E-commerce Merchandising Glossary: 78 Terms Every Shopify Merchant Should Know

An e-commerce merchandising glossary for Shopify merchants: 78 terms from sell-through and days of cover to AOV, PLP, pinning and merchandising rules, each explained in plain language with how it is used.

This e-commerce merchandising glossary collects the terms that come up whenever a team talks about what to show shoppers, in what order, and whether it worked. Merchandising borrows words from retail buying, web analytics and software, and the same idea often goes by three names depending on who is in the room. A buyer says sell-through, an analyst says conversion, a developer says sort key, and all three are talking about the same collection page.

Each term below is explained in two to four sentences, with a formula where one helps and a note on how it is used on a Shopify store. The terms are grouped by topic rather than alphabetically, so related ideas sit together: pages and layout, sorting and placement, Shopify collections, shopper metrics, inventory and margin, campaigns, and measurement. Where a term is something our app SellRank works with, we say so, because a definition is easier to remember when you have seen it used.

Pages and layout

• PLP (product listing page): any page that shows a grid or list of products, such as a collection page, a category page or search results. The PLP is where shoppers compare and choose which product to open, so its order and first row have an outsized effect on sales.
• PDP (product detail page): the page for a single product, with images, price, variants, description and the add-to-cart button. The PLP decides whether a shopper reaches a PDP; the PDP decides whether they add to cart.
• Collection page: Shopify's name for the PLP that shows the products in one collection. Its default order is set in the collection's sort order in Shopify admin, and shoppers can change it with the theme's sort menu if the theme offers one.
• Product card (product tile): the block for one product on a PLP, usually an image, title, price and sometimes a badge or rating. The card is what the shopper judges before clicking, so the price and image it shows matter as much as the product itself.
• Above the fold (first screen): the part of a page visible before scrolling. On a phone, a collection page usually shows only a handful of product cards above the fold, which is why the first row is the most valuable space on the page.
• First row: the first few product positions on a collection page. It gets the most attention of any positions on the page, so deciding what goes there is the core of collection merchandising.
• Facets and filters: controls that narrow a PLP by attribute, such as size, colour, price or material. Filters change which products are shown; sorting changes the order they are shown in. Good merchandising needs both.
• Pagination and infinite scroll: the two ways a long PLP loads more products, by page numbers or by loading more as the shopper scrolls. Either way, products deep in the list are seen by far fewer shoppers than those at the top.
• Landing page: the page a shopper first arrives on from an ad, email or search result. For many D2C campaigns the landing page is a collection, so the collection's order is part of the campaign whether anyone planned it or not.

Sorting and placement

• Sort order: the rule that decides the sequence of products on a PLP. On Shopify, each collection has a default sort order, such as best selling, price, date created, title, most relevant or manual.
• Default sort: the order a collection shows when a shopper has not chosen one. Most shoppers never change it, so the default sort is effectively the collection's merchandising.
• Manual sort: an order set by hand, product by product. On Shopify it is the only sort that lets you decide every position, and it is also what apps write to when they set a collection order for you. In Shopify's Liquid documentation, the manual option appears to shoppers as Featured.
• Best selling: Shopify's sort based on the all-time number of orders that include the product, according to its help centre. It is simple but backward-looking, so a product that sold well two years ago can outrank one that is selling well this week.
• Most relevant: a newer Shopify sort option that, according to Shopify's help centre, orders products by sales performance. Shopify says new collections use it by default.
• Pinning: fixing a product at a chosen position regardless of what the automatic order says. Merchandisers pin hero products, campaign products and anything with a commercial reason to be seen. In SellRank, pins are remembered on every re-sort.
• Demotion (burying): pushing a product down or to the bottom of a collection, for example because it is low on stock, being discontinued or photographs poorly. It is the opposite of pinning and just as important.
• Boosting: raising a product's rank without fixing its position, by giving it extra weight in a score. A boosted product moves up, but can still be outranked by products that perform much better.
• Merchandising rules: the conditions that shape an automatic order, such as in-stock first, exclude a vendor, or keep new arrivals in the top rows. Rules turn a raw metric into an order a merchandiser would sign off.
• Slotting (percentage slots): dividing a collection into slices, each filled by a different strategy. For example, the first 20 percent in-stock bestsellers, the next 20 percent new arrivals, and the rest by revenue. SellRank calls these percentage slots.
• Blended score: a single score built from several weighted metrics, such as revenue, conversion and recency, used to rank products. Blending stops one metric from dominating, so one viral product does not push everything else down.
• Re-sort cadence: how often an automatic order is recalculated and republished. Daily suits most stores in a busy season; weekly suits slower catalogues. SellRank can re-sort daily or weekly in the store's own time zone.
• Sort drift: when the live order of a collection no longer matches the order that was intended, because someone moved products by hand, a theme or app changed it, or new products were added. SellRank checks for this hourly and calls it sort health.

