The field glossary
Terms of Trade
Words that cost money.
terms from ecommerce, trading, technology and AI, in four editions
A board approves more spend on the strength of a word than on the strength of a number. ROAS, contribution margin, headless, AI readiness: each arrives with a figure attached and a recommendation behind it, and the room signs off a proposal built on a term it would not use in any other meeting.
Terms of Trade is Barking Cat’s field glossary: forty terms from ecommerce, trading, technology and AI, defined from inside the P&L rather than from the vendor deck. Each entry has four parts. The definition is straight, and short enough to be quoted. The field note is drawn from three decades of running retail and ecommerce P&Ls and says what the term does to a business in practice. The board question is the one to ask when the term next appears in a proposal. The last line names the Barking Cat foundation or instrument that reads it.
The forty are arranged as the four documents a chair actually receives: the PE deck, the trading pack, the technology proposal and the AI pitch, with Barking Cat’s own vocabulary at the end.
The habit is older than the terms. Retailers once counted hits on their websites and reported them to the board as customers; anyone who understood web analytics knew the acronym as How Idiots Track Statistics. The words have changed. The habit has not.
Edition 1: The PE deck
10 terms
ROAS is the number an agency hides behind when your channel is loss making. It sounds like a business until the product margin, the returns and the fulfilment cost come off the numerator and the platform’s share of the revenue turns out to have been counted twice, once by Google and once by Meta.
CAC is where your budget goes to die. It is the measure of everything you have spent divided by the new customers who turned up, whether the spend acquired a customer or not, so the agency retainer, the brand campaign and the biscuits all land in the same number. How exactly did the biscuit budget attract the Gen A consumer?
LTV is the optimistic punt the professional gambler takes on getting a return on the budget, and normally the last place they look to turn a profit. It is the number that makes any acquisition cost look prudent, because a spreadsheet has decided the customer will come back, and the spreadsheet has never been asked what happened to the cohort from two years ago.
Contribution margin is the two-word phrase a CFO uses to terrify marketers. It is the number that turns a record month into a loss, because it is the only one that remembers the free delivery, the discount code and the dresses that came back.
Attribution is best described as a stab in the dark, because most marketers do not really know where their customers are coming from, and so cannot turn anything off. That is the commercial consequence: a budget that can only ever grow, because every channel has a report proving it was responsible for the sale.
Incrementality is the one number that would settle the attribution argument, which is why nobody in the argument proposes measuring it.
Replatforming is the golden rule of every new head of ecommerce. It is the must-do, because until it is done they can never be held responsible for the numbers. It is also the easiest way to burn eighteen months and half a million pounds of capex, at the end of which the proposition is exactly what it was, rendered on a different stack.
Headless is not the ecommerce team running around on Black Friday week. It is a technology proposition that promised much, until retailers spoiled it with IT: the front end that was going to move at the speed of trading now needs a developer to change a banner, and the developer is on a different floor with a different backlog.
Personalisation is the twenty-year-old promise of relevant marketing and shopping experiences, wearing a new hat with every technology release: first-party data, then machine learning, and now artificial intelligence, somehow still pushing out the same message and the same creative to half the customer base. The hat is new. The email is not.
AI readiness is the uncomfortable conversation your teams are not having with the board sponsor who promised investors an AI-enabled workforce by the end of next quarter. The workforce has heard about the promise; the sponsor has not yet heard about the data.
Edition 2: The trading pack
10 terms
Conversion rate is the metric that brand experience was abandoned for.
AOV is the melting pot where a single pair of socks holds three laptops and a television to account.
Basket abandonment is a cunning ploy by consumers to solicit discount codes from unsuspecting retailers.
Returns rate is a measure of how accurate your photography is.
Sell-through is a traditional merchandising measure that single-handedly tells you how effective your design, marketing and ecommerce functions are. Or not.
Markdown is the measure of how inaccurate the business forecasting is.
Weeks cover is the depressing measure of how little you have of the things customers want and how much you have of the things nobody wants.
Cost to serve is the measure that surprises ecommerce directors when their bumper quarter leads to mass redundancies.
A marketplace is a discount-driven, retail-media-fuelled channel where your customers disconnect from you, but which still somehow seems like incremental revenue.
Omnichannel is the 2010s buzzword that anyone who had a website and a store claimed to be, while studiously ignoring what was happening in either.
Edition 3: The technology proposal
10 terms
PIM is an expensive replacement for spreadsheets that feeds on spreadsheets to produce spreadsheets.
An order management system is the piece of software that makes ship-from-store possible and the store manager’s bonus impossible.
A CDP is the vault the priceless customer database is locked in, so that the customer in Margate who spent £3 in 2014 and opened one email in 2019 is never, ever left off a mailing list.
Composable is the promise of easily connecting and disconnecting digital systems, while your developer weeps into their tea because a steering committee, two board reports and an inquiry are required to update the copyright year on the website footer.
Single customer view is the most expensive way to discover that marketing did not know what to do with a single customer, let alone the 75 per cent who bought in a store.
A/B testing is the polite way ecommerce departments tell you that your ideas are stupid.
Core Web Vitals are a strange bunch of letters and acronyms that Google uses to punish slow websites.
Technical debt is what your MVP leaves behind.
Site search is the little box on your website where customers enter their hopes and dreams, like a digital letter to Santa, and answered about as often.
A chatbot is a friendly AI-driven interaction on a website intended to enrage and infuriate customers, so that the business can learn what expletives its addressable audience has picked up.
Edition 4: The AI pitch, and Barking Cat’s own terms
10 terms
Agentic commerce is the idea of an AI agent shopping online with your payment details, not dissimilar to marriage.
GEO is the new AEO, which was the new SEO. Same agency, new deck.
AI Overviews are what Google shows instead of you. Expect an invoice in the near future.
llms.txt is a tiny file on the website welcoming our AI overlords.
Chatty Pete and friends now run your marketing department.
AI theatre is what a board buys when it cannot say what it wants AI to fix.
The binding constraint is the thing no one is telling you, usually because the person who knows reports to the person who caused it.
The recognition point is like a comb-over: every time you look in the mirror, you know it is not right.
Outside-in is the harsh reality from your customer: they are just not that into you. Inside-out is the walk after which you do not blame them.
Commercial experience is what the customer was scoring while the business was scoring the campaign.