manager — where the coming twelve months’ trade terms are set: cost prices, co-op funding, freight allowances, damage terms, chargeback thresholds,…
AVS (Amazon Vendor Services) Glossary
AVS (Amazon Vendor Services) is Amazon’s invitation-only premium support program for 1P vendors: a dedicated Brand Specialist — an Amazon employee assigned to your account — who works your catalog, operations, and marketing inside Amazon on your behalf.
AW (Amazon Warehouse) Glossary
Amazon Warehouse (AW) is Amazon’s storefront for returned, open-box, and used goods — items that came back, got inspected and graded (Like New, Very Good, Good, Acceptable), and now sell at a discount on their own offer slot beside (or instead of) new inventory.
AWD (Amazon Warehousing and Distribution) Glossary
AWD (Amazon Warehousing and Distribution) is Amazon’s upstream bulk-storage and auto-replenishment service: inventory sits in Amazon’s wholesale-tier storage outside FBA, and transfers flow automatically into fulfilment centres as demand pulls them — sidestepping FBA…
AWS (Amazon Web Services) Glossary
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is Amazon’s cloud computing platform — the infrastructure layer a large share of the internet runs on.
B 28 terms
B2B Glossary
B2B (Business-to-Business) is selling to businesses instead of individual shoppers — on Amazon, that means the Amazon Business program: verified companies, institutions, hospitals, and government buyers purchasing with their own pricing, invoicing, and tax-exempt workflows.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer) Glossary
B2C (Business-to-Consumer) is the default mode of Amazon selling: one business, one shopper, one cart — products bought for personal use, at retail prices, in single or small quantities.
B2R (Born to Run) Glossary
B2R (Born to Run) is a Vendor Central program that lets a 1P vendor propose the opening purchase order for a new launch — instead of waiting for Amazon’s conservative algorithms to decide your product deserves shelf space.
Backend Search Terms Glossary
Backend Search Terms are the hidden keyword field behind your listing — roughly 250 bytes of indexing real estate shoppers never see but A9 reads.
Batteries Compliance Glossary
Batteries Compliance is Amazon’s safety-documentation regime for any product containing or being a battery: UN 38.3 test summaries for lithium cells, UL 4200A certifications for battery-containing devices, and dangerous-goods data through the hazmat workflow.
BAU (Business as Usual) Glossary
BAU (Business as Usual) is the baseline rhythm of the operation — routine orders, standard replenishment, always-on ads, weekly reporting — the business as it runs when nothing special is happening.
BB (Buy Box) Glossary
BB (Buy Box) is the seller shorthand for the Featured Offer — the buyable offer box on a detail page where Add to Cart and Buy Now live.
BD (Best Deal) Glossary
A BD (Best Deal) is Amazon’s scheduled promotional slot — typically a week-long discounted placement on the Deals page, browsable by shoppers hunting for exactly this.
Best Seller Glossary
The Best Seller badge is Amazon’s orange #1 marker — awarded hourly to the top-selling product in each category and subcategory node. It appears in search results and on the detail page, signaling to shoppers: this is the one everyone else bought.
BFW (Black Friday Week) Glossary
BFW (Black Friday Week) is Amazon’s November discount marathon — the multi-day event running from mid-November through Cyber Monday that opens the Q4 endgame. Surging traffic, aggressive deals, peak ad competition: the marketplace’s demand at its annual maximum.
BIL (Build International Listings) Glossary
BIL (Build International Listings) is Seller Central’s global-expansion tool: define one source marketplace, connect target marketplaces, and your listings, pricing rules, and inventory sync flow outward automatically — a change at home propagates abroad.
BISS (Business, Industrial and Scientific Supplies) Glossary
BISS (Business, Industrial and Scientific Supplies) is Amazon’s professional-goods category — lab instruments, manufacturing tooling, medical supplies, facility equipment — where the buyers are businesses and the purchasing follows B2B rules: bulk orders, compliance…
BOGO (Buy One Get One) Glossary
BOGO (Buy One Get One) is the promotion format where buying one unit earns another — free or discounted. On Amazon it runs as a promo type (percent-off structured as BOGO, or the free-item promotions social sellers know) and in sellers’ own bundling logic (buy the tool, get the blades).
BOL (Bill of Lading) Glossary
The BOL (Bill of Lading) is freight’s founding document: the contract of carriage, the receipt for goods loaded, and the title-adjacent record of what shipped, from whom, to where, on what terms. Ocean, LTL, truckload — if it moves commercially, a BOL governs it.
Brand Gating Glossary
Brand Gating is the enforcement layer that stops unauthorized sellers from listing under a brand — sellers must apply (and pay per-brand approval fees) to sell gated branded products, and only the brand’s permission or genuine-invoice wholesale chains get through.
Brand Registry (Amazon Brand Registry) Glossary
Brand Registry is Amazon’s program for trademark owners: verify your active or pending mark, and the platform confirms you as the brand’s authoritative voice — unlocking the tools that separate brands from resellers.
Brand Representative Glossary
A Brand Representative is the authorized-user structure inside Brand Registry: the designated humans (and their permission levels) who may act for the brand — manage detail pages, access Brand Analytics, run enforcement, publish A+ content.
Brand Store Glossary
A Brand Store is your multipage, ad-free storefront inside Amazon — brand-registered sellers design it themselves: homepage, category pages, product collections, your story and imagery.
Browse Node Glossary
A Browse Node is the numeric ID for a category or subcategory in Amazon’s product tree — Kitchen → Cookware → Skillets, each level a node.
BS (Brand Specialist) Glossary
A BS (Brand Specialist) is an Amazon employee assigned to support a vendor or strategic seller — associated mainly with the AVS and SAS programs.
BSR (Best Seller Rank) Glossary
BSR (Best Seller Rank) is the sales-rank number every product carries in its category — lower is better, recalculated continuously (roughly hourly) from recent sales.
BTP (Brand Tailored Promotions) Glossary
BTP (Brand Tailored Promotions) lets brand-registered sellers aim exclusive discounts at specific audiences — brand followers, recent cart abandoners, past purchasers, high-spend customers — visible only to them, on the detail page and at checkout.
BTR (Born to Run) Glossary
BTR (Born to Run) is Amazon’s vendor program for launching new products with a substantial upfront purchase order: the vendor nominates a launch quantity and guarantees the sell-through; Amazon buys the inventory for an initial window (commonly ~10 weeks) instead of ordering its…
BTS (Back to School) Glossary
BTS (Back to School) is the June-through-September demand season around school and college restarts — supplies, electronics, dorm furnishings, apparel, and everything else a restart consumes. For affected categories it’s the year’s second-biggest concentration after Q4.
Bundle Glossary
A Bundle is multiple complementary products combined into one offer at one price — sold as its own ASIN with its own listing. The camera kit with the case and memory card; the skincare routine in one box; the beginner’s everything-set. Bundling is order-value strategy made physical.
Buy Box Glossary
The Buy Box — formally the Featured Offer — is the buyable offer on a product detail page: the box with Add to Cart and Buy Now.
BWP (Buy with Prime) Glossary
Buy with Prime (BWP) puts Prime on YOUR website: shoppers on your D2C store check out with their Prime account and get Amazon-grade delivery — fast shipping, easy returns — fulfilled from your FBA inventory. Amazon’s trust infrastructure, wearing your brand’s clothes.
BWS (Beer, Wine & Spirits) Glossary
BWS (Beer, Wine & Spirits) is Amazon’s alcohol category — among the most heavily gated, regulated, and jurisdiction-dependent verticals on the platform.
C 43 terms
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) Glossary
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is the full cost of winning one new customer: all advertising spend, promotional discounts, and marketing expenses over a period, divided by the new customers gained in that period.
CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) Glossary
CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) is the smoothed annual growth rate of a metric over multiple years — the constant rate at which something would have grown from its starting value to its ending value if it had compounded steadily.
CARP Glossary
CARP (Carrier Appointment Request Portal) is Amazon’s scheduling system for inbound freight: carriers and vendors use it to book and manage delivery appointments at fulfillment centers before a truck ever shows up.
Category Page Glossary
A Category Page is Amazon’s browsing surface for a product category — the page shoppers land on when they click “Kitchen & Dining” or filter through “Beauty → Skin Care.” It shows a grid of products refined by filters (brand, price, rating),…
CCC (Cash Conversion Cycle) Glossary
CCC (Cash Conversion Cycle) is the number of days between paying for inventory and getting that money back as sales revenue: cash out to supplier, stock in transit and on shelves, cash back from customers. It measures how long each rupee or dollar is trapped in the pipeline.
Chargeback Glossary
A chargeback (Amazon vendor/seller operations sense) is a financial penalty deducted from your account for operational non-compliance — late PO confirmations, missing ASNs, carton labeling errors, appointment misses.
Child ASIN Glossary
A Child ASIN is the individual, purchasable variant inside a parent listing — one specific size, color, or flavor, with its own ASIN, its own inventory, and its own price. The parent is the family; the children are what actually go in carts.
Chime (Amazon Chime) Glossary
Amazon Chime is Amazon’s communications platform — and for sellers, the place where identity-verification video interviews happen.
CIV (Customer Instock Value) Glossary
CIV (Customer Instock Value) is the estimated dollar value of your in-stock inventory as seen by Amazon Retail — a 1P-vendor KPI that weighs availability, price, and demand velocity to express how much “ready-to-buy value” your catalog currently presents to customers.
CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) Glossary
CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is the total profit a single customer generates across the entire relationship — first order, repeats, subscriptions, add-ons — not just the transaction that introduced them.
CM (Contribution Margin) Glossary
CM (Contribution Margin) is what’s left of a sale after every variable cost of that sale: COGS, Amazon fees, fulfilment, shipping, returns, and the ad spend that bought the click.
COE (Centre of Excellence) Glossary
A COE (Centre of Excellence) is a concentrated team of specialists that builds standards, tools, and repeatable processes for one domain — supply chain, advertising, customer experience, compliance — and spreads that capability across the wider organization.
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) Glossary
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is what your product costs you to get sellable: manufacturing plus freight, duties, and inbound logistics to your warehouse or Amazon’s — the landed cost per unit.
Compact by Design Glossary
Compact by Design is Amazon’s sustainability certification for products whose design removes excess air, water, or packaging — more product per shipment, less waste per unit. Certified items earn the Climate Pledge Friendly badge and, often, a genuinely smaller FBA size tier.
Concessions Glossary
Concessions are refunds or credits issued to customers WITHOUT a return — money given to resolve a complaint: a dented box, a late arrival, a missing accessory.
Contra COGS Glossary
Contra COGS (vendor-side) is the family of allowances — marketing funds, damage allowances, volume rebates, freight contributions — that a 1P vendor agrees to pay Amazon, deducted against the cost of goods.
Co-Op Agreement Glossary
A Co-Op Agreement is the annually negotiated contract clause in a 1P vendor relationship where the vendor agrees to fund part of Amazon’s marketing and operational costs — a percentage-based deduction from invoices that pays for placements, promotions, freight allowances, and…
Co-op or Coop Glossary
Co-op (cooperative marketing, sometimes “automated marketing” in Amazon’s vendor systems) is the 1P practice of Amazon promoting a vendor’s products — display placements, category features, campaign inclusion — with the cost deducted from the…
Coupon (Vendor Powered Coupon or VPC) Glossary
A Coupon (the detail-page, clip-to-save green badge) is Amazon’s self-serve promotion that shows a discount — percentage or fixed amount — on search results and the product page.
CPC (Cost per Click) Glossary
CPC (Cost per Click) is what you pay Amazon each time a shopper clicks your sponsored ad — the unit price of traffic in the PPC auction.
CP (Contribution Profit) Glossary
CP (Contribution Profit) is the absolute dollar profit a product generates after its variable costs — the same logic as contribution margin, expressed in currency instead of percentage.
CP (Cost Price) Glossary
CP (Cost Price) is the wholesale price at which a 1P vendor sells goods to Amazon Retail — the base number Amazon pays before the Contra COGS stack does its subtracting.
CPF (Climate Pledge Friendly) Glossary
CPF (Climate Pledge Friendly) is Amazon’s sustainability program: certified products wear the green-leaf badge on search results and detail pages, and get their own filtered surfaces (the CPF storefront and filter).
CPI (Cost Price Increase) Glossary
CPI (Cost Price Increase) is any rise in what you pay per unit — supplier price hikes, tariff changes, freight inflation. For vendors it’s the formal process of raising Amazon’s cost price; for sellers it’s the margin event that forces repricing decisions downstream.
CPPU (Cost per Purchased Unit) Glossary
CPPU (Cost per Purchased Unit) is total advertising spend divided by total units sold: the ad dollars required to sell one physical item.
CPQ (Case Pack Quantity) Glossary
CPQ (Case Pack Quantity) is the number of units inside one master carton — the physical building block of your supply chain.
CPS (Cost per Sale) Glossary
CPS (Cost per Sale) is ad spend divided by the number of orders it produced — what each sale cost you in advertising.
CR (Confirmation Rate) Glossary
CR (Confirmation Rate) is the percentage of purchase orders or customer orders formally acknowledged within Amazon’s required window. In vendor operations it gauges how reliably you confirm POs; in seller operations it’s part of the order-handling discipline that keeps accounts healthy.
CRAP Glossary
CRAP (Cannot Realise Any Profit) is Amazon’s internal label for products it can’t make money on: negative or thin margins after all costs, expensive to ship relative to value, return-heavy, or simply not selling fast enough.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) Glossary
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is the systematic work of making more of the traffic you already have buy: improving images, copy, pricing presentation, reviews, A+ content — every element between an arrival and a purchase. Same clicks, more orders.
