Terminology - Expressions

OMS

Order Management System

POS

Point of Sales

RMA

Return Merchandise Authorization

RA

Return Authorization

RGA

Return Goods Authorization

Client

The company that contracts with Increff to operate e-commerce services.

Customer

Final user that purchase client’s products.

Sales Channel

Any channel selling retailer’s product (E.g. webstore, marketplace).

BOPIS

Buy Online Pickup In-Store

ISPU

In-Store Pickup (Collection of items from the store, regardless of payment point)

ROPIS

Reserve Online Pickup In-Store (The order reservation is made online but the payment is made in the store)

MNI

Multi-Node Inventory

SFS

Ship from Store

HD

Home delivery

STS

Ship to Store

ISI

In Store Interface

Inventory Domain

A domain which includes all features related to stock accounting (how many items do we have at all, how many available, where etc.) and stock brokering (eq. from where we should allocate stock for the order placed in Spain, etc.).

SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)

Distinct items, such as a products or services, offered for sale which embody all attributes associated with the item and that distinguish it from all other items.
A SKU is a unique, alphanumeric identifier that is used to track inventory. It should not contain spaces and must not exceed 64 characters in length. A SKU longer than 64 characters will cause an import to fail.

Pick List

The grouping of order items which will be picked together, used both within a warehouse or store during the process of picking a customers order.

Sourcing

Action of deciding at which source each of the lines of an order will be (hard) allocated.

Allocation queue

All orders that are still pending to be assigned to a specific source. They could be new orders or orders that needs to be resourced. The Source Engine will process all lines in Soft allocation at the scheduled time to define a source in order to make an HARD allocation. The page will display flagged the exceptions.

Source

An entity which represents a physical place where stock can be stored and where orders get dispatched from. Source has unique ID, name, address, a flag which tells if this source provides pickup service or no (is pickup location) and some basic setting for sourcing rules (when source can receive the new batch of orders).

Stock

An entity which represent a stock level of the item (SKU) in a Source.

Stock-snapshot

Sends a single message for a specific source for intra-day updates. If you have a very large catalog we recommend sending stock-snapshot updates in batches.

There are three modes to send a stock-snapshot: DELTA, FULL or NONZERO.

Adjustment

Frequent intra-day adjustments, or updates, that adjust the relative stock to the available quantity already in your OMS. Available stock is then recalculated to be sold for the modified SKUs and exported as a DELTA stock-snapshot message.

Stock aggregate

An entity which represent the sale channel and is used to provide the stock levels to the external sales channel. Each stock aggregate can have one or multiple sources associated and will aggregate the stock available to sell for all the associated sources (calculating safety stock and in-flight orders).

Store Stock

An entity which represent an aggregated Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) available in Stock aggregate.

Safety stock

Is a specific quantity that can be defined at source, category or stock level of the item (SKU) level. The safety stock is decreased from the available to sell stock to provide a buffer against over-sales.

Sourcing Exceptions

Exceptions rules can be configured in the configuration system. Orders that have at least 1 exception will be flagged and highlighted in the allocation queue so that the business manager can review in timely manner and provide some manual resolution to the exception. If no manual action is taken, during the next Source Engine run the order will be processed again.

Allocation attempt

Every time an order line Soft Allocated is processed by the Source Engine is marked as allocation attempt even if the line couldn’t be hard allocated for some reason (no stock available, conflict with the business rules). The only case that won’t indicate an allocation attempt is for orders in a store that don’t have any source enabled in the specific allocation run.

Re-Source

The action to push back an order line which is already hard allocated to the source engine so that can be sourced from a different source.

Sourcing scheduler / sourcing waves

A method of running order sourcing which improves allocation efficiency by optimising orders into groups of orders sharing common SKU’s. The timeframes are configurable and each source can be enabled/disabled for a particular schedule. This method of allocation has benefits over FIFO (first-in, first-out) based scheduling and can be mixed with realtime sourcing for optimum allocation.

Soft allocation

Soft allocation is executed for each physical line of the order as soon as the order has been imported in the OMS. It’s the mechanism that will prevent the merchant to oversell in the various sales channels.

• Soft allocation is executed as soon as the order arrives in OMS or potentially during checkout (e.g. before running any fraud, remorse time etc.)