Shopify collection terms

• Collection: a group of products on Shopify, used for navigation, landing pages, discounts and tax rules. The same product can be in many collections.
• Manual collection: in Shopify's legacy model, a collection whose products are chosen by hand. It always contains the same products unless someone adds or removes them.
• Smart collection (automated collection): in Shopify's legacy model, a collection whose products are chosen by conditions, such as a tag, type, vendor or price. Shopify's help centre says a smart collection can have up to 60 conditions, matched all or any.
• Conditions: the rules that decide membership of an automated collection or source, such as product tag is festive or price is less than 1,000. Conditions keep a collection current as products are added.
• Collection sources: the building blocks of Shopify's new collections model, introduced in 2026. A collection is a union of sources, which can combine conditions, hand-picked products, exclusions, other collections and app-provided sources.
• Variant collection: a collection whose members are individual variants rather than whole products, such as only the red variants of a range. Shopify's developer documentation limits a shop to 100 of them.
• Sub-collection: in Shopify's new model, a collection used as a source for another, such as Rings and Earrings inside Jewellery. Shopify restricts this to one level deep.
• Tag: a free-text label on a product, often used in collection conditions and filters. Tags are flexible and easy to misuse, so it pays to keep a documented list of the ones that drive collections.
• Product type and vendor: two standard product fields in Shopify, often used as collection conditions. Keeping them consistent across the catalogue makes conditions reliable.
• Metafield: a custom field on a product or variant, such as fabric, stone shape or occasion. Metafields can power filters and collection conditions, and are more structured than tags.

Shopper and conversion metrics

• Session: one visit to the store, which can include many page views. Sessions are the usual denominator for store-wide conversion rate.
• Product view: one view of a product, usually counted when the PDP loads. Views are the top of the funnel for each product and the basis for rates like add-to-cart rate.
• Add-to-cart rate: add-to-carts divided by product views. It shows how well a product persuades once opened, and it is often more stable than conversion for products with few orders.
• Conversion rate: the share of visits, or of product views, that end in an order. Store conversion is orders divided by sessions; product conversion is orders divided by views. Always say which one you mean.
• View-to-order rate: orders of a product divided by its views. It is a useful ranking metric because it rewards products that sell when seen, not just products that are seen a lot.
• Click-through rate (from a PLP): the share of shoppers who see a product card and click it. It tells you whether the image, price and title on the card are doing their job.
• AOV (average order value): total revenue divided by the number of orders. AOV rises with bundles, cross-sells and higher-priced products in prominent positions, and falls with heavy discounting.
• Units per transaction (UPT): the average number of items per order. Together with AOV it tells you whether shoppers are buying more items or more expensive ones.
• Revenue per visitor: total revenue divided by visitors or sessions. It combines conversion and AOV in one number, which makes it a good summary for comparing two versions of a collection page.
• Bounce rate: the share of sessions that leave after one page without interacting further. A high bounce rate on a collection used as a landing page often points to a first row that does not match what the ad promised.

Inventory terms

• Sell-through rate: units sold in a period divided by units available at the start of that period, or received during it, shown as a percentage. High sell-through means stock is moving; low sell-through flags products that may need clearance or better placement. SellRank can rank by it on every plan.
• Days of cover (days of stock cover): stock on hand divided by average daily units sold. A product with 300 units that sells 10 a day has 30 days of cover. Very high cover suggests overstock; very low cover warns of a coming stockout.
• Weeks of supply: the same idea as days of cover, measured in weeks, and common in retail buying. Use whichever unit your team plans in, but use one consistently.
• Inventory turnover (stock turn): how many times stock is sold and replaced in a period, often calculated as cost of goods sold divided by average inventory at cost. Higher turnover generally means less cash tied up in stock.
• Stockout (out of stock): when a product or variant has no sellable units. An out-of-stock product at the top of a collection collects clicks that cannot convert.
• Size break (broken size run): when a fashion product has sold out in the common sizes and only the extremes remain. It is technically in stock but converts poorly, so it usually belongs lower on the page.
• Dead stock: inventory that has not sold for a long time and is unlikely to sell at full price. It ties up cash and warehouse space, and is a candidate for clearance or bundling.
• Made-to-order: products produced only after an order is placed, with little or no stock held. Stock-based metrics like days of cover do not apply to them in the usual way, so ranking logic should not treat them as overstock or out of stock. SellRank's clearance logic is built to avoid that mistake.

