Glossary

Ecommerce AI glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms behind ecommerce AI.

01 / Glossary

Terms

ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)Agentic: An open protocol shape for publishing a catalogue so AI shopping agents can read products and complete a purchase on a shopper's behalf. Sellarix exposes catalogues as an ACP feed.
Agentic commerceAgentic: Commerce conducted by AI agents acting for shoppers: discovering products, building carts and checking out programmatically. It needs clean, structured, agent-ready data.
AI site searchDiscovery: Search that interprets a shopper's natural-language intent and returns ranked, explained products rather than matching keywords. See Discover and Convert.
Catalogue enrichmentMerchandising: Automatically filling missing product attributes, fixing data and standardising taxonomy so products are accurate and discoverable. Part of Merchandise and Price.
Churn predictionGrowth: Scoring how likely each customer is to stop buying, so retention effort is spent where it pays back. See Grow and Retain.
Conversational commerceDiscovery: Shopping through dialogue: customers ask in their own words and an AI assistant understands intent and responds with products. Read the explainer.
Customer lifetime value (CLV)Growth: The predicted total value of a customer over their relationship with a store, used to prioritise acquisition and retention. Also called LTV.
Data spinePlatform: A single, unified store of catalogue, customer and order data that every AI capability reads from and writes to, so insight compounds instead of fragmenting across tools.
Demand forecastingOperations: Predicting future demand at SKU and location level to drive replenishment and reduce stockouts and overstock. See Operate and Protect.
Dynamic pricingMerchandising: Setting prices automatically from demand, margin targets and competitor data, with each change explainable. Part of Merchandise and Price.
EU AI ActCompliance: The EU's risk-based law governing AI. Its Article 50 transparency duties (AI disclosure and synthetic-media marking) apply from 2 August 2026. See the compliance guide.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)Discovery: Optimising content so AI answer engines cite it: clear definitions, structured data and machine-readable facts. Also called answer engine optimization (AEO).
Hybrid searchDiscovery: Combining semantic (meaning-based) and lexical (exact-match) search and fusing the results, so both natural-language queries and exact SKUs return good results.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)Agentic: An open standard that lets AI models call external tools and data through one interface. Sellarix exposes catalogue and order tools via an MCP manifest.
Next-best-actionGrowth: The single action most likely to move a given customer, ranked by incremental impact, used to drive retention and growth.
Personalized recommendationsDiscovery: Product suggestions generated from a shopper's behaviour and catalogue affinities, updated in real time across the store.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Platform: Grounding an AI model's responses in retrieved, real data (your catalogue and orders) rather than only its training, so answers are accurate and current.
Returns predictionOperations: Flagging orders and products likely to be returned before they are, so the causes can be addressed and margin protected.
Semantic searchDiscovery: Search that matches on meaning using vector embeddings, so 'something warm for winter runs' finds the right products even without exact keywords.
Synthetic media markingCompliance: Machine-readable labelling of AI-generated images and video (for example C2PA content credentials), required under the EU AI Act. Built into Content and Media.
UCP (Universal Cart Protocol)Agentic: Google's cart format for expressing a cart and its items so it travels across agents and shopping surfaces. Sellarix publishes catalogues in Universal Cart shape alongside ACP.
Virtual try-onContent: Letting shoppers preview a product on themselves or in their space, often with AR, to raise confidence and reduce wrong-fit returns. Part of Content and Media.
Visual searchDiscovery: Searching by image: a shopper uploads or snaps a photo and gets visually similar, buyable products from the catalogue.
WISMO (where is my order)Service: The most common ecommerce support query. Serve resolves it automatically from live tracking and order data.