Knowledge – E-Commerce & Web Glossary

Topics

E-Commerce6 terms Integrations & ERP6 terms AI & GEO6 terms SEO & Performance6 terms Legal & Accessibility6 terms Hosting & Technology6 terms

All terms

Accessibility Statement

An accessibility statement is a publicly available declaration in which website or shop operators document the extent to which their digital offering meets the applicable accessibility requirements. For public-sector bodies it is mandated by EU Directive 2016/2102 and the German BITV 2.0; the BFSG requires affected companies to provide comparable information on the accessibility of their service.

Legal & Accessibility

AI Crawler

AI crawlers are automated programs that systematically read websites to collect content for training AI models or for answering user queries. Well-known examples are GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and Google-Extended.

AI & GEO

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are AI-generated answer summaries that Google displays above the classic search results, accompanied by source links. They condense content from several websites into a direct answer to the search query.

AI & GEO

B2B Commerce

B2B commerce (business-to-business commerce) refers to electronic trade between companies – for example via online shops, customer portals, punchout catalogues or EDI connections. In contrast to B2C, requirements are shaped by customer-specific conditions, approval workflows and deep ERP integration.

E-Commerce

BFSG (German Accessibility Act)

The Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG) transposes EU Directive 2019/882 (European Accessibility Act) into German law and obliges manufacturers, retailers and service providers to make certain products and services – including e-commerce – accessible. It has applied since 28 June 2025.

Legal & Accessibility

Brotli Compression

Brotli is an open-source compression algorithm developed by Google for delivering web content. It typically compresses text resources such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript more effectively than the older gzip. All common modern browsers support Brotli over encrypted connections (HTTPS).

Hosting & Technology

Canonical Tag

The canonical tag (rel="canonical") is an HTML annotation in the head of a page that tells search engines the preferred URL of a piece of content. If the same content is reachable under several addresses, the tag consolidates the ranking signals on the canonical version.

SEO & Performance

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of geographically distributed servers that caches and delivers static content such as images, CSS and JavaScript files from locations close to the user. The shorter transmission paths typically reduce latency and load times.

Hosting & Technology

Checkout Optimization

Checkout optimization covers all measures that make an online shop's ordering process – from cart to order confirmation – faster, simpler and more trustworthy. The goal is to reduce purchase abandonment and increase the conversion rate.

E-Commerce

Content Security Policy (CSP)

A content security policy (CSP) is a security mechanism by which a website uses an HTTP header to tell the browser which sources scripts, styles, images and other resources may be loaded from. It primarily makes cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and the injection of third-party content more difficult.

Hosting & Technology

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are three metrics defined by Google to measure the user experience of a website: Largest Contentful Paint (loading performance), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). They feed into Google's page assessment as part of the page experience signals.

SEO & Performance

Digital Product Passport (DPP)

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a digital record that consolidates key information about a product – such as materials, repairability and recyclability – across its entire life cycle and makes it accessible via a data carrier such as a QR code. Its legal basis is the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781).

Legal & Accessibility

EDI

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the standardised electronic exchange of structured business documents – such as orders, despatch advices and invoices – directly between the IT systems of business partners. Common standards include UN/EDIFACT in Europe and ANSI X12 in North America.

Integrations & ERP

ERP Integration

An ERP integration is a software connection that couples an ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) with other applications such as online shops. It automatically exchanges data such as products, prices, stock levels, orders and customer data in both directions.

Integrations & ERP

GDPR-Compliant Tracking

GDPR-compliant tracking refers to collecting and analysing user data on websites in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the German TDDDG – in particular through valid consent, data minimisation or the use of cookieless analytics that do not require consent.

Legal & Accessibility

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) refers to measures that prepare website content so that AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews can understand it, reproduce it correctly and cite it as a source. GEO complements classic search engine optimisation with visibility in generated AI answers.

AI & GEO

Headless Commerce

Headless commerce describes an e-commerce architecture in which the frontend (presentation layer) is decoupled from the commerce backend, with both communicating exclusively via APIs. As a result, the frontend can be built with any technology and evolved independently of the shop system.

E-Commerce

hreflang

hreflang is an annotation in the HTML head, the HTTP header or the XML sitemap that tells search engines which language and, optionally, which region a page is intended for, and at which URLs alternative language versions can be found.

SEO & Performance

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Google metric from the Core Web Vitals and measures the time until the largest visible content element in the viewport – usually an image or a text block – is fully rendered. According to Google, a value of up to 2.5 seconds is considered good.

SEO & Performance

LLM (Large Language Model)

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text that can process and generate natural language on this basis. LLMs are the technical foundation of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

AI & GEO

llms.txt

llms.txt is a text file in Markdown format, proposed in 2024, that resides in the root directory of a website and offers AI systems a compact, structured overview of its most important content. It is a community proposal, not a binding standard.