CS (Customer Service) Glossary
CS (Customer Service) on Amazon spans every buyer interaction around the order: pre-purchase questions, delivery issues, product support, returns, refunds, and the reviews and feedback that follow.
CSA (Cost Support Agreement) Glossary
A CSA (Cost Support Agreement) is a formal arrangement where a 1P vendor pays Amazon to bridge an economic gap — funding part of a discount, propping up margin after a price match, or keeping a product from negative profitability during a promotional period.
CSM (Customer Success Manager) Glossary
CSM (Customer Success Manager) is the person or function accountable for what happens AFTER the purchase: onboarding, support, issue resolution, and the relationship that determines whether the buyer comes back.
CTC (Contribution to Change) Glossary
CTC (Contribution to Change) measures how much a single factor — one SKU, one channel, one cost line — moved a larger total between two periods, usually expressed in percentage points or basis points. If portfolio profit fell 4%, CTC answers: which products caused it, and by how much?
CTR (Click-Through Rate) Glossary
CTR (Click-Through Rate) is clicks divided by impressions — of everyone who saw your product in search results or an ad slot, the share who clicked. It’s the first conversion in the funnel: the moment attention becomes a visit.
Cubic Feet Glossary
Cubic feet is the volumetric unit Amazon uses to meter space: how much room your product (in its packaged form) occupies in a fulfillment center. Storage fees, some inbound logistics, and capacity limits all run on volume, not weight.
Cubiscan Request Glossary
A Cubiscan Request is a formal ask to have Amazon physically re-measure and re-weigh a product using its automated measurement equipment.
Customer Returns Glossary
Customer returns are the reverse journey: buyer sends the product back, and the system handles the refund, the inventory grading and disposition, and the paperwork.
CVR (Conversion Rate) Glossary
CVR (Conversion Rate) is purchases divided by visits: of the shoppers who landed on your product page, the share who bought. Amazon calls its unit-of-measure Unit Session Percentage — same idea, slightly different denominator conventions (sessions vs. visitors).
CX (Customer Experience) Glossary
CX (Customer Experience) is the totality of what buying from you feels like: how discoverable the product is, how clear and honest the listing, how fast and intact the delivery, how the packaging feels, how easy returns are, and how problems get handled.
CXD (Cross Docking) Glossary
CXD (Cross Docking) is a logistics pattern where inbound goods move directly from arriving transport into outbound transport, with little or no time in storage.
CY (Calendar Year) Glossary
CY (Calendar Year) is the standard January–December frame for reporting and planning — as opposed to FY (Fiscal Year), which can start and end on other months depending on the organization.
Cyber Monday Glossary
Cyber Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving — the online-shopping event that turns the holiday weekend’s browsing into a digital sales crescendo.
D 14 terms
D2FC (Delivery-to-Fulfilment Centre) Glossary
D2FC (Delivery to Fulfilment Centre) measures the quality of your inbound: of the units you ship to Amazon, what share arrive cleanly — correctly booked, correctly labelled, undamaged? A D2FC defect is any unit that arrives with a booking, transit, or documentation problem.
DA (Domain Authority) Glossary
DA (Domain Authority) is a third-party SEO metric — the best known is Moz’s, scored 1–100 on a logarithmic scale — predicting how well a website is likely to rank in search. Higher DA means a stronger backlink profile and more trust in the eyes of search engines.
Deal OPS Glossary
Deal OPS (Deal Operations) is the discipline of running Amazon promotions as a managed program: planning the calendar, submitting and tracking each deal type (Lightning Deals, Best Deals, Coupons, Prime Exclusive Discounts, Brand Tailored Promotions), and measuring the return on every…
Demand Forecasting Glossary
Demand Forecasting is estimating how much of a product customers will buy in a future period — next month, next quarter, next season — and planning inventory to meet that number without drowning in it.
DF (Direct Fulfilment) Glossary
DF (Direct Fulfilment) is Amazon’s vendor dropship model: Amazon lists and sells the products, but the vendor stores the inventory and ships each order directly to the customer from its own warehouse.
DI (Direct Import) Glossary
DI (Direct Import) is shipping inventory from an overseas manufacturer straight to Amazon’s network, bypassing domestic warehouses and intermediaries.
Dimensional Weight Glossary
Dimensional weight (dim weight) is a pricing convention that charges for the space a package occupies rather than its actual weight: length × width × height divided by a divisor (carriers commonly use 139 for inches; the metric equivalent divides cubic centimetres by 5,000 for kilos).
DIO (Days Inventory Outstanding) Glossary
DIO (Days Inventory Outstanding) is the average number of days your inventory sits before it sells: average inventory value divided by cost of goods sold, multiplied by the days in the period.
DMF (Discretionary Marketing Funds) Glossary
DMF (Discretionary Marketing Funds) is a 1P vendor funding line where Amazon holds a pool of the vendor’s money to deploy at its own discretion — funding promotions, seasonal placements, and campaigns it judges worthwhile — deducting the spend from vendor remittances…
DOTD (Deal of the Day) Glossary
DOTD (Deal of the Day) is a 24-hour flagship promotion: the marquee slot on Amazon’s deals pages, front-and-centre for a full day, typically at steep discount. It’s a burst event — massive traffic exposure, rapid unit movement, and a Best Seller Rank jolt if the numbers work.
DP (Detail Page) Glossary
DP (Detail Page) is the product page itself: the destination where every search impression, ad click, and external visitor lands. Title, images and video, bullets, price and badges, reviews, A+ content, Q&A, delivery promises — the DP is where browsing becomes buying, or doesn’t.
DPV (Detail Page Views) Glossary
DPV (Detail Page Views) counts visits to a product’s page — sessions or page loads, depending on the report — regardless of purchases. It’s the traffic number: how many shoppers stopped, looked, and (in the sessions view) how many visits that took.
DSI (Downstream Impact) Glossary
DSI (Down Stream Impact) measures what a promotion, price change, or marketing push does AFTER it ends: the long-tail effect on organic visibility, sustained velocity, and future sales.
DSP (Demand-Side Platform) Glossary
DSP (Demand-Side Platform) is Amazon’s programmatic advertising system: automated buying of display, video, and audio ads that run both on Amazon’s surfaces and across the wider internet.
E 13 terms
EAN Glossary
An EAN (International Article Number, originally European Article Number) is the 13-digit product identifier behind the barcode: globally unique, issued through GS1, and assigned per variation — every size, colour, or pack count gets its own number.
EBC (Enhanced Brand Content) Glossary
EBC (Enhanced Brand Content) — today known in Seller Central simply as A+ Content — is the richer product-description system available to brand-registered sellers: image-and-text modules, comparison charts, brand storytelling, and structured layouts replacing the plain…
ECDD (Estimated Cargo Delivery Date) Glossary
ECDD (Estimated Cargo Delivery Date) is the projected arrival date for goods in transit — an inbound shipment, a vendor delivery, or a direct import container.
EDD (Estimated Delivery Date) Glossary
EDD (Estimated Delivery Date) is the arrival promise shown to the customer — on the product page, at checkout, and in order history.
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) Glossary
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the structured, machine-to-machine language businesses use to exchange documents: purchase orders, order confirmations, invoices, shipment notices, inventory feeds. No emails, no portals, no retyping — your system speaks directly to Amazon’s.
EDIFACT Glossary
EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport) is the United Nations’ international EDI standard — the message dictionary that defines how purchase orders, invoices, and shipping documents are structured when systems in different countries and…
EFN (European Fulfilment Network) Glossary
EFN (European Fulfilment Network) lets a seller store inventory in one Amazon European fulfilment country and fulfil orders across other European marketplaces from that single pool.
EOD (End of Day) Glossary
EOD (End of Day) is the daily cutoff that ends the operational cycle: the time by which orders must be processed, packed, and handed to the carrier to count as that day’s work.
EOM (End of Month) Glossary
EOM (End of Month) is the monthly close — the natural checkpoint when the account’s numbers stop moving and get read: sales and performance review, inventory audit, invoicing, payment reconciliation, and the budget reset for the coming month.
EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) Glossary
EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) is the hardware-software system that records sales, processes payments, and tracks stock wherever transactions happen in person — shops, counters, market stalls. It’s the retail brain: every scan updates a ledger of what sold, when, and for how much.
EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) Glossary
EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) is the environmental-compliance regime that makes manufacturers, importers, and brand owners legally responsible for the end-of-life side of their products — recycling, packaging recovery, and waste management.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Glossary
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the single system where a company’s operating truth aggregates: inventory, orders, purchasing, finances, manufacturing, and fulfilment, connected so a sale in any channel updates stock and books automatically.
EVM (Enterprise Value Multiple) Glossary
EVM (Enterprise Value Multiple) is the multiplier applied to a business’s annualized earnings — EBITDA or seller’s discretionary earnings, depending on the deal — to arrive at its acquisition value.
F 23 terms
FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) Glossary
FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) is Amazon’s fulfilment service: you send inventory in, Amazon stores it, picks, packs, ships, and handles customer service and returns.
FBA Fulfilment Fee Glossary
The FBA fulfilment fee is the per-unit charge for pick, pack, ship, and returns processing on every FBA order. It’s a fixed amount per unit determined by the product’s size tier and shipping weight — dimensions in, fee out.
FBA Prep Fees Glossary
FBA prep fees are what Amazon charges when your units arrive at the fulfilment centre not meeting its receiving standards — barcode labels missing or unscannable, items needing polybagging, bubble wrap, taping, or boxing to be safely handled.
FBA Storage Fees Glossary
FBA storage fees are the monthly rent Amazon charges for the space your inventory occupies: per cubic foot, per month, with higher rates October–December, plus separate surcharges on inventory that ages past 180, 270, and 365 days.
FBM (Fulfilment by Merchant) Glossary
FBM (Fulfilment by Merchant) means you fulfil your own Amazon orders: your stock, your pick-and-pack, your carrier, your customer service and returns. Amazon runs the listing and the marketplace; the promise behind it is entirely yours to keep.
FC (Fulfilment Centre) Glossary
An FC (Fulfilment Centre) is an Amazon-operated logistics facility: a warehouse engineered around receiving, storing, picking, packing, and shipping inventory at internet scale.
FCA (Free Carrier) Glossary
FCA (Free Carrier) is an Incoterm — a standard shipping-negotiation shorthand — defining where the seller’s responsibility ends: when goods are handed to the buyer’s nominated carrier at an agreed point (the seller’s premises or another named location),…
FCF (Free Cash Flow) Glossary
FCF (Free Cash Flow) is the cash a business actually generates after everything it consumes to keep running and growing — operating cash plus or minus the capital tied up in inventory, equipment, and platform float.
FCL (Full Container Load) Glossary
FCL (Full Container Load) means your goods get an entire ocean container — typically 20ft or 40ft — exclusively: sealed at origin, unopened until its destination. One shipper, one cargo, one set of hands.
FCST (Forecast) Glossary
FCST (Forecast) is the projected future — of sales, demand, or inventory — used to plan what to make, order, ship, and spend.
Featured Offer Glossary
The Featured Offer is the placement on a product detail page that carries the Add to Cart and Buy Now buttons — the box shoppers click. On most pages, one offer holds it at a time, chosen by Amazon among eligible offers (the same mechanic sellers have long called the Buy Box).
FFP (Frustration-Free Packaging) Glossary
FFP (Frustration-Free Packaging) is Amazon’s certification tier for packaging that lives up to its name: 100% recyclable, easy to open, no plastic clamshells, no wire ties, no excess prep — the product arrives undamaged with a minimal, sensible box.
First-Party Data Glossary
First-party data is information a brand collects directly from its own audience — emails, purchase histories, browsing behaviour, preferences — rather than renting it from an advertising platform. It’s the customer relationship you actually own.
FLOW (Forward-Looking Order Workflow) Glossary
FLOW (Forward-Looking Order Workflow) is a planning discipline: instead of reacting to stock levels, you project demand forward and time purchases so inventory lands just before it’s needed — computed from sell-through, seasonality, and supplier lead times rather than…
FNSKU (Fulfilment Network Stock Keeping Unit) Glossary
An FNSKU is the barcode Amazon puts on YOUR units inside its fulfilment network — the label that says “this specific unit belongs to this seller,’ distinct from the same product sold by anyone else.
FOB (Free on Board) Glossary
FOB (Free on Board) is the classic Incoterm for sea freight: the seller delivers goods to the origin port and loads them on board the vessel — after that point, title, cost, and risk pass to the buyer. Price quotes like “FOB Shenzhen” name the port where the handoff happens.
FOPV (Featured Offer Page Views) Glossary
FOPV (Featured Offer Page Views) counts detail-page views that happened while your product was actually holding the Featured Offer — the cart-winning placement.
FRE (Forecast Recast Events) Glossary
A Forecast Recast Event (FRE) is the deliberate scrapping and rebuilding of your demand forecast after a structural shock — a viral spike, a sudden collapse, a competitor exit, a platform change — because the old baseline no longer describes the world, and planning on it will…
Freight Forwarder Glossary
A freight forwarder is the logistics intermediary that moves goods across borders on your behalf: booking ocean or air freight, arranging origin consolidation and export documentation, managing customs clearance at both ends, and coordinating the final leg to your warehouse or…
Frequency Capping Glossary
Frequency capping is the limit on how many times one user sees the same ad in a period — a DSP (and programmatic) control that stops your display or video creative from following one shopper around the internet forever. It’s the difference between awareness and annoyance.
FTE (Full-Time Employee) Glossary
FTE (Full-Time Employee) is the standard unit of labour capacity — conventionally one person at a standard full week (40 hours). Sellers use FTE counts to size operations, budget payroll, and decide when a role should be hired in-house versus kept outsourced.