• Soft allocation will keep track of all orders inflight that are still pending to be assigned to a specific source node.

• Soft allocated items are decreased from the stock available to sell when generating a stock-snapshot to any of the sales channel.

Hard allocation

Booking the stock at source level and implies the creation of a shipment request (either for the warehouse or the store picklist). It is done at line level so potentially would generate a split shipment if the same order is hard allocated to various sources.

• Hard allocation will override soft allocations (i.e. order lines with allocations won’t have a soft allocation).

• Hard allocation will be changed to soft allocation in case there is a pick decline or LSP out of stock cancellation and order line need to be re-sourced.

• Hard allocations can be manually forced from the Source Bucket or the Hot Bucket.

ATS

(Stock) Available To Sell at the moment the information is provided with stock snapshot feed (which can be full or non-zero).

ATP

Available To Promise Inventory as provided to front-ends.

PO

Purchase Order

Harmonized Tariff Code

International standardized system of names and numbers for classifying traded products developed and maintained by the World Customs Organization (WCO).

EAN 13

Wikipedia Definition: “An EAN-13 barcode (originally European Article Number, but now renamed International Article Number) is a 13 digit (12 data and 1 check) barcoding standard which is a superset of the original 12-digit Universal Product Code (UPC) system developed in the United States. The EAN-13 barcode is defined by the standards organization GS1.
All the numbers encoded in UPC and EAN barcodes are known as Global Trade Item Numbers (GTIN), and they can be encoded in other GS1 barcodes.”

GTIM

Global Trade Item Numbers (see also EAN 13 and UPC).

Logistics Domain

A domain which includes all features related to the process of pick, pack and deliver products to a customer (where deliver order from and to, how to deliver, what to deliver, track what delivered and when and so on).

Fulfillment

The process of managing customer shipments.

Shipment

A shipment is a record of the products in an order that have been shipped. More than one shipment can be associated with a single order.

Split shipment

Part of the order which is ship at a different time or from a different location of another part of the order.

Package

A parcel that is used to deliver the order.

Partial Shipment

An order is partially shipped when part of it is cancelled (E.g. case when the inventory is damaged).

Shipment Request

A request to the source to initiate order dispatching. Normally this request also means that source have to allocate stock for the item. Shipment request includes a unique number within the order, list of the items which need to be shipped and destination address.

Shipping carrier

A company that transports packages. Common carriers include UPS, FedEx, DHL, and USPS.

Advice note

Document that lists all products shipped to a customer. The advice note may not include prices for instance if the order is a gift and can’t then be considered as a formal customer invoice.

PUL

(Pick Up Location) A Source which has a pickup location flag set, representing a place where a customer can pick up their order.

Customer Pick up Confirm

An event when customer is coming to the Pickup Location and picking up his or her order.
Currently the Pickup Location is likely to be a physical store, this is the most common scenario in retail today. In the future this concept may be expanded to include other locations, such as a gate in an airport, another retailer or commercial premise being used as a “collection point”, or in the case of some carriers it could also be a physical location specifically used for the delivery too and collection of parcels, for example DHL Pack Station.
There is an API endpoint for notifying OMS about this event.

Customer Pick up Decline

An event when customer is coming to the Pickup Location and decline to pick up one or all items of his order.
There is an API endpoint for notifying OMS about this event.

Pick Confirm

An event when runner is getting item from the shelf and put it to the customer package.
There is an API endpoint for notifying OMS about this event.

Pick Decline

An event when runner cannot do Pick Confirm by some reason. There is an API endpoint for notifying OMS about this event.

DC

Distribution Center

DMS

Delivery Management System

WMS

Warehouse Management System

LSP

Logistic Service Provider

FC

Fulfillment center

Order

An order is a request for goods.

Order status

The order status indicates where it is in the order cycle. In Increff OMS, the system order status values are the following:

• Created : Order is created in OMS, Inventory is not yet allocated.

• Fulfillable : Inventory is fully allocated to the order.

• Unfulfillable : Inventory is not fully allocated, so processing can not start.

• Processing - Processing means that the order has been sent to wms for processing. generally at this point picklist is released.