AI & GEO

Managed Hosting

Managed hosting is an operating model in which the provider takes care not only of the server infrastructure but also of its administration – including operating system updates, security patches, monitoring and backups. The customer uses the environment without having to handle day-to-day technical operations.

Hosting & Technology

Merchandise Management (WaWi)

A merchandise management system (German: Warenwirtschaftssystem, 'WaWi') is software for controlling the flow of goods in a retail business – from purchasing and warehousing through order processing to shipping. It centrally manages products, stock levels, suppliers, customers and documents such as orders, delivery notes and invoices.

Integrations & ERP

Middleware

Middleware is an intermediary software layer that mediates communication between two or more applications. It handles tasks such as data transformation, field mapping, buffering and error handling without being a business application like a shop or ERP itself.

Integrations & ERP

PIM (Product Information Management)

A PIM system (Product Information Management) is central software for managing, enriching and distributing product information such as descriptions, attributes, media and translations. It supplies connected channels – such as the online shop, marketplaces, catalogues and data feeds – with consistent product data.

E-Commerce

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique in which a language model retrieves relevant information from an external knowledge source before generating an answer and incorporates it into the response. This allows AI answers to be grounded in current, company-specific data instead of relying solely on the model's training knowledge.

AI & GEO

REST API

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a programming interface through which software systems exchange functions and data. REST (Representational State Transfer) is the most widely used architectural style for this on the web: resources are addressed via URLs and manipulated with HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, with responses usually delivered in JSON format.

Integrations & ERP

Schema.org

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for structured data on the web, launched in 2011 by Google, Bing and Yahoo, with Yandex joining later. Using types such as Product, Article or FAQPage, content can be annotated so that search engines understand its meaning programmatically.

SEO & Performance

Service Worker

A service worker is a JavaScript script that the browser runs in the background, independently of the open page. It can intercept network requests, cache content and provide features such as offline operation, background synchronisation or push notifications.

Hosting & Technology

Shopware 6

Shopware 6 is an e-commerce system developed in Germany, built on the PHP framework Symfony with an API-first architecture. It is available as an open-source edition as well as in commercial plans and is one of the widely used shop systems among mid-sized businesses in German-speaking markets.

E-Commerce

Staging Environment

A staging environment is a copy of a website or online shop that is separate from the live system and as identical to it as possible. Updates, new features and configuration changes are tested there before release; only after successful testing are the changes transferred to the production system.

Hosting & Technology

Topical Authority

In SEO, topical authority describes the status of a website as a recognized source for a subject area, built through comprehensive, interlinked content covering all relevant aspects of that topic.

SEO & Performance

WCAG 2.1

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 are an international standard by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that describes in 78 success criteria how web content should be designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. A W3C recommendation since June 2018, they underpin many legal requirements, including EN 301 549 and thus, indirectly, the German BFSG.

Legal & Accessibility

Withdrawal Button

The withdrawal button is a legally required function in online shops that allows consumers to exercise their right of withdrawal directly and digitally. It is based on EU Directive (EU) 2023/2673; for online retailers in Germany, the obligation applies from 19 June 2026.

Legal & Accessibility

XRechnung

XRechnung is the German standard for purely XML-based electronic invoices, published by the Coordination Office for IT Standards (KoSIT). It specifies the European standard EN 16931 for invoicing public-sector clients in Germany.

Integrations & ERP

ZUGFeRD

ZUGFeRD (Zentraler User Guide des Forums elektronische Rechnung Deutschland) is a hybrid format for electronic invoices that combines a human-readable PDF/A-3 file with structured XML invoice data. From version 2.x onwards, the format is aligned with the European standard EN 16931.

E-Commerce

Development

E-Commerce

CMS Solutions

SEO

GEO / AI Search

PageSpeed

Consulting

Hosting

Cloud Computing

Generative AI

Data Enrichment

Category Automation

Google Merchant Center

Google Ads API

SAP Business One

Microsoft Dynamics

All Integrations

Topics

All terms

Accessibility Statement

AI Crawler

AI Overviews

B2B Commerce

BFSG (German Accessibility Act)

Brotli Compression

Canonical Tag

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Checkout Optimization

Content Security Policy (CSP)

Core Web Vitals

Digital Product Passport (DPP)

EDI

ERP Integration

GDPR-Compliant Tracking

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Headless Commerce

hreflang

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LLM (Large Language Model)

llms.txt

Managed Hosting

Merchandise Management (WaWi)

Middleware

PIM (Product Information Management)

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

REST API

Schema.org

Service Worker

Shopware 6

Staging Environment

Topical Authority

WCAG 2.1

Withdrawal Button

XRechnung

ZUGFeRD

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