FTL (Full Truckload) Glossary
FTL (Full Truckload) is ground freight where one trailer carries one shipper’s cargo — sealed, dedicated, non-stop-ish from origin to destination.
FY (Fiscal Year) Glossary
FY (Fiscal Year) is the twelve-month accounting period a business uses for reporting, budgeting, and tax — which doesn’t have to match January–December.
G 18 terms
Gated Product Glossary
A gated product is a brand, category, or item that Amazon lets only approved sellers list: the gate opens when you present evidence you can source it legitimately. Gating covers a broad range — big brands, groceries, health products, topicals, collectibles, anything Amazon judges high-risk.
GDSN (Global Data Synchronization Network) Glossary
GDSN (Global Data Synchronization Network) is the GS1-run system of connected data pools through which manufacturers and retailers publish and share standardised product master data — dimensions, weights, descriptions, packaging, attributes — as one universally agreed record per item.
GEMBA Glossary
Gemba is the lean principle of going to the actual place where work happens — the factory floor, the warehouse, the packing bench — to see reality instead of reading about it.
GIPE (Global Imports Program Expansion) Glossary
GIPE (Global Imports Program Expansion) is Amazon’s umbrella of initiatives for scaling direct imports — moving goods from international manufacturers into Amazon’s fulfilment networks more efficiently: consolidated freight routing, streamlined border processing, and…
GL (General Ledger) Glossary
The GL (General Ledger) is the master accounting record of every financial transaction the business makes — revenue in, costs out, categorised into accounts.
Glance Views Glossary
Glance views is the older Amazon term for detail-page views: how many times shoppers visited a product’s page — from search, ads, category browsing, or anywhere else.
GLN (Global Location Number) Glossary
A GLN (Global Location Number) is GS1’s unique 13-digit identifier for a physical location or legal entity — a factory, a warehouse, a company office, a billing address. Where GTINs name products, GLNs name places and parties in the supply chain.
GMM (Guaranteed Minimum Margin) Glossary
A GMM (Guaranteed Minimum Margin) is a vendor agreement in which the vendor promises Amazon a floor profit percentage on retail sales — and pays the difference when Amazon’s actual margin falls below it, usually because price competition forced retail prices down.
GMS (Gross Merchandise Sales) Glossary
GMS (Gross Merchandise Sales) measures the total sales value moving through a marketplace over a period — everywhere from one seller’s catalogue to the platform’s own reporting.
GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) Glossary
GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) is the total monetary value of goods sold through a marketplace over a period — the dollar sum of everything changing hands, measured at the prices shoppers paid, before returns, fees, discounts, and costs.
Goldbox Glossary
Goldbox is Amazon’s internal name for the deals hub — the Today’s Deals page where shoppers browse active limited-time offers: Lightning Deals, Best Deals, Deal of the Day, coupons, and event promotions, across every category on the site.
GPE (Global Procurement Excellence) Glossary
GPE (Global Procurement Excellence) is Amazon’s internal drive to standardise and sharpen how it buys: consistent negotiation frameworks across regions and categories, better cost structures and payment terms, tighter purchase-order discipline, and funding models that align vendor…
GPE (Global Program Expansion) Glossary
GPE (Global Program Expansion) — the same initials as Amazon’s procurement initiative, different programme — is how Amazon takes internal programmes that worked in one market (Born to Run, Sustainability programmes, Frustration-Free Packaging, Vendor Services, ads…
GPO (Global Procurement Organization) Glossary
A GPO (Global Procurement Organization) is a centralised buying function — an internal department or shared entity that handles strategic sourcing, supplier negotiation, and purchasing across markets on behalf of the whole business, rather than letting each country or team buy independently.
GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation) Glossary
GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation) is the European Union’s product-safety framework (in force since December 2024) covering non-food consumer products: sellers must ensure only safe products reach EU consumers, with traceability, warnings where relevant, and a designated…
Gross Margin Glossary
Gross margin is the profit left after subtracting the direct cost of making and delivering a product — typically revenue minus COGS — expressed as a percentage of revenue.
GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) Glossary
A GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) is the umbrella term for the family of GS1 product identifiers: UPC (North America), EAN (Europe and beyond), ISBN (books), JAN (Japan) — all 8-to-14-digit numbers encoding the same concept, one unique identifier per trade item, issued through GS1.
GV (Glance Views) Glossary
GV (Glance Views) is the reporting shorthand for what shoppers did before they didn’t — the count of times a product’s detail page was visited.
H 13 terms
Amazon Haul Glossary
Amazon Haul is Amazon’s separate budget storefront for sub-$20 products — mostly under $10, some as low as a dollar — running its own search, cart, and checkout, separate from the main marketplace.
H1 (First Half) Glossary
H1 (First Half) is the first six months of the year — January to June — the reporting period that follows the holiday hangover and precedes the peak-season build. In Amazon terms, it’s the stretch that sets up everything Q4 will pay out.
H2 (Second Half) Glossary
H2 (Second Half) is July through December — the back half of the year and, for most Amazon sellers, the profit engine: Prime Day season, back-to-school, the Q4 crescendo, and every promotional event the marketplace builds around consumer spending.
Halo Effect Glossary
The halo effect is the compounding lift a product earns beyond the campaign that produced it: strong sales velocity from advertising or external traffic strengthens organic rank, which delivers unsponsored conversions long after the ad budget stops — sales the original spend keeps…
Hazmat (Hazardous Materials) Glossary
Hazmat (hazardous materials) — also called dangerous goods — are products containing substances that regulators classify as risky to store or transport: aerosols, lithium batteries, flammable liquids, certain chemicals, magnets.
HB (Heavy Bulky) Glossary
HB (Heavy Bulky) is Amazon’s classification for products that exceed standard size and weight thresholds — furniture, large appliances, fitness equipment, oversized anything — and therefore run through specialised fulfilment and transportation processes rather than…
HCPO (High Confidence Purchase Order) Glossary
An HCPO (High Confidence Purchase Order) is a vendor PO Amazon issues when it’s genuinely confident the goods will sell: strong historical velocity, confirmed demand drivers (a promotion, a season, a launch), low current inventory, and clean sell-through data behind the order.
HOTW (Hands Off The Wheel) Glossary
HOTW (Hands Off The Wheel) is Amazon’s own name for its automation direction: replacing human-managed processes — ordering, pricing, inventory management, promotions, replenishment — with algorithms.
HPC (Health and Personal Care) Glossary
HPC (Health and Personal Care) is one of Amazon’s anchor retail categories: supplements, over-the-counter medicines, personal hygiene, skincare and grooming, feminine care, baby health items, first aid and home medical equipment.
HPO (Hot Purchase Order) Glossary
An HPO (Hot Purchase Order) is a vendor emergency: a high-priority Amazon order for stock that’s completely out of stock while customers are actively trying to buy it. When availability hits zero and demand is live, Amazon escalates — and the vendor is expected to move fast.
HS (Harmonized System) Glossary
The HS (Harmonized System) is the World Customs Organisation’s international product-classification language: every tradeable physical good gets a numeric code — six digits at the international level, extended by each country for local detail — that determines how…
HTD (Half Year to Date) Glossary
HTD (Half Year to Date) measures cumulative performance from the start of a six-month period to today — so mid-March’s HTD is everything since January 1; mid-October’s is everything since July 1. It’s the medium-sized lens between monthly noise and annual hindsight.
HTS Code (Harmonized Tariff Schedule) Glossary
An HTS code (Harmonized Tariff Schedule) is the United States’ 10-digit extension of the international HS system: the first six digits are the global classification, and four US-specific digits pin down the exact duty rate, admissibility, and regulatory treatment for goods entering…
I 22 terms
IB (Inbound) Glossary
IB (Inbound) is everything between your supplier’s dock and Amazon’s shelving: planning the shipment, labelling and prepping units to spec, booking appointments, moving the freight, and clearing receiving so stock becomes buyable.
IDQ (Index Data Quality) Glossary
IDQ (Index Data Quality) is the health of your listing’s search-index metadata: how completely and accurately Amazon’s search engine recognises your title, backend terms, attributes, and description — and therefore how reliably your ASIN surfaces for the searches it should win.
Impressions Glossary
Impressions count how often your product or ad appears on a shopper’s screen — in search results, in carousels, in sponsored placements — regardless of whether anyone clicks. They are the top of the funnel: visibility itself, quantified.
Inbound Compliance Chargeback Glossary
An inbound compliance chargeback is the fee Amazon deducts when an FBA shipment breaks the receiving rules — wrong labels, missing prep, incorrect carton data, misrouted deliveries. The charge offsets the manual labour needed to make your non-compliant shipment receivable.
Inbound Compliance Penalty Glossary
An inbound compliance penalty is the broader enforcement layer around FBA receiving: fee assessments (per shipment or per unit), placement or routing restrictions, and — at the far end — suspension of inbound privileges for repeated or serious violations of prep, labelling, or…
Incoterms Glossary
Incoterms (International Commercial Terms) are the International Chamber of Commerce’s standard shorthand for splitting responsibility in a shipment: who arranges and pays freight, who insures, who clears customs, and exactly where risk transfers from seller to buyer.
Intellectual Property Complaint Glossary
An intellectual property complaint is a rights owner’s formal claim against a listing — trademark, copyright, patent, or design — filed through Amazon.
Inventory Ledger Glossary
The inventory ledger is Amazon’s account of your stock: every unit’s movement inside the fulfilment network — received, stowed, sold, returned, adjusted, disposed, reimbursed — recorded as line items.
Inventory Replenishment Glossary
Inventory replenishment is the decision logic for keeping stock flowing: when to reorder, how much, and where it should live — timed so products stay available without capital drowning in warehouses. It’s demand forecasting converted into purchase orders and shipping schedules.
Inventory Tracking Glossary
Inventory tracking is the continuous visibility layer: knowing where every unit is and what state it’s in — at the factory, on the water, in FBA, in transit between locations, being returned — and keeping the dashboards and systems that describe it actually accurate.
Inventory Velocity Glossary
Inventory velocity measures how fast your stock sells through — units turned per period, or the inverse (days of cover). It’s the heartbeat metric of a healthy catalogue: fast velocity means capital cycling and rank fed; slow velocity means money parked in cartons.
IOR (Importer of Record) Glossary
The IOR (Importer of Record) is the party legally responsible to a country’s customs authority for imported goods: filing the declarations properly, complying with local laws, paying duties and taxes, and keeping the records. Not who moves the freight — who answers for it.
IP (Intellectual Property) Glossary
IP (Intellectual Property) is the family of legally protected intangible assets: trademarks (names, logos, brand identifiers), patents (inventions and designs), copyrights (creative works, imagery, content), and trade secrets.
IPCP (Inbound Preferred Carrier Programme) Glossary
IPCP (Inbound Preferred Carrier Programme) is Amazon’s logistics arrangement offering pre-negotiated discounted freight through vetted carriers into fulfilment centres — with something arguably more valuable than the rate: fixed daily warehouse slots that bypass standard…
IPI (Inventory Performance Index) Glossary
IPI (Inventory Performance Index) is Amazon’s 0–1000 score for how well you manage FBA inventory: how productively your stock turns, how effectively listings convert customers, how well you avoid excess and age-outs, and how steadily popular products stay in stock.
IPIP (Items per Inner Pack) Glossary
IPIP (Items Per Inner Pack) is the packaging-hierarchy attribute stating how many sellable units sit inside one inner pack (also called a case pack) — the secondary container that lives inside the master carton. It tells receiving systems how the shipment is bundled.
IPMP (Inner Packs per Master Pack) Glossary
IPMP (Inner Packs Per Master Pack) declares how many inner packs (case packs) a single master carton contains — the next layer up the packaging hierarchy from IPIP. Together the two attributes describe the full structure: master carton → inner packs → sellable units.
IRDR (Inventory Record Defect Ratio) Glossary
IRDR (Inventory Record Defect Ratio) measures how far Amazon’s system records diverge from physical reality: the share of units where what the system expects doesn’t match what’s actually on the shelf. It’s the accuracy score of your inventory footprint inside the network.
ISA (Inbound Shipment Appointment) Glossary
An ISA (Inbound Shipment Appointment) is the booked dock slot for freight deliveries to an Amazon fulfilment centre — the specific time and receiving door your truckload, LTL, or vendor shipment is scheduled to arrive, booked through the carrier appointment systems before the truck rolls.
ISBN (International Standard Book Number) Glossary
An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is the unique 13-digit identifier assigned to every edition of a published book — the number that distinguishes this edition, in this format, from every other.
Item Highlights Glossary
Item Highlights is the structured field that sits directly beneath Item Name in Amazon’s listing editor — a dedicated 125-character space (as of the 2026 title standard) for the qualifiers, specs, and use-cases that no longer fit in a shortened title.
IXD (Inbound Cross Dock) Glossary
An IXD (Inbound Cross Dock) is a specialised Amazon facility that receives large inbound shipments — often palletised or containerised — breaks them down, sorts by destination, and forwards inventory to regional fulfilment centres.
J 1 terms
JBP (Joint Business Plan) Glossary
A JBP (Joint Business Plan) is the annual — sometimes half-yearly — growth agreement between a brand and Amazon’s retail team: the structured document a 1P vendor and Amazon build together to align commercial targets, promotional calendars, operational standards, and…
K 4 terms
KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Glossary
KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is Amazon’s self-publishing platform: the route that lets authors and brands publish ebooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers straight to Amazon’s bookstore without a publisher, a print run, or a warehouse.
