E-commerce knowledge base
Research, reviews and practical breakdowns: what works in online stores, how to measure change and build a sales system.
Fulfillment
Fulfillment (order fulfillment) is the whole path of an order from the warehouse to the buyer: receiving and storing goods, order processing, picking and packing, shipping and handling returns. You can do fulfillment yourself or hand it to an outside operator.
Headless commerce
Headless commerce is an online store architecture in which the visible part (the storefront, the "head") is separated from the backend that holds the logic of orders, catalog and payments, and data is exchanged through an API. The storefront can be changed or…
Subscriptions in e-commerce
An e-commerce subscription is a model in which a customer agrees to receive a product regularly (every month, every few weeks) or to pay for access, and by agreement payment is charged automatically each time. The main types are replenishment of consumables…
SaaS
SaaS (software as a service) is software you don't buy or install on your own server but use through a browser on a subscription. The provider hosts, updates and supports it (Wikipedia, SaaS).
GEO (generative engine optimization)
GEO (generative engine optimization) is a set of actions a website takes to get into the answers of AI assistants and AI search: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode. The separate terms AEO and LLMO mean almost the same thing. For Google…
Checkout
Checkout is the sequence of steps from the cart to purchase confirmation: contact details, delivery, payment, order review. This is exactly where an online store loses shoppers who have already decided to buy.
How to choose what to improve first (ICE, PIE)
Hypothesis prioritization is a way to order ideas for improving a site (change a button, rewrite the delivery info, simplify a form) by expected benefit and difficulty, so you do first what gives the most for the least effort. The best-known simple models are…
How to move to a new online store platform without losing traffic and data
Online store migration means moving the catalog, customers, orders and page URLs to a new platform so that buyers and Google don't notice a break. There are two main risks: losing search traffic (the URLs changed and the old ones are not redirected) and…
Catalog filters
Catalog filters (faceted search) are a set of parameters (price, brand, color, size and so on) by which a customer narrows down a list of products. Each filter consists of a category (a property, such as color) and values (red, blue).
Branding
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or other feature that distinguishes one seller's goods or services from the rest. Branding is the work of creating and developing that distinction: from the name and logo to the voice, the promise and the buyer's…
Attribution: why ad reports don't match
Attribution is the rule that "assigns" a purchase to advertising touchpoints: a click, an impression, an email. Different systems (Google Ads, GA4, Meta, your CRM) apply different rules, so they show a different number of sales for the same period. This isn't…
AI bots on your site: GPTBot, robots.txt and llms.txt
AI bots are programs that AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google) use to read websites: to train models, to power search in chatbot answers, or to visit a page at a specific user's request. You can manage them through `robots.txt`, but one rule…