• Complete - Shipped from the warehouse

• Cancelled - Order is cancelled.

The store administrator can create custom order statuses, assign them to order states and set default status values for order states.

Purchase order (PO)

A written sales contract between a buyer and seller that describes the merchandise or service to be purchased from a vendor.

Back Order

An order that cannot be currently filled or shipped, but is requested nonetheless for when the item becomes available again. The backorder can be either planned or unplanned but in all cases the customer will be informed of the waiting period. If the backordered item is part of an order with other items, the available items will be shipped and only the line in backorder will stay onhold until the stock is available.

Pre-order

Any order that has an item which is not currently in stock but has a fixed date in the future where the item is expected to be in stock.

Exchange

An order line that exchanged for another product. The action is always initiated by the customer service and implies that the original item is returned to the warehouse and such return won’t generate a refund.

Reshipments

For purchased item that was never received by the customer, or is received damaged the customer service will be able to request a new shipment of the item free of charge for the customer.

Appeasement

Is the action to grant some kind of discount, gift, return,… to an unsatisfied customer. It is initiated by the customer service team and could be in a form of a promocode to be applied on future purchases or a partial refund on his order. The merchant would have defined with the customer service team what are the limits and rules to apply an appeasement to his customers.

Appeasement refund

Refers to a partial refund executed against an order line (can be against an item, a service or the shipping cost). This is manually initiated by the customer service agent.

API

An Application Programming Interface is a software interface that lets third-party applications read and write to a system using programming language constructs or statements. This means, it specifies how some software components should interact with each other.

Back Office

The web based application which users can login to in order to monitor process within OMS.

Development complete

All of the testing phases that follow below assume that development is complete by all work streams. We assume here that unit testing and functional testing would already have been taking place. Even testing specific interfaces with third parties would have also taken place.

SIT

System Integration Test. All development environments are able to talk to each other and exchange data. Dependencies are important to manage to ensure no section of the entire system is stopped. We should expect here that end-to-end testing can take place. Some parts of the system might be in MOCK modes (e.g. Payments are not connected to Banks, Logistics are not picking and packing and sending products).

UAT

User Acceptance Test. Client tests in Staging.

MTP

All code moved to production. Another piece of testing should take place in each functional area to ensure features are functioning correctly. Production credentials configuration for connecting to 3rd party systems etc. should take place.
Basically smoke testing all of the connectivity and configuration to get ready for end-to-end testing which will take place in Soft Launch.

COO

The Country of Origin is the country of manufacture, production, or growth where an article or product comes from. There are differing rules of origin under various national laws and international treaties.

PIM

Product Information System

RRP

Recommended Retail Price

UPC

The Universal Product Code is a barcode widely used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand and in other countries for tracking trade items in stores. Its most common form, the UPC-A, consists of 12 numerical digits, which are uniquely assigned to each trade item. Along with the related EAN barcode, the UPC is the barcode mainly used for scanning of trade items.

CS

Customer Service

CSR

Customer Service Representative

SLA

Service Level Agreement

Merchant

a retailer, or any other person, firm, or corporation that, according to a Merchant Agreement, agrees to accept credit cards, debit cards, or both, when properly presented.

Merchant account / Merchant ID (MID)

An account with a bank or financial institution that makes it possible to accept credit card transactions.

Gateway

A transaction bridge between a customer and a payment processing service that is used to transfer money between the customer and the merchant.

Payment Gateway

An e-commerce application service provider that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, or traditional brick and mortar businesses. It is equivalent to a physical point of sale terminal located in most retail outlets.

Acquirer

The bank that does business with merchants enabling them to accept credit cards.

Card Issuer

The financial institution that authorizes the issuance of a card to a consumer (or another organization), and is liable for the use of the card. The issuer retains full authority over the use of the card by the person to whom the card is issued.

Cardholder

A person who opens a credit card account and is authorized to make purchases.

Payment Service Provider (PSP)

Service providers that enable web- and offline transactions for merchants. PSPs aggregate various payment methods from various acquirers into one contract and one technical interface for merchants.

System Integrator

An individual or company that specializes in building complete computer systems by putting together components from different vendors.