KPI (Key Performance Indicators) Glossary
A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a metric you have deliberately chosen to judge whether the business is winning — not a number that merely exists on a dashboard.
KVI (Known Value Items) Glossary
A KVI (Known Value Item) is a product your customers buy often and whose price they already know by heart — the everyday item where a shopper arrives with a number in their head and notices, instantly, when your price deviates from it.
KYC (Know Your Customer) Glossary
KYC (Know Your Customer) is the identity verification process marketplaces and payment processors use to establish who is actually behind an account: the legal entity, the people who control it, and the bank account that receives the money.
L 19 terms
Landed Cost Glossary
Landed cost is the total cost of getting one sellable unit onto your shelf — everything from the factory invoice to the moment the product is unloaded and checked in at its final destination.
LBB (Lost Buy Box) Glossary
LBB (Lost Buy Box) is the status where your offer no longer holds the Featured Offer position on a detail page — the Add to Cart button has moved to another seller, or disappeared entirely while Amazon suppresses the box.
LBO (Lost Business Opportunity) Glossary
LBO (Lost Business Opportunity) is a financial model that puts a number on the revenue and profit sacrificed when a listing cannot serve live demand — stockouts, suppressions, supply-chain delays, or any operational bottleneck that pulls a sellable product offline.
LBQ (Launch Buy Quantity) Glossary
LBQ (Launch Buy Quantity) is the number of units you should have on hand to carry a new product through its launch phase — from first sale until the second production batch is checked in and sellable. Not the MOQ, not a guess: the quantity the launch’s velocity actually requires.
LCL (Less than Container Load) Glossary
LCL (Less Than Container Load) is ocean freight for shipments that do not fill a container: your pallets share a 20ft or 40ft box with cargo from other shippers, and you pay for the space you occupy rather than the whole container.
LD (Lightning Deal) Glossary
LD (Lightning Deal) is a time-bound Amazon promotion: a limited quantity of an item offered at a significant discount for a few hours — typically four to twelve — in a premium placement on the Deals page.
Lead Time Glossary
Lead time is the total elapsed time from placing a purchase order to having inventory checked in, sellable, and live on the marketplace. Not the factory’s production estimate — the whole journey: manufacture, transit, customs clearance, and Amazon receiving.
LFO (Lost Featured Offer) Glossary
LFO (Lost Featured Offer) is the modern successor to the Lost Buy Box metric: the percentage of time your offer was not the Featured Offer on a detail page — meaning shoppers saw a competitor’s offer instead, or in suppression cases, no Featured Offer at all.
Lightning Deals Glossary
Lightning Deals are Amazon’s time-boxed promotional placements: a product featured for several hours on the Deals page, at a discounted price, in front of shoppers who arrive specifically to buy. The quantity is limited, the countdown is public, and the window is short by design.
Listing Optimisation Glossary
Listing optimisation is the work of making a product detail page do two jobs at once: index for the searches that matter, and convert the shoppers those searches deliver.
LOA (Letter of Authorization) Glossary
An LOA (Letter of Authorization) is a formal document from the trademark owner granting a specific seller permission to retail their branded products on Amazon.
LPI (Listing Power Index) Glossary
LPI (Listing Power Index) is a diagnostic score — typically expressed on a 0–100% scale — that grades how well an Amazon detail page is set up to be found and understood by the search systems.
LPN (License Plate Number) Glossary
An LPN (License Plate Number) is a unique barcode Amazon assigns to an individual unit inside a fulfilment centre — most commonly when a customer return is checked in. The sticker links that physical item to its order history, return reason, and warehouse condition assessment.
LPR (License Plate Receive) Glossary
LPR (License Plate Receive) is Amazon’s carton-level receiving process: each box or pallet in an inbound shipment carries a unique container barcode — a “license plate” — that links by scan to the digital box-content manifest you submitted in advance,…
LQS (Listing Quality Score) Glossary
LQS (Listing Quality Score) is a benchmarking score for a product detail page: how complete, structurally sound, and optimised the listing is across its core elements — title, bullets, images and video, description and A+ content, and backend search fields — measured against…
LSPL (Large Scale Product Launch) Glossary
LSPL (Large Scale Product Launch) is a 1P vendor programme for introducing genuinely new products to Amazon: the vendor supplies large quantities upfront with strong advertising investment, and Amazon commits to buying stock at scale, distributing it across fulfilment centres, and…
LSR (Late Shipment Rate) Glossary
LSR (Late Shipment Rate) is the percentage of your merchant-fulfilled orders whose shipping confirmation was posted after the expected ship date. Every FBM order carries a promised handling window; confirm after it, and the order counts against you.
LTL (Less than Truckload) Glossary
LTL (Less Than Truckload) is freight for shipments that need more than a parcel but less than a full trailer: your pallets share a 53-foot truck with palletised freight from other companies, and you pay for the space, weight, and handling you use.
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) Glossary
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) is the total revenue — or profit, depending on how you run it — one customer generates across the entire duration of their relationship with your brand. Not one order: every order, repeat, and subscription that follows the first.
M 20 terms
MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) Glossary
MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) is a policy a manufacturer or brand sets to define the lowest price at which its products may be publicly advertised.
Marketplace Glossary
A marketplace, in the Amazon sense, is the shared platform where you sell: Amazon’s storefronts combine its own retail operations with third-party merchants and brands, all listing into one customer base, one transaction system, and one fulfilment infrastructure.
MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfilment) Glossary
MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfilment) lets you use Amazon’s fulfilment network to store and ship products sold on your own channels — your website, Shopify, eBay, a wholesale portal — not just orders placed on Amazon itself.
MCP (Margin Compensation) Glossary
MCP (Margin Compensation) — also referred to as a Cost Support Agreement (CSA) — is a vendor (1P) arrangement in which the brand funds Amazon to offset a decline in Amazon’s net product margin on its products.
MDA (Major Domestic Appliances) Glossary
MDA (Major Domestic Appliances) is the category of large household appliances — refrigerators and freezers, washing machines and dryers, ovens and cooktops, dishwashers, built-in kitchen appliances.
MF (Merchant Fulfilled) Glossary
MF (Merchant Fulfilled) — the method behind FBM, Fulfilment by Merchant — means the seller stores the stock, packs the orders, arranges shipping, and handles customer service directly, instead of using Amazon’s warehouses.
MFC (Manufacturing Central) Glossary
MFC (Amazon Manufacturing Central) is a discovery platform that connects Amazon sellers and brand owners directly with vetted manufacturers, with an initial focus on suppliers based in India.
MFP (Minimum Featured Price) Glossary
MFP (Minimum Featured Price) is the lowest price at which your product has actually won the Featured Offer over a defined trailing window. It is a historical record, not a policy — a price floor created by your own past deals, dips, and discounts.
ML (Machine Learning) Glossary
Machine learning (ML) is the branch of computing where systems learn patterns from data and improve their decisions without being explicitly programmed for each case.
MLA (Machine Learning Algorithm) Glossary
An MLA (Machine Learning Algorithm) is the engine behind machine learning — the computational procedure that finds patterns in data and improves its own performance with experience, rather than following rules written for every case in advance.
MMA (Minimum Margin Agreement) Glossary
An MMA (Minimum Margin Agreement) is a vendor-negotiation safeguard guaranteeing that Amazon earns at least an agreed minimum margin percentage on a vendor’s products.
MOA (Minimum Order Amount) Glossary
MOA (Minimum Order Amount) is the smallest total value a supplier will accept on a purchase order — a financial threshold, as opposed to a unit count. Order below the figure, and the supplier will decline the order: their production and logistics have a floor cost, and the MOA covers it.
MoM (Month over Month) Glossary
MoM (Month over Month) measures the change in a metric from one month to the next: revenue, units, advertising spend, conversion, or any line you are following. This month’s figure against last month’s, expressed as growth or decline.
MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) Glossary
MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) is the smallest number of units a manufacturer will produce in a single order. It is the factory’s answer to a straightforward economics problem: tooling, setup, and run costs do not shrink with order size, so below a certain volume the line is not worth starting.
MP (Marketplace) Glossary
MP (Marketplace), in the Amazon-seller sense, means a specific regional platform: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, and the rest. Each is its own storefront with country-specific legal regulation, tax structure, language, and — critically — its own search index and customer behaviour.
MPPP (Master Packs per Pallet) Glossary
MPPP (Master Packs Per Pallet) is the logistics specification for how many master cartons are stacked on a single pallet in a shipment to Amazon.
MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) Glossary
MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) is the price the manufacturer recommends a product be sold at — a reference point for consistent pricing across retail channels, and, on Amazon, the anchor Amazon uses to validate discounts and display them credibly.
MTD (Month to Date) Glossary
MTD (Month to Date) describes performance within the current calendar month, from the 1st up to today. It is a live, moving window: the number you read on the 15th covers fifteen days, and it grows daily until the month closes.
MWS (Marketplace Web Services) Glossary
MWS (Marketplace Web Services) was Amazon’s original programmatic interface for sellers: the API that let software connect to Seller Central data, automating inventory, orders, payments, and reporting. For over a decade it was the plumbing of professional automation on the marketplace.
MYCE (Manage Your Customer Engagement) Glossary
MYCE (Manage Your Customer Engagement) is a free email marketing tool inside Seller Central that lets eligible sellers send campaigns directly to their followers and past buyers.
N 21 terms
NAFN (North American Fulfilment Network) Glossary
NAFN (North American Fulfilment Network) lets an FBA seller serve the whole North American region from inventory stored in US fulfilment centres: your stock in the United States fulfils orders on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com.mx, with Amazon handling the cross-border movement,…
NARF (North American Remote Fulfilment) Glossary
NARF (North American Remote Fulfilment) is the programme that lets a US seller use their domestic FBA inventory to fulfil orders from customers on Amazon Canada and Amazon Mexico — without physically importing stock into either country.
NASP (North American Selection Policy) Glossary
NASP (North American Selection Policy) is the rulebook for which products can be listed and sold across Amazon’s North American marketplaces — the US, Canada, and Mexico. It decides whether an ASIN that lives comfortably on Amazon.com can also be listed on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.mx.
NCNS (No-Call-No-Show) Glossary
NCNS (No-Call-No-Show) is the label Amazon applies when a carrier or vendor misses a scheduled Inbound Shipment Appointment at a fulfilment centre — and neither shows up nor communicates. The dock slot was booked; nobody came; nobody called.
NCX (Negative Customer Experience) Glossary
NCX (Negative Customer Experience) is Amazon’s measure of how often customers report dissatisfaction with a product after purchase — the signal the platform uses to identify underperforming ASINs, flag quality problems, and act on them.
NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) Glossary
An NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) is a confidentiality contract between you and an external party — typically a manufacturer, supplier, agency, or freelancer — that legally prohibits them from sharing your proprietary information: product designs, specifications, supplier…
Negative Keywords Glossary
Negative keywords are PPC exclusions: search terms you instruct Amazon not to show your ads for. Applied at campaign or ad-group level, they stop sponsored placements from appearing on queries that have proven irrelevant — the clicks that spend budget without ever converting.
Net PPM (Net Pure Product Margin) Glossary
Net PPM (Net Pure Product Margin) is the margin Amazon’s retail operation actually earns on a vendor’s products: what remains of the retail price after the product cost it paid and the commercial terms attached.
Net PPU (Net Pure Profit per Unit) Glossary
Net PPU (Net Pure Profit Per Unit) is what one unit leaves you after the marketplace takes its cut: the gross list price minus Amazon’s referral fee and fulfilment cost.
Net Profit Glossary
Net profit is what a business actually keeps: total sales minus every cost of earning them — product cost, marketplace fees, advertising, returns, warehousing, software, and tax. It is the bottom line, and everything else in the accounts exists to explain it.
Net Profit Margin Glossary
Net profit margin expresses net profit as a percentage of revenue: of every pound or dollar that comes in, how much stays. It is the profitability ratio that lets you compare periods, products, and channels on equal terms, because it removes the distorting effect of sheer scale.
Net Receipts Glossary
Net receipts is the monetary value of goods Amazon has actually received into its fulfilment network — not ordered, received. In vendor terms it is sell-in: how much stock has physically arrived, been checked in, and been accepted at the warehouses, valued at the vendor cost.
NIS (New Item Setup) Glossary
NIS (New Item Setup) is the process of onboarding a new product to Amazon: getting a new ASIN fully built, fully attributed, and fully compliant before it goes live for customers. It is the difference between a product that exists and a product that can be found, bought, and shipped.
nIXD (National Inbound Cross Dock) Glossary
nIXD (National Inbound Cross Dock) is a node in Amazon’s fulfilment network that receives seller inventory at a central facility, then redistributes it to regional fulfilment centres — a sorting and forwarding hub rather than a place where stock is stored.
NP (New Product) Glossary
NP (New Product) describes an ASIN in its launch phase — the honeymoon window where early sales velocity writes the ranking future. It is a stage, not a category: the same product is an NP for its first weeks and a mature line thereafter, and the treatment it takes is different during each.
NPD (New Product Development) Glossary
NPD (New Product Development) is the process of creating a product that deserves to exist on a marketplace: finding the gap, designing something that fills it, sourcing it at a cost that works, and building the launch that proves it.
NPL (New Product Launch) Glossary
NPL (New Product Launch) is the coordinated execution that follows a product’s development: introducing the new item to the marketplace with keyword positioning, review acquisition, and advertising working together to build early traction, sales velocity, and initial organic rank.
NR (Non-replenishable) Glossary
NR (Non-Replenishable) is an inventory classification for stock you intend to sell out completely without reordering: discontinued lines, end-of-season ranges, trend items past their moment, closeout lots. The defining feature is not the product — it is that there is no next production run.