Price and margin terms

• Gross margin: revenue minus cost of goods sold, often shown as a percentage of revenue. A product with a ₹1,000 price and a ₹400 cost has a 60 percent gross margin, before shipping, returns and marketing.
• Markup: the amount added to cost to reach the price, shown as a percentage of cost. The same ₹400 cost and ₹1,000 price is a 150 percent markup. Markup and margin are often confused, and the difference matters in pricing meetings.
• COGS (cost of goods sold): the direct cost of the products sold in a period. On Shopify, the cost per item field on each variant is what apps and reports use to estimate it.
• Contribution margin: revenue minus all variable costs of an order, including product cost, shipping, payment fees, packaging and returns. For Indian D2C brands, RTO and COD fees can move contribution margin a long way from gross margin.
• Markdown: a permanent price reduction, usually to clear stock. Unlike a temporary promotion, a markdown is meant to stay until the product sells.
• Compare-at price: the higher reference price Shopify shows crossed out next to the selling price. It should reflect a price the product was genuinely sold at.
• Profit-aware ranking: ordering a collection by margin or estimated profit rather than revenue alone. It puts products that earn the most in front, not only those that sell the most. SellRank offers it on the Scale plan and up, using cost per item from Shopify.

Campaigns and planning

• Hero product: a product chosen to lead a campaign or collection, usually for its photography, margin, stock depth or story. Hero products are typically pinned in the first row for the length of the campaign.
• New arrivals window: the period during which a new product gets deliberate visibility, before it has enough data to compete on performance. Without a window, data-driven orders keep new products at the bottom.
• Draft order (for a collection): a collection order prepared in advance and saved without being published. Drafts let a team review a campaign's order before it reaches shoppers.
• Scheduled publish: publishing a collection order automatically at a set date and time, such as midnight when a sale starts. It removes the need for someone to make the change live by hand.
• Auto-revert: returning a collection automatically to its previous or everyday order when a campaign ends. It is the step most often forgotten when campaigns are run by hand. SellRank includes drafts, schedules and auto-revert on the Grow plan and up.
• Merchandising calendar: a plan of campaigns, launches and seasonal moments across the year, with the collections each one affects. In India, the festive season from Navratri to Diwali is the busiest stretch of it.
• Cross-sell and upsell: suggesting a related product (cross-sell) or a higher-priced alternative (upsell). They usually live on PDPs and in the cart, but a collection's order can do some of the same work by placing complementary products together.
• Open-to-buy: the budget a buyer has left to spend on new stock in a period, after accounting for current stock and planned sales. It connects merchandising decisions to cash.

Data and measurement

• First-party data: data a store collects directly from its own site, such as views and orders, rather than buying or borrowing it. It tends to be more complete and more reliable for merchandising than third-party sources.
• Web pixel: a small script that records events on a storefront, such as product views and add-to-carts. On Shopify, apps add pixels through the Web Pixels API. SellRank's pixel records aggregate counts per product per day, with no customer identifiers.
• Aggregate data: totals and averages, such as 120 views of a product yesterday, as opposed to records about individual people. Merchandising decisions almost always need only aggregates.
• Attribution: deciding which change or channel gets credit for a result. For collections, the useful question is which version of the order was live when the views, carts and orders happened.
• Version (of a collection order): a saved snapshot of a collection's order at the time it was published. Keeping versions makes it possible to compare their performance and restore an earlier one.
• Per-version performance: the views, add-to-carts, orders and revenue recorded while each version of a collection order was live. SellRank shows this for every version, so a merchant can see whether a new order beat the old one.
• A/B test: showing two versions to comparable groups of shoppers at the same time and comparing results. It is the strongest way to judge a change, but it needs enough traffic, and many small stores compare periods before and after instead.
• Seasonality: regular changes in demand across the year, such as festive peaks. It is the main reason a before-and-after comparison can mislead, since traffic and intent change around the same time as the order does.
• GA4 (Google Analytics 4): Google's analytics platform, widely used by Shopify stores. It can supply historical product views and add-to-carts; SellRank can import up to 90 days from a connected property on the Scale plan and up.

India-specific terms worth knowing

• MRP (maximum retail price): the highest price at which a packaged product can be sold in India, printed on the pack. Online selling prices are often shown against it as a reference.
• COD (cash on delivery): payment collected when the order is delivered. It remains common in India and affects both conversion and the cost of returns.
• RTO (return to origin): an order that is shipped but returned to the seller undelivered, often a refused COD order. RTO costs are a major part of contribution margin for many Indian D2C brands.
• Festive season: the period from roughly Navratri to Diwali when Indian online sales peak. In 2026, Navratri begins on 11 October and Diwali falls on 8 November.

How the terms in this merchandising glossary fit together

Most of these terms describe one loop. Collections and conditions decide which products are on a page. Sort order, slots, pins and rules decide the order. Views, add-to-cart rate, conversion and revenue per visitor measure what shoppers did. Sell-through, days of cover and margin decide what you want them to buy. And versions, attribution and seasonality tell you whether the change you made actually caused the result you see.

SellRank was built to run that loop on Shopify collections. It ranks products by metrics from this glossary, lets you compose the order with slots, conditions, pins and demotions, writes it into Shopify's manual sort on a schedule, and shows the performance of each version. There is a free plan for one collection if you want to try the terms in practice.