Authorization

The act of ensuring the cardholder has adequate funds available against his or her line of credit. A positive authorization results in an authorization code being generated, and those funds being set aside. The cardholder’s available credit limit is reduced by the authorized amount.

Authorization rate

The percentage of successfully authorized orders from the bank of the consumer making the payment.

Capture

The process of converting the authorized amount into a billable transaction. Transactions cannot be captured until authorized, and authorizations cannot be captured until the goods or services have been shipped.

Settlement

Settlement occurs when the acquiring bank and the issuer exchange funds and the proceeds are deposited into the merchant account.

Checkout process

The process of gathering the payment and shipping information that is necessary to complete the purchase of items in the shopping cart. In the final step, the customer reviews and places the order.

Payment Acceptance rate

The percentage of successfully authorized orders from initiating the payment to placing the order.

Conversion rate

The percentage of visitors who are converted into buyers.

Decline or Declined

The denial of an Authorization Request by, or on behalf of, an Issuer Member.

Refund

The creation of a credit to a cardholder account, usually as a result of a product return or to correct an error.

Onboarding process

The process of integrating new clients in the company.

Credit Limit

The maximum amount the cardholder may owe to the issuer on the card account at any time.

Overall acceptance rate

The percentage of successfully authorized orders from initiating the purchase to placing the order.

Credit Card

A payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services, based on the cardholder’s promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts so paid plus other agreed charges. The card issuer (usually a bank) creates a revolving account and grants a line of credit to the cardholder, from which the cardholder can borrow money for payment to a merchant or as a cash advance.

Real Time Banking (RTB)

The ability for customers of the bank to perform their banking transactions 24/7/365 in a seamless and user-friendly manner.

Direct Debit

Your customers shop online and the invoice amount due will be debited from their account afterwards.

Instalments

The payments whereby the cardholder is able to split a payment into smaller transactions, spread over an agreed period of time.

Open Invoice

Comfortable and safe payment method for online shoppers, they receive the goods first and pay afterwards.

Risk assessment

The identification, evaluation, and estimation of the levels of risks involved in a purchase, their comparison against benchmarks or standards, and determination of an acceptable level of risk.

Risk Acceptance Rate

Percentage of the orders accepted in the risk assessment.

Orders rejected / cancelled

declined orders during risk assessment.

Manual Review process

Technique to perform manual checks on orders to determine the authenticity of an identity and transaction to establish which orders are fraudulent. Typically, the best (lowest risk) and worst (highest risk) transactions are automatically accepted or declined, and manual review is a means to try and convert all other order attempts where the merchant isn’t certain and requires a closer look.

Chargeback

A transaction that is challenged by a cardholder or card issuing bank and is sent back through interchange to the merchant bank for resolution.

Chargeback rate

The percentage of transactions where the card issuer call back a transaction either in full or in part.

Disputes

Situation in which a customer questions the validity of a transaction that was registered to the account. Customers dispute charges for a variety of reasons, including unauthorized charges, excessive charges, failure by the merchant to deliver merchandise, defective merchandise, dissatisfaction with the product(s) or service(s) received, or billing errors.

Reconciliation

Accounting process that uses two sets of records to ensure figures are accurate and in agreement.

Annual GMV

Annual Gross Merchandise Volume

Interchange fees

Fees paid by the acquirer to the issuer to compensate for transaction-related costs. VISA and MasterCard establish interchange fee rates. Issuer/Issuing Bank: The financial institution (a licensed member of MasterCard or VISA) which holds contractual agreements with and issues cards to cardholders.

Foreign Exchange

It is the exchange of one currency for another or the conversion of one currency into another currency.

Transaction fee

An expense a business must pay each time it processes a customer’s credit or debit card transaction.

Refund fee

Fees charged each time a business issues a refund on a previously authorized and settle transaction.

Chargeback fee

Every chargeback comes with a fee. The price of chargeback fees varies, depending on the merchant processor.

Maintenance fee

A fee that is charged either yearly or monthly for the use of your credit card if your account is open or if you maintain an account balance, whether or not you have active charging privileges.

XML

Extensible Markup Language (a well-defined, structured document format used for the exchange of data between systems or platforms).

XSD

XML Schema Definition file (defines the accepted schema, or data format, organization and capabilities, for the XML document that it describes).