NS (Non-sortable) Glossary
NS (Non-Sortable) is Amazon’s classification for products too large, heavy, or awkward for the automated sorting equipment in fulfilment centres.
NTB (New to Brand) Glossary
NTB (New to Brand) is Amazon’s advertising reporting for purchases made by first-time buyers of your brand.
NTS (Net Sales) Glossary
NTS (Net Sales) is revenue after the things that give some of it back: customer returns, order cancellations, and promotional discounts. Gross sales is what the orders were worth; net sales is what the business actually keeps before costs.
O 25 terms
O2C (Order to Cash) Glossary
O2C (Order-to-Cash) is the full pipeline between a customer pressing buy and the money being settled in your bank account: the order itself, the fulfilment that satisfies it, the settlement cycle inside Amazon, the reserve rules that hold some funds back, and the disbursement that finally…
OA (Online Arbitrage) Glossary
OA (Online Arbitrage) is the practice of buying discounted products from retail websites and reselling them on Amazon at a higher price — profit coming from the spread between what a retailer is charging today and what the marketplace is paying.
OB (Obsolete) Glossary
OB (Obsolete) is the inventory status and vendor replenishment code that marks a product as permanently discontinued, superseded, or no longer supported — and instructs Amazon’s purchasing systems to stop ordering it. For a vendor item, that means the bulk purchase orders simply end.
OB (Outbound) Glossary
OB (Outbound) covers everything that leaves an Amazon fulfilment centre: customer orders being picked, packed, and shipped; transfers moving stock between facilities; Multi-Channel Fulfilment orders heading to other sales channels; and removals going back to the seller or off to disposal.
ODR (Order Defect Rate) Glossary
ODR (Order Defect Rate) is the share of orders that generated a negative customer experience, measured over a rolling 60-day window. Amazon counts three kinds of defect: negative seller feedback, A-to-z Guarantee claims, and credit card chargebacks.
OH (On-hand Inventory) Glossary
OH (On-Hand Inventory) is the quantity of sellable stock physically sitting in a warehouse and available to fulfil an order right now.
OHL (Other Hardlines) Glossary
OHL (Other Hardlines) is a catch-all classification in Amazon’s retail and analytics systems for durable, non-consumable physical products that do not belong in the major hardlines groups — home improvement, automotive, tools, consumer electronics.
OIH (Order Inventory Health) Glossary
OIH (Order Inventory Health) measures how ready your inventory is to meet current and upcoming order demand: the depth, availability, and positioning of stock against the volume that is coming.
OLR (Organization and Leadership Review) Glossary
OLR (Organisation and Leadership Review) is the management discipline high-growth sellers use to examine team performance, structure, and leadership depth — asking systematically whether the organisation can carry the business through its next stage.
OMOQ (Offer Minimum Order Quantity) Glossary
OMOQ (Offer Minimum Order Quantity) is a listing-level setting that defines the smallest number of units a customer must buy in a single transaction for your offer to be checkout-eligible. It lets a seller enforce a multi-unit minimum directly on a standard product detail page.
OMS (Order Management System) Glossary
An OMS (Order Management System) is the software layer that manages orders across every channel you sell on: collecting them, routing them to the right place to be fulfilled, keeping stock levels synchronised, and pushing shipping updates back out.
OOS (Out of Stock) Glossary
OOS (Out of Stock) is the status where a listing has zero sellable units available. The offer cannot be bought, the Buy Box goes to nobody or a competitor, and the listing effectively disappears from the shopping experience until stock returns.
Operating Margin Glossary
Operating margin measures the share of revenue that remains after the core costs of running the business — product, fulfilment, advertising, software, people, and premises — before interest and tax.
OpEx (Operating Expenses) Glossary
OpEx (Operating Expenses) covers the ongoing costs of running the business day to day: advertising, software subscriptions, warehousing, labour, third-party services, and the rent and admin of keeping the lights on. Where product development is spent once, OpEx is spent every month, forever.
OPS (Ordered Product Sales) Glossary
OPS (Ordered Product Sales) is the total value of products customers ordered in a period — counted at the moment the order is placed, before cancellations, returns, or refunds.
Ordered Revenue Glossary
Ordered revenue is the value of everything customers ordered in a period, regardless of whether it has shipped, been delivered, or been returned — recorded at the order date, at the average selling price the customer actually paid at that moment.
Ordered Volume Glossary
Ordered volume counts the units customers ordered across a period — gross demand in units rather than value, captured before cancellations, payment failures, or returns are deducted. It is the raw throughput number: how many units the marketplace was asked to move.
Organic Rank Glossary
Organic rank is a product’s unpaid position in Amazon’s search results for a specific query — the listing’s natural placing, earned through algorithmic assessment of relevance, customer satisfaction, and historical performance rather than bought with ad spend.
Organic Ranking Glossary
Organic ranking is the natural position a product holds on a keyword’s search results page — the placing earned through sales velocity, keyword relevance, and conversion rate rather than through advertising spend.
OTC (Over the Counter) Glossary
OTC (Over the Counter) covers healthcare products customers can buy without a prescription — both medications and devices.
OTDR (On-Time Delivery Rate) Glossary
OTDR (On-Time Delivery Rate) is the share of merchant-fulfilled parcels delivered to customers by or before the promised delivery date. It is measured on tracked packages over a rolling window, and it is one of the performance metrics that decide whether an FBM seller keeps their privileges.
OTIF (On-Time, In-Full) Glossary
OTIF (On-Time, In-Full) is the supply-chain standard Amazon applies to inbound freight: did the exact quantity ordered arrive at the specified facility within the agreed delivery window? Both halves must be satisfied — the full quantity, and inside the window.
OTP (One-Time Password) Glossary
OTP (One-Time Password) is a single-use code, valid for one login or one handover, used to prove identity at a specific moment. On Amazon it serves two distinct purposes: protecting seller accounts through multi-factor authentication, and verifying high-value deliveries at the doorstep.
Oversize Tier Glossary
The oversize tier is the FBA classification for products exceeding the standard-size limits — too long, too wide, too tall, or too heavy.
OTT (Over-the-Top Advertising) Glossary
OTT (Over-The-Top) advertising is streaming-TV video advertising — non-skippable spots delivered over the internet to viewers rather than through traditional cable, appearing within the Amazon ecosystem on properties like Prime Video, Freevee, and Twitch.
P 54 terms
P1 (Priority 1) Glossary
P1 (Priority 1) is the highest severity classification Amazon applies to incidents, technical failures, and operational escalations: a business-critical problem demanding immediate attention because it disrupts customers, sellers, orders, payments, or core platform functionality.
P2 (Page 2) Glossary
P2 (Page 2) is shorthand for the second page of Amazon’s search results — and, in seller language, for the state of having fallen off page one.
P2G (Path to Green) Glossary
P2G (Path to Green) is the structured recovery plan Amazon teams use when a metric, project, or partnership is underperforming — flagged red (critical) or yellow (at risk) on a dashboard — and needs a documented route back into good standing.
P3 (Priority 3) Glossary
P3 (Priority 3) is the lowest severity tier in Amazon’s issue-tracking systems: non-critical bugs, system limitations, and operational annoyances with limited impact. The workaround exists, the business does not stop, and the fix waits its turn behind more serious problems.
P70 (Prognose bei 70%) Glossary
P70 (Prognose bei 70%) is a forecast confidence level used in Amazon’s demand planning: a projection curve set where there is a 70% probability that actual demand will not exceed the forecast — leaving a 30% chance it runs higher.
P80 Glossary
P80 is a demand forecast confidence level: the unit volume that weekly demand is expected to stay at or below 80% of the time.
P90 Glossary
P90 is the most conservative of the standard demand forecast tiers: the unit volume that actual demand is expected not to exceed 90% of the time. Where P50 is the balanced midpoint and P80 is cautious, P90 is the plan you choose when being short would be genuinely expensive.
Parent ASIN Glossary
A Parent ASIN is the non-purchasable umbrella identifier that groups related variations — the same product in different colours, sizes, or counts — onto one detail page. Customers never buy the parent; they buy the child ASINs, and the parent holds the family together.
Payment Processing Fee Glossary
The payment processing fee covers the cost of taking and moving a customer’s money: card authorisation, settlement, and the transfer of funds into your account.
PB (Private Brand) Glossary
PB (Private Brand) means a brand owned by the seller or retailer itself rather than licenced from a third party: private label in retail dialect. Amazon’s own ranges are private brands; so is the label a seller registers and builds on the marketplace.
PBDD (Prime Big Deal Days) Glossary
PBDD (Prime Big Deal Days) is Amazon’s autumn shopping event for Prime members: a 48-hour promotional window, introduced in 2023 and typically landing in October, positioned as a pre-holiday kickoff and often described as a second Prime Day.
PBS (Predictive Buying System) Glossary
A PBS (Predictive Buying System) is inventory software that forecasts demand from historical velocity, seasonality, and trend signals, and converts those forecasts into procurement decisions — when to reorder, how much, and at what point the order needs to be placed to arrive in time.
PCA (Personal Care Appliances) Glossary
PCA (Personal Care Appliances) is a product category on Amazon spanning powered grooming and beauty devices — hair dryers, straighteners, trimmers, electric toothbrushes, epilators, IPL devices, and facial cleansing tools.
PCOGS (Product Cost of Goods Sold) Glossary
PCOGS (Product Cost of Goods Sold) is the product-attributed slice of cost of goods sold — what the unit itself cost, as distinct from freight and fee components — and one of the core cost metrics in Amazon vendor reporting measuring the cost of the product Amazon has received…
PCS (Producer Compliance Scheme) Glossary
A PCS (Producer Compliance Scheme) is an accredited organisation that handles the statutory obligations producers carry for what they put on the market — collecting, recovering, recycling, and reporting on packaging, electronics, and batteries.
PCT (Percentage) Glossary
PCT (Percentage) is the unit Amazon’s reporting speaks in: sales growth, conversion rate, Buy Box percentage, in-stock rate, defect and return rates are all expressed as proportions. It is the standardisation that lets metrics from different categories and periods be compared at all.
PD (Prime Day) Glossary
PD (Prime Day) is Amazon’s flagship mid-year shopping event: a global 48-hour window exclusive to Prime members, with deep discounts and limited-time promotions designed to concentrate enormous traffic into a fixed period.
PD1 (Prime Day 1) Glossary
PD1 (Prime Day 1) is the first 24 hours of the two-day Prime Day event — typically the highest-traffic, highest-impulse stretch of the entire window, and the period where competition for visibility is most aggressive.
PD2 (Prime Day 2) Glossary
PD2 (Prime Day 2) is the second and final 24 hours of the Prime Day window — the stamina leg.
PD4 (Prime Day 4) Glossary
PD4 (Prime Day 4) is the shorthand for Amazon’s extended multi-day event formats — Prime Day stretched beyond the traditional 48 hours into windows lasting several days. The abbreviation circulates in seller conversation and older playbooks more than in the platform’s own language.
PDA (Product Display Ads) Glossary
PDA (Product Display Ads) is the legacy name for what Amazon now runs as Sponsored Display: display advertising that places your product on other listings, in review sections, on merchandising placements, and on and off the marketplace, targeted by product, category, or shopping interest…
PDP (Product Detail Page) Glossary
The PDP (Product Detail Page) is the page a shopper lands on for a specific product — title, images, price, bullets, A+ content, reviews, and fulfilment options. It is the marketplace’s point of sale, and every form of traffic you buy or earn eventually arrives here.
PED (Prime Exclusive Discount) Glossary
A PED (Prime Exclusive Discount) is a promotional pricing tier restricted to Prime members: a discount that displays with a strikethrough price and a savings badge directly in search results and on the detail page, without the shopper needing to hunt for or claim a coupon.
Pending Orders Glossary
Pending Orders are transactions in a temporary state: the customer has checked out, but the platform has not completed payment verification or card authorisation. The order exists, the units are effectively held, and shipping details stay hidden from the seller until the payment clears.
Performance Notifications Glossary
Performance Notifications are the official compliance messages Amazon sends through Seller Central: policy violations, metric breaches, intellectual property claims, listing problems, and account-health warnings.
PFA (Please Find Attached) Glossary
PFA (Please Find Attached) is ordinary business shorthand — an email phrase pointing the reader to files enclosed with the message — and it lives on in seller–support correspondence and supplier communication across the marketplace world.
PFR (Provisions for Receivables) Glossary
PFR (Provisions for Receivables) is the accounting treatment for money a vendor expects to receive but may not fully collect: reserves set against outstanding receivables to reflect deduction risk.
PIB (Perfect Inbound) Glossary
PIB (Perfect Inbound) is the zero-defect standard for freight arriving at an Amazon fulfilment centre: shipments that arrive exactly as specified — booked correctly, labelled properly, quantity-accurate, and undamaged. It is to inbound logistics what on-time-in-full is to vendor delivery.
PIBDR (Perfect Inbound Defect Rate) Glossary
PIBDR (Perfect Inbound Defect Rate) is the measured share of incoming shipments that fail the Perfect Inbound standard: the defect ledger behind inbound fees. Where PIB is the target, PIBDR is the actual performance — the number that explains why chargebacks appear on a remittance.
PICS (Pan-European Inbound Consolidation Service) Glossary
PICS (Pan-European Inbound Consolidation Service) is Amazon’s programme for simplifying vendor inbound freight across Europe: instead of shipping separately to fulfilment centres in several countries, a vendor delivers goods to one designated inbound hub, and Amazon handles the…
PIM (Product Information Management) Glossary
PIM (Product Information Management) is the system and discipline of keeping product data consistent everywhere it appears: dimensions, materials, weights, compliance documents, imagery, and copy, held in one authoritative place and syndicated outward to channels rather than typed into…
P&L (Profit and Loss) Glossary
A P&L (Profit and Loss) is the statement that turns marketplace activity into business truth: what you earned, what it cost, and what survived. Revenue at the top, every cost category below it, net profit at the bottom — the document that separates a business from a dashboard.
PL (Private Label) Glossary
PL (Private Label) is the model of selling products manufactured for you and branded as your own: you develop or select a product, have it produced to your specification, apply your trademark, and sell it exclusively under your label.
PLT (Product Lead Time) Glossary
PLT (Product Lead Time) is the total clock from placing a purchase order to having sellable stock: manufacturing, freight, customs clearance, and receiving at the fulfilment centre, added together. It is the physics of replenishment — the interval you cannot compress with enthusiasm.
PO (Purchase Order) Glossary
A PO (Purchase Order) is the formal commercial document that triggers fulfilment: which goods, in what quantities, at what prices, to be delivered when. Between a seller and a factory it authorises production; between Amazon and a vendor it is the order the vendor is obligated to serve.
POA (Plan of Action) Glossary
A POA (Plan of Action) is the structured appeal document a seller or vendor submits when a listing or account has been suspended, or when a policy violation has been flagged: a written account of what went wrong, what has been done about it, and what will stop it recurring.
POC (Point of Contact) Glossary
A POC (Point of Contact) is the designated person responsible for a given thing — an escalation, a compliance area, a logistics process, an integration. In vendor and seller operations, the term covers both the named individual on Amazon’s side and the designated owner on yours.
POCA (Purchase Order Change Acknowledgment) Glossary
A POCA (Purchase Order Change Acknowledgment) is the vendor’s formal response to an Amazon purchase order or an amendment to one: confirming what will be supplied, adjusting what cannot be, and in some cases rejecting lines outright — before the freight ships.
POD (Proof of Delivery) Glossary
A POD (Proof of Delivery) is the evidence that goods arrived: a signed delivery receipt, an electronic check-in, a scanned barcode, a timestamped carrier confirmation, or photographs of the freight received. It is the document that proves a shipment completed its journey.
PPA (Price Pack Architecture) Glossary
PPA (Price Pack Architecture) is the deliberate design of what sizes and pack configurations you sell, and at what price points: the geometry of your price ladder. It answers the question of how a catalogue meets shoppers at different budgets and use cases without cannibalising itself.
PPA (Price Protection Agreement) Glossary
A PPA (Price Protection Agreement) is a vendor term under which the vendor compensates Amazon if wholesale prices fall after Amazon has bought inventory: the vendor credits the difference on units still on hand or in transit when the cost price drops, protecting the platform’s…
PPC (Pay-per-Click) Glossary
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is the advertising model where you pay for each click rather than for impressions or sales: the pricing spine of Amazon’s sponsored advertising, across Sponsored Products, Brands, and Display.
PPM (Pure Profit Margin) Glossary
PPM (Pure Profit Margin) is vendor shorthand for product margin after Amazon’s deductions — the profitability read used on the first-party side of the business, closely tied to net pure product margin.
PPOOS (Procurable Product Out of Stock) Glossary
PPOOS (Procurable Product Out of Stock) is the vendor metric for the share of customer views that land on an out-of-stock detail page for products the platform is still actively trying to source: glance views on unavailable, replenishable items as a percentage of total views.
PPPU (Pure Profit per Unit) Glossary
PPPU (Pure Profit Per Unit) is the vendor’s net earnings on a single unit after the full deduction stack — cost of goods, platform fees, trade terms, advertising allocations, and the operational costs attributable to that item.
PPU (Price per Unit) Glossary
PPU (Price Per Unit) is the standardised price of a product expressed against a unit of measure — per ounce, per pound, per count, per sheet — so that packs of different sizes can be compared on value rather than on total price.
PPV (Purchase Price Variance) Glossary
PPV (Purchase Price Variance) is the gap between the price expected on a purchase order and the price invoiced — procurement’s report card on price control.
PQV (Product Quantity Variation) Glossary
PQV (Product Quantity Variation) is an inbound shipment defect: the units received at a fulfilment centre do not match the quantity declared in the shipping plan. The shipment arrives short or long against what was said to be on the way.
PR (Planned Replenishment) Glossary
PR (Planned Replenishment) is systematic, forecast-driven replenishment rather than reactive ordering: stock scheduled against sales velocity and demand projections, on a cadence, so the pipeline stays level instead of lurching between shortage and excess.
Pre-fulfilment Cancellation Rate Glossary
Pre-Fulfilment Cancellation Rate measures how often a seller cancels orders before shipping them — a performance metric for merchant-fulfilled orders, evaluated on a rolling basis against a hard ceiling of 2.5%.
Pricing Elasticity Glossary
Pricing Elasticity measures how demand responds to a change in price: the percentage change in units sold divided by the percentage change in price. It quantifies whether raising or lowering a price will grow or shrink total revenue.
Prime (Amazon Prime) Glossary
Prime is Amazon’s membership programme: fast free delivery on eligible items, along with the wider bundle of services members receive.
PRO (Producer Responsibility Organization) Glossary
A PRO (Producer Responsibility Organization) is an accredited body that administers producer-responsibility obligations on behalf of businesses: collecting, sorting, recovering, and recycling the waste created by the packaging, electronics, and batteries a company places on a market.
Product Compliance Glossary
Product Compliance is the regulatory layer beneath every listing: the safety documentation, certifications, test reports, restricted-substance rules, and market-specific approvals a product must satisfy before it can legally be sold in a given marketplace.
Q 9 terms
Q1 (First Quarter) Glossary
Q1 (First Quarter) is January through March: the post-holiday hangover of the retail calendar. Returns arrive, gift-driven demand evaporates, storage on leftover stock keeps billing, and the listings that carried December sit in a much quieter market.
Q2 (Second Quarter) Glossary
Q2 (Second Quarter) is April through June: spring demand, the Mother’s and Father’s Day bumps, and — the part that decides the summer — the deadline for getting Prime Day inventory produced, shipped, and into the network.
Q3 (Third Quarter) Glossary
Q3 (Third quarter) is July through September: the aftermath of Prime Day, back-to-school demand, and the arrival window for the inventory that will sell in the fourth quarter.
Q4 (Fourth Quarter) Glossary
Q4 (Fourth Quarter) is October through December: the peak. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the gifting season concentrate the year’s highest traffic into three months, and for many sellers the quarter produces the majority of annual profit.
Q5 (Fifth Quarter) Glossary
Q5 (Fifth Quarter) is retail slang for the period after Christmas — late December through January — when gift cards get spent, late bargain hunters shop, and resolution-driven demand appears. It is not a calendar quarter; it is a commercial one.
QA (Quality Assurance) Glossary
QA (Quality Assurance) is the discipline of preventing defects before a customer meets them: factory audits, pre-shipment inspections, material and durability testing, and the standards that decide whether a batch ships or gets reworked.
QBR (Quarterly Business Review) Glossary
A QBR (Quarterly Business Review) is a structured sit-down every ninety days: performance against plan, what is working and what is not, and the commitments that carry into the next quarter.
QD (Quantity Discount) Glossary
A QD (Quantity Discount) is tiered bulk pricing — buy more, pay less per unit — used on Amazon Business to reach registered corporate buyers with genuine procurement behaviour rather than consumer one-offs.
QUID (Quantitative Ingredient Declaration) Glossary
QUID (Quantitative Ingredient Declaration) is the labelling rule that requires the quantity of an ingredient to be declared when that ingredient appears in the product name or is emphasised on the packaging — the “with 40% chicken” part of a food label.
R 20 terms
RA (Retail Arbitrage) Glossary
RA (Retail Arbitrage) is sourcing by buying discounted products from physical retail — clearance aisles, liquidation stores, seasonal markdowns — and reselling them on the marketplace at a higher price. It exploits the gap between local supply and national demand.
Referral Fee Glossary
The Referral Fee is the marketplace’s commission on each sale: a percentage of the total sale price, varying by category, typically in the range of 8–15%, with a minimum charge per item in most categories.
Removal Order Glossary
A Removal Order is the instruction to take inventory out of the fulfilment network — returned to you, shipped to a third party, or disposed of. It is the lever for stranded, unsellable, or slow-moving stock that would otherwise keep accruing storage fees.
Restock Limits Glossary
Restock Limits are caps on how much inventory a seller can send into the fulfilment network: quantity and storage-volume allowances set by the account’s performance and sales history rather than chosen by the seller.
Return Disposition Glossary
Return Disposition is the classification a returned unit receives after inspection: sellable, damaged, defective, customer-damaged, or similar. The code decides what happens to the unit and, for the seller, what it is worth.
Return Processing Fee Glossary
The Return Processing Fee is a charge applied to sellers when a customer returns an item — particularly in categories where returns are routine, such as apparel, and in cases where a product’s return rate exceeds category thresholds.
RFQ (Request for Quote) Glossary
RFQ (Request for Quote) is the negotiation channel on Amazon Business: registered business customers ask sellers for custom pricing on large-volume orders, bypassing standard posted prices and automated pricing tiers.
RGM (Revenue Growth Management) Glossary
RGM (Revenue Growth Management) is the discipline of growing profit rather than just sales: pricing structure, promotional strategy, and product assortment managed together against measured consumer response.
rIXD (Regional Inbound Cross Dock) Glossary
rIXD (Regional Inbound Cross Dock) is a facility in the fulfilment network that receives bulk inbound shipments and sorts them for redistribution within a region, letting sellers consolidate a delivery instead of splitting freight across multiple destinations.
RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) Glossary
An RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) is the number that authorises and tracks a specific return. On the marketplace it is generated automatically when a return is requested, appears on the customer’s return slip and label, and ties the incoming unit to the order it came from.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) Glossary
ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) is advertising revenue divided by advertising spend, expressed as a ratio: a 4.0 means every unit of currency spent on ads produced four back in sales.
RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) Glossary
RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) is the directive restricting hazardous materials — lead, mercury, cadmium, and certain phthalates among them — in electrical and electronic equipment sold into regulated markets. It exists to make electronics safe to handle and safe to recycle.
ROI (Return on Investment) Glossary
ROI (Return on Investment) is gain divided by cost, expressed as a percentage: what a rupee or dollar of investment returned. It is the master ratio that every other metric in the business ultimately serves, and on a marketplace it is most useful at the level of the unit and the SKU.
ROO (Removal of Offer) Glossary
ROO (Removal of Offer) describes an offer disappearing from a product detail page: the page stays visible, but the buy option is gone — the button greyed out, removed, or the offer suppressed entirely. It can happen to your offer or to a competitor’s.
ROP (Reorder Point) Glossary
ROP (Reorder Point) is the inventory level at which you place the next purchase order: expected demand during the lead time, plus safety stock. It is the single most consequential number in inventory management, because ordering late costs a stockout and ordering early costs cash.
R&R (Roles and Responsibilities) Glossary
R&R (Roles and Responsibilities) is the who-does-what structure behind an account: which person or agency owns which task, and what access they have in order to do it. On the marketplace it becomes concrete in user permissions, where access is granted by function rather than by convenience.
RRA (Rapid Retail Analytics) Glossary
RRA (Rapid Retail Analytics) describes the near-real-time retail data available on the vendor side of the marketplace: hourly reporting on sales, traffic, and inventory, instead of the day-lagged summaries that standard reporting provides.
RRP (Recommended Retail Price) Glossary
RRP (Recommended Retail Price) is the manufacturer’s suggested selling price for a product — the equivalent of the reference price used in many markets: the number a strikethrough, a savings badge, or a comparison is measured against.
RSP (Retail Selling Price) Glossary
RSP (Retail Selling Price) is the price a product actually sells at on the marketplace — the number the customer pays.
RVR (Retail Vendor Recruitment) Glossary
RVR (Retail Vendor Recruitment) is the process by which brands are invited into the first-party wholesale model: the platform’s teams identify sellers performing well and approach them about becoming suppliers rather than third-party sellers.
S 65 terms
S2P (Source to Pay) Glossary
S2P (Source to Pay) is the full procurement cycle from finding a supplier to settling the final invoice: sourcing, negotiation, contracting, purchase order, quality control, payment, and reconciliation.
Safety Stock Glossary
Safety Stock is the buffer held against uncertainty: extra inventory covering the gap between expected demand and demand that arrives higher than expected, or expected lead times and supply that runs later than expected.
Sales Velocity Glossary
Sales Velocity is how fast inventory converts into sales: units sold per day, or per week, over a defined period. It is the pulse rate of a product, and it drives almost everything downstream — ranking, replenishment timing, storage exposure, and cash flow.
SAS (Strategic Account Services) Glossary
SAS (Strategic Account Services) is a paid support programme for eligible sellers that provides a dedicated account manager inside the platform: operational guidance, escalation routes, and strategic planning from someone whose job is your account.
SB (Sponsored Brands) Glossary
SB (Sponsored Brands) is the advertising format available to brand-registered owners: a headline, the brand logo, and either a collection of products or a video, placed prominently above search results.
SBSAS (Standards for Brands Selling in the Amazon Store) Glossary
SBSAS (Standards for Brands Selling in the Amazon Store) is the policy framework that governs how brands may sell on the platform — including the platform’s ability to require that certain manufacturers and brand owners supply through the wholesale vendor model rather than…
SC (Seller Central) Glossary
SC (Seller Central) is the operating dashboard where a third-party seller runs the business: listings, inventory, pricing, orders, advertising, reports, and account health, all in one interface.
SCAC (Standard Carrier Alpha Code) Glossary
SCAC (Standard Carrier Alpha Code) is the two-to-four-character identifier assigned to a transportation company across the freight industry.
SCM (Supply Chain Management) Glossary
SCM (Supply Chain Management) is the coordination of everything between raw materials and the customer’s doorstep: production, freight, customs, warehousing, and replenishment into the fulfilment network.
SCP (Supply Chain Programme) Glossary
SCP (Supply Chain Programme) — now part of the platform’s consolidated supply chain services — is an integrated logistics offering that connects ocean freight, bulk storage, and final-mile replenishment into one route from your manufacturer to the fulfilment network.
SD (Sales Discount) Glossary
SD (Sales Discount) is the deduction from gross sales created by promotional activity — deal events, coupons, and member-exclusive offers — recorded in vendor reporting as a reduction to revenue rather than as a cost line.
SDA (Small Domestic Appliances) Glossary
SDA (Small Domestic Appliances) is the product category covering portable electrical household devices: air fryers, coffee makers, blenders, toasters, irons, and the like. It is one of the higher-volume category families in home goods, with its own fee structure and compliance obligations.
SDA (Selective Distribution Agreement) Glossary
An SDA (Selective Distribution Agreement) is a contract that limits who may distribute a brand’s products: resellers must meet defined criteria for stores, presentation, expertise, and service before they are authorised to sell the range.
SDE (Seller’s Discretionary Earnings) Glossary
SDE (Seller’s Discretionary Earnings) is the valuation measure used for small and medium businesses: net income with the owner’s compensation, plus discretionary, non-recurring, and non-operating expenses added back.
SDN (Software Defined Networking) Glossary
SDN (Software Defined Networking) is infrastructure managed by software rather than by configuring physical hardware: routing and network control handled programmatically, which is what allows cloud platforms to scale and reconfigure at speed.
SDS (Safety Data Sheet) Glossary
An SDS (Safety Data Sheet) is the standardised document describing a product’s chemical properties, physical hazards, and safe handling requirements, organised in a fixed set of sections so that anyone receiving it can find the same information in the same place.
Search Term Report Glossary
The Search Term Report is the advertising data that shows what shoppers actually typed when your ads appeared — and how each of those queries performed. The distinction it captures is fundamental: you bid on keywords, but customers search in terms.
Search Volume Glossary
Search Volume is how often a query is entered on the marketplace over a period — the demand ceiling above every keyword decision. It determines how much traffic a keyword can deliver at all, which is why it belongs near the start of any product or advertising plan.
Selective Distribution Network Glossary
A Selective Distribution Network is a curated set of authorised sellers a brand distributes through, with membership conditional on meeting defined criteria. It is the enforcement arm of a selective distribution agreement: the agreement sets the terms, the network is who actually sells under them.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Glossary
SEO is the work of earning unpaid visibility in a search engine’s results. On a marketplace it means giving the ranking system the signals it weighs — relevance to the query, and evidence that shoppers who arrive through it buy.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Glossary
The SERP is the page of results a search query returns: the organic listings, the sponsored placements above and within them, and the filters and merchandising the platform applies around the edges. It is where discovery actually happens.
SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) Glossary
SFP lets sellers who ship from their own warehouses carry the Prime badge, provided they can meet the delivery promises attached to it — and keep meeting them after the trial ends.
SFR (Search Frequency Rank) Glossary
SFR is a ranking of how often a given search term is typed by shoppers — a relative popularity measure from first-party data, rather than an absolute count of searches.
Shipped COGS Glossary
Shipped COGS is the cost of the goods that were actually shipped to customers in a period, valued at your cost per unit. It is the cost counterpart to shipped revenue, and it measures what genuinely left the building rather than what was ordered or received.
Shipped Revenue Glossary
Shipped revenue is the sales value of products that were actually shipped to customers in a period: units that left the network multiplied by their selling price. It is the realised figure, as distinct from the order book.
Shipped Units Glossary
Shipped Units is the count of products that have actually left the fulfilment centre and are on their way to a customer — as opposed to ordered units, which include everything that was purchased, including what has not shipped, may still cancel, or is sitting in a pending state.
Shipped Volume Glossary
Shipped Volume is the unit count of products shipped to customers within a reporting period — the operational counterpart to shipped revenue, and a direct read on realised demand rather than on intent to buy.
SIA (Sell-In Agreement) Glossary
An SIA (Sell-In Agreement) is the commercial contract that sets the wholesale terms of a first-party relationship: baseline wholesale pricing, trade allowances, co-operative marketing contributions, return provisions, and logistics chargeback schedules.
SIOC (Ships in Own Container) Glossary
SIOC (Ships in Own Container) is a packaging certification tier within the frustration-free packaging programme: the product’s own packaging is engineered, tested, and approved to ship through the network to the customer without an overbox or any added protective packaging.
SIPP (Ships in Product Packaging) Glossary
SIPP (Ships in Product Packaging) is the programme under which products ship to customers in their original branded packaging, without an additional shipping box — the successor framing of ship-in-own-container, and a change that reduces packaging waste and operational cost at the same time.
SIV (Seller Identity Verification) Glossary
SIV (Seller Identity Verification) is the process of proving that a seller is who they claim to be: business entity details, identification documents, bank information, and the links between them all checked before the account is allowed to trade.
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) Glossary
A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is the internal code a business assigns to each distinct sellable variant — distinguished by brand, style, colour, size, or pack configuration — and used to track that variant through inventory, orders, and accounts.
SLA (Service Level Agreement) Glossary
An SLA is a committed performance standard — a timeframe, a response window, or a quality threshold that one party undertakes to meet.
SnL (Small and Light) Glossary
SnL (Small and Light) was the programme built for low-priced, lightweight items: a separate fee structure that made the economics of cheap, fast-moving products workable by removing the cost elements that their margins could not carry.
SnS (Subscribe & Save) Glossary
Subscribe & Save is the recurring-delivery programme: shoppers commit to regular deliveries of eligible products at a discount, and the subscription renews automatically on their chosen schedule until they change or cancel it.
SOA (Sell-Out Agreement) Glossary
A Sell-Out Agreement is a margin-funding arrangement based on sell-through: the contribution a brand makes is tied to units sold to end customers, rather than to units shipped into the network.
SOH (Sellable on Hand) Glossary
SOH (Sellable on Hand) is the quantity of inventory that is available to sell right now: units in the network that could be picked and shipped to a customer immediately.
SoROOS (Sourceable Replenishment Out of Stock) Glossary
SoROOS (Sourceable Replenishment Out of Stock) is an availability metric that captures the worst kind of gap: occasions when the product could genuinely be replenished — it is sourceable — but the listing is not buyable for customers, because of a suppression, a flag, or a…
SORT (Sortable) Glossary
SORT (Sortable) is the logistics classification for standard-size products that pass through the network’s automated handling: units that fit conveyors and routing bins without manual intervention — within the standard size dimensions and under the weight limit.
SOV (Share of Voice) Glossary
SOV (Share of Voice) is the share of visibility a brand holds against its competitors for a given set of terms or within a category — the proportion of impressions or placements that belong to you.
SP (Sponsored Products) Glossary
SP (Sponsored Products) is the advertising format that promotes individual product listings in search results and on product pages, charged on a cost-per-click basis and targeted by keyword or product.
SP (Small Parcel) Glossary
SP (Small Parcel) is the inbound shipping method that sends inventory as individual, separately labelled cartons through standard ground carrier networks, rather than as palletised freight.
SP-API (Selling Partner API) Glossary
SP-API (Selling Partner API) is the platform’s official programming interface for developers, replacing the older web-service model: a modern, permission-scoped way for applications to read and write business data — orders, inventory, listings, finances, advertising —…
SPD (Small Parcel Delivery) Glossary
SPD (Small Parcel Delivery) is inbound shipping by individually packed, separately tracked cartons through commercial ground networks — the same method as small parcel under its delivery-side name, bypassing palletised freight requirements and usually reaching the network faster.
SPICS (Super Pan-European Inbound Consolidation Service) Glossary
SPICS (Super Pan-European Inbound Consolidation Service) is the European inbound programme that lets vendors and high-volume sellers send inventory to a single consolidation point, from which the platform manages cross-border distribution to fulfilment centres across several EU marketplaces.
SPN (Service Provider Network) Glossary
SPN (Service Provider Network) is the platform’s directory of vetted third-party providers — agencies, software, and service firms — that have been approved to support sellers, covering advertising, account health, logistics, and other operational functions.
SPOC (Single Point of Contact) Glossary
SPOC (Single Point of Contact) is the practice of channelling communication with an organisation through one designated person or team, so that questions, escalations, and commitments have a single owner rather than being distributed across whoever happens to answer.
Sponsored Display Glossary
Sponsored Display is a self-service advertising format that reaches audiences on and off the marketplace, targeted by shopping behaviour and product views rather than by keyword alone. Creative is generated automatically from the listing.
SQP (Search Query Performance) Glossary
Search Query Performance is an analytics view that maps the shopper funnel for a search term: from the searches made, through impressions, clicks, and cart additions, to the purchases completed. It shows what happens across the whole journey for a given query.
SR (Sales Rank) Glossary
Sales Rank is the category-level ranking of a product by recent sales velocity: a position that rises as the product sells and falls when it does not. Lower numbers are better, and the rank is relative to everything else selling in the same category.
SRP (Secure Receive Process) Glossary
The Secure Receive Process is a verified receiving workflow for inbound freight: the consignment is scanned and counted under a documented chain of custody as it is checked in, so that what arrived is recorded authoritatively rather than reconstructed later.
SRP (Suggested Retail Price) Glossary
The Suggested Retail Price is the manufacturer’s recommended shelf price for a product — the figure published as the reference price, which marketplaces display as a struck-through comparison where the current price is lower.
SSA (Shipping Settings Automation) Glossary
Shipping Settings Automation is the self-fulfilment tool that selects carriers and purchases labels according to rules you define: service levels, delivery promises, cut-off times, and coverage mapped to your own shipping configuration.
SSCC (Serial Shipping Container Code) Glossary
The Serial Shipping Container Code is the standard GS1 barcode that uniquely identifies each physical carton or pallet in transit: an eighteen-digit identifier, applied as a label, that travels with the unit from dispatch to receipt.
SSPA (Self-Service Performance Advertising) Glossary
SSPA, or self-service performance advertising, is the umbrella term for the advertising console a brand operates itself: the search and display formats bought, targeted, and budgeted without a sales representative involved.
SSR (Seller Central Ship Request) Glossary
A Ship Request is the authorisation created in the seller console to send inbound inventory for fulfilment: it defines the consignment, books the appointment, and sets the compliance expectations the shipment will be measured against on arrival.
Standard Size Tier Glossary
Standard size is the regular-product classification: the tier below oversize, carrying the more favourable fulfilment fee schedule because those units move through the network’s automated handling with less space and less labour per item.
Stockouts Glossary
A stockout is demand without inventory: shoppers arrive, the product cannot be bought, and the sale goes to a competitor. It is the most expensive routine failure in e-commerce because the loss is not limited to the missed orders.
Storage Fees Glossary
Storage fees are the recurring charge for holding inventory in the fulfilment network: a monthly rate based on the space the inventory occupies, with additional charges for stock held beyond defined age thresholds and during peak periods.
Storefront Glossary
A Storefront is the multi-page branded destination available to registered brands: a small site-within-the-marketplace that showcases the catalogue and the brand narrative, and carries no competitor advertising or search-results distractions.
STR (Sell-Through Rate) Glossary
Sell-Through Rate is the proportion of inventory that sells within a period: units sold relative to units available. It is the cleanest single read on whether purchasing and demand are matched.
Stranded Inventory Glossary
Stranded inventory is stock sitting in the fulfilment network with no live listing to sell it: the units exist, occupy space, and cannot be bought, because the listing that would sell them has been suppressed, closed, or otherwise made inactive.
Supply Chain Glossary
The supply chain is the whole pipeline from raw materials to a delivered product: sourcing, manufacturing, freight, inbound processing, storage, and fulfilment. It is the machine that makes the listing buyable, and its performance shows up as availability.
Supply Chain Logistics Glossary
Supply chain logistics is the physical execution layer of the pipeline: freight, warehousing, routing, receiving, and the handling of goods at every stage between the factory and the customer.
SW (Ship Window) Glossary
The Ship Window is the required delivery date range on purchase orders: the earliest and latest dates within which goods are expected to arrive. Deliver too late and supply is disrupted; deliver too early and the receiving network is holding stock before it planned to.
T 15 terms
T12 (Turkey Twelve) Glossary
T12 (Turkey Twelve) is the broadened holiday trading window that runs across roughly twelve days of peak demand — an extended version of the traditional Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday sprint.
T12M (Trailing Twelve Months) Glossary
T12M (Trailing Twelve Months) is the rolling twelve-month view: the most recent 365 days of data, updating daily, with no fixed start or end date tied to the calendar.
T30D (Trailing 30 Days) Glossary
T30D (Trailing 30 Days) is the rolling thirty-day window: the most recent month of performance data, updating continuously, dropping the oldest day as each new one arrives.
T5 (Turkey Five) Glossary
T5 (Turkey Five) is the compressed peak: the five-day stretch from Thanksgiving through Black Friday, the following weekend, and Cyber Monday. Those five days carry a disproportionate share of the year’s volume across most categories.
T60D (Trailing 60 Days) Glossary
T60D (Trailing 60 Days) is the rolling two-month window: the most recent sixty days of sales and operational data, updating daily as each new day arrives and the oldest falls away.
T7D (Trailing 7 Days) Glossary
T7D (Trailing 7 Days) is the rolling one-week window: sales, conversion, clicks, and campaign performance measured over the immediately preceding seven days.
T90D (Trailing 90 Days) Glossary
T90D (Trailing 90 Days) is the rolling quarter: the most recent ninety days of performance data, updating daily. It is the window long enough to contain a full sales cycle and short enough to still describe the present.
TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) Glossary
TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) is advertising spend divided by total sales — including the organic sales that advertising did not directly generate. It measures what advertising costs relative to the whole business, not just to the sales it is credited with.
Third-Party Seller Glossary
A third-party seller is an independent merchant selling on a marketplace through the seller platform: the 3P side of the business. The seller owns the inventory, sets the prices, chooses how orders are fulfilled, and carries the responsibility for the customer experience.
TL (Truckload) Glossary
TL (Truckload) is freight in which a single dedicated trailer carries one consignment directly from a manufacturer, port, or supplier to a destination warehouse — no intermediate stops, no other cargo sharing the load.
TOS (Terms of Service) Glossary
The Terms of Service are the contractual rules governing how sellers, vendors, advertisers, and brands use the marketplace: acceptable conduct, compliance requirements, enforcement rights, and the standards an account must meet to stay in good standing.
TSI (Trans Shipment In) Glossary
TSI (Trans Shipment In) describes inventory received at a facility after being moved from another location rather than arriving directly from the vendor or seller — stock that is counted in the ledger while it is between facilities.
TSO (Time-to-Ship Optimization) Glossary
TSO (Time-to-Ship Optimization) is the work of shortening the interval between the customer placing an order and the carrier scanning the parcel into the network. It is the operational gap where delivery promises are won or lost.
TTM (Trailing Twelve Months) Glossary
TTM (Trailing Twelve Months) is the rolling twelve-month view — the most recent full year of data, updated continuously rather than tied to a calendar year. It is the figure used when a business needs to describe itself accurately.
UFT (Ultra Fast Track) Glossary
UFT (Ultra Fast Track) measures how much of a brand’s selection is available for the fastest delivery options — same-day or next-day handling — based on where the inventory is actually held.
U 8 terms
UIN (Unique Identification Number) Glossary
A UIN (Unique Identification Number) is a registration code issued by a national registry or producer responsibility organisation for a specific environmental or regulatory purpose — most commonly as proof of compliance with extended producer responsibility obligations for…
Unfulfillable Inventory Glossary
Unfulfillable inventory is stock held in the fulfilment network that cannot be sold: damaged, defective, expired, or otherwise graded as unsuitable for customers. The units exist, they occupy space, and they cannot fulfil an order.
Unit Session Percentage Glossary
Unit Session Percentage is the conversion measure of a listing: units ordered divided by the number of sessions on the detail page, over a given period. It is the standard conversion rate in seller reporting.
UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Products and Services Code) Glossary
UNSPSC is the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code: a hierarchical classification taxonomy for goods and services, used to organise what a product is in a machine-readable way for procurement systems.
UTA (Unable to Access) Glossary
UTA (Unable to Access) is a carrier scan meaning the driver could not physically reach the delivery point: a gate, a locked building, no entry code, weather, or something less polite at the door.
UTL (Unable to Locate) Glossary
UTL (Unable to Locate) is an inventory exception: a unit the system believes exists cannot be physically found during scanning or handling. The record says the stock is there; the warehouse floor disagrees.
UTM Glossary
UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL that record where a visitor came from: the source, the medium, the campaign, and optionally the content and the term. They are how external traffic becomes attributable rather than merely countable.
UX (User Experience) Glossary
UX (User Experience) is how every touchpoint of a brand feels to the person using it.
V 30 terms
Variation Glossary
A Variation is the relationship that groups similar products into a single detail page: several child offers that differ by one defined attribute — size, colour, flavour, pack quantity, material, style — sitting under a common parent.
Variation Lifecycle Management Glossary
Variation Lifecycle Management is the practice of maintaining a product family over time: adding children as the range grows, retiring variants that stop performing, and restructuring the family when the product line itself changes.
VAT (Value Added Tax) Glossary
VAT (Value Added Tax) is the consumption tax charged on goods and services at each stage of production and distribution. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, selling into a market generally means registering for VAT there and collecting, reporting, and remitting it.
VB (Virtual Bundle) Glossary
A Virtual Bundle groups two to five complementary products from the same registered brand into one buyable offer, without physically packing them together. The components are separate inventory and the order is assembled at fulfilment.
VC (Vendor Central) Glossary
Vendor Central is the supplier-facing platform used by manufacturers and distributors who sell to the retailer itself as a first-party supplier: the retailer buys wholesale and resells, owning the retail price, the content, and the customer relationship.
VCR (Vendor Confirmation Rate) Glossary
VCR (Vendor Confirmation Rate) is the share of ordered units a vendor confirms within the required window: of the units requested on a purchase order, how many were accepted and confirmed on time.
Vendor Glossary
A Vendor is a first-party supplier: a business that sells inventory in bulk to the retailer itself, which then sets the retail price, manages the listings, and serves the customer. The brand becomes a wholesaler; the platform becomes the retailer.
VFBD (Vendor Funded Buy-Down) Glossary
VFBD (Vendor Funded Buy-Down) is an arrangement in which the brand funds a temporary retail price reduction: the brand pays a set amount per unit for the duration of a promotion, and the retail price comes down accordingly.
VFH (Vendor Flex Hub) Glossary
A Vendor Flex Hub is a coordination point for several Vendor Flex locations: a node that organises inbound flows, redistribution, and capacity across the flex sites in its area rather than each one operating independently.
VFMC (Vendor Funded Managed Coupons) Glossary
VFMC (Vendor Funded Managed Coupons) are coupons within the subscription programme that the platform creates, schedules, and optimises, with the vendor providing the funding. The brand pays; the platform decides when and where the coupon runs.
VF / VFlex (Vendor Flex) Glossary
Vendor Flex embeds the platform’s fulfilment operation inside the vendor’s own facility. Space is allocated within or beside the vendor’s warehouse, the platform installs its systems and equipment, and its staff pick, pack, and ship from there under its own processes.
VGP (Vendor Growth Plan) Glossary
A Vendor Growth Plan is a structured agreement between a vendor and the platform setting out growth targets, the initiatives that will pursue them, and who owns each one. It is the working document of the vendor relationship rather than a formality.
VIAO (Vendor Initiated Allocated Offer) Glossary
A VIAO (Vendor Initiated Allocated Offer) is a pricing proposal a vendor submits to the buying team: the brand offers a temporary discount on a specific product, and the discount goes live only if the offer is accepted.
Vine Glossary
Vine is the official early-review programme: a brand enrols an eligible product, makes a number of units available, and invited reviewers receive them at no cost in exchange for writing reviews that appear on the listing.
Vine Voices (Amazon Vine Voices) Glossary
Vine Voices are the reviewers in the Vine programme: a small group of people the platform invites based on the quality and helpfulness of their past reviews, who receive enrolled products at no cost and write about them.
VIO (Vendor Initiated Order) Glossary
A VIO (Vendor Initiated Order) lets a first-party vendor propose a purchase order rather than wait for the platform’s automated buying to generate one. The brand initiates the purchase; the retailer decides whether to accept.
VIP (Vendor Improvement Plan) Glossary
A VIP (Vendor Improvement Plan) is the corrective counterpart to a growth plan: a structured programme for a vendor whose performance is affecting the customer experience or the retailer’s operational efficiency, setting out specific metrics to fix and the actions required.
VIR (Volume Incentive Rebate) Glossary
A VIR (Volume Incentive Rebate) is a trade term in which the supplier pays a rebate once agreed volume thresholds are reached: the more the retailer sells or buys, the better the effective terms it earns.
Virtual Try-On Glossary
Virtual Try-On is the augmented-reality feature that lets a shopper see how a product looks on them before buying — primarily used for footwear and eyewear, and part of a wider set of immersive features built on 3D models.
VLT (Vendor Lead Time) Glossary
VLT (Vendor Lead Time) is the total time a vendor needs to fulfil a purchase order: from the order being received through processing and confirmation, picking and packing, arranging transport, transit, and finally the appointment and check-in at the destination facility.
VM (Vendor Manager) Glossary
A Vendor Manager is the person on the retailer’s side who owns the commercial relationship with the brand: a category buyer responsible for a portfolio of vendors within one product area, covering negotiation, assortment, performance, and promotional participation.
VMP (Virtual Multi-Pack) Glossary
A Virtual Multi-Pack sells several units as a single offer without physically bundling them. The pack is created at catalogue level, a new listing is linked to the single-unit product, and when a customer orders the pack the warehouse picks that number of individual units and ships them together.
VMS (Vendor Management System) Glossary
A Vendor Management System is the software layer that organises first-party operations: purchase orders, logistics, catalogue data, and financial reconciliation brought into one place rather than handled across scattered spreadsheets and portals.
VOC (Vendor Own Carrier) Glossary
VOC (Vendor Own Carrier) is the direct-fulfilment option in which the vendor chooses and manages the carrier delivering to the end customer, rather than routing through the platform’s own carrier arrangements.
VOC (Voice of the Customer) Glossary
Voice of the Customer is the dashboard that aggregates customer sentiment about a product into a single health view: reviews and ratings, return comments, customer service contacts, and post-purchase feedback, combined into a rating for each item.
Voucher / Vendor Powered Voucher (VPV) Glossary
A Voucher is a clip-able discount shown as a badge on a listing and in search results — an amount or a percentage that the customer activates before checkout. The discount is funded entirely by the brand, plus a small merchandising fee in most markets.
VRID (Vehicle Run Identification) Glossary
A VRID (Vehicle Run Identification) is the identifier assigned to a vehicle and its load for a specific run in the logistics network: the code that ties together the truck, the goods it is carrying, and the schedule it is meant to follow.
VSP (Vendor Success Programme) Glossary
The Vendor Success Programme is the entry-level managed support arrangement for vendors: structured guidance and account support covering operational health, catalogue management, and growth opportunities, priced below the more comprehensive managed service.
VSS-M (Vendor Self-Service Merchandising) Glossary
Vendor Self-Service Merchandising is the set of tools that lets a vendor manage merchandising directly — setting up promotions, creating and funding deals, applying placements, and managing enhanced content — without waiting on the buying team to arrange each one.
VTR (Valid Tracking Rate) Glossary
Valid Tracking Rate is the share of self-fulfilled shipments carrying valid, verifiable tracking: parcels dispatched with a tracking number that can actually be scanned and followed from dispatch to delivery.
W 11 terms
Warehouse Deal Glossary
A Warehouse Deal is a listing in the resale storefront for open-box, used, or refurbished stock — typically items that began as customer returns or were damaged within the fulfilment network, resold at a discount under a distinct grading.
WBR (Weekly Business Review) Glossary
A Weekly Business Review is the standing meeting at which performance is examined against plan: the metrics, the issues behind them, and the commitments for the coming week. It is a management rhythm rather than a report.
WCO (World Customs Organization) Glossary
The World Customs Organization is the intergovernmental body that sets the international standards governing how goods are classified, valued, and cleared across borders.
WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Glossary
WEEE is the European directive making producers responsible for the collection, treatment, and recycling of electrical and electronic products once they reach end of life. It applies across European markets and to sellers, not only to manufacturers with a physical presence there.
Wholesale Glossary
Wholesale means selling in bulk to a buyer who then retails the goods. On a marketplace it describes two related things: the first-party model, in which the brand supplies the platform as a wholesaler, and the sourcing model in which a reseller buys branded goods in bulk to sell on.
Wholesale Sourcing Glossary
Wholesale Sourcing is the reseller model: buying branded products in bulk from manufacturers or authorised distributors at trade pricing and selling them on existing listings, at a margin between the buy price and the retail price.
WHS (Warehouse Health and Safety) Glossary
Warehouse Health and Safety is the framework of facility standards, equipment training, and handling procedures that protect the people working in a warehouse from injury: how racking is managed, how machinery is operated, how goods are lifted, and how incidents are recorded and investigated.
WIP (Work in Progress) Glossary
WIP (Work in Progress) is inventory caught mid-manufacture: materials committed and money spent, but the goods not yet finished and therefore not yet sellable.
WOC (Weeks of Cover) Glossary
Weeks of Cover measures how long current stock will last at the present rate of sale: units on hand divided by weekly sales. The answer is a runway expressed in weeks, which is exactly how inventory decisions are actually made.
Working Capital Glossary
Working capital is the difference between current operational assets — inventory, receivables, cash — and current liabilities such as supplier payments and platform fees. In practice it is the money available to run the business day to day.
WoW (Week over Week) Glossary
WoW (Week over Week) compares this week’s figure with last week’s: the highest-frequency trend view that is still worth having. It is used across sales, units, traffic, conversion, availability, and advertising performance.
X 1 terms
X-Channel Management Glossary
X-Channel Management is the practice of running inventory, pricing, and content coherently across every channel a brand sells on at once — the marketplace, its own website, other marketplaces, and physical retail — rather than managing each in isolation.
Y 3 terms
YoY (Year over Year) Glossary
YoY (Year over Year) compares a period with the same period a year earlier: this July against last July, this quarter against the same quarter, rather than against the month immediately before it.
YTD (Year to Date) Glossary
YTD (Year to Date) is the cumulative performance from the start of the year to today: sales, costs, and efficiency measures aggregated from January, or from the start of the fiscal year where that differs.
YTG (Year to Go) Glossary
YTG (Year to Go) is the complement to year to date: what remains to be achieved in the rest of the year to reach the annual target. It is the forward-looking half of the same calculation.
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