Ruankao E-Commerce Designer (Intermediate) key terms

A transaction model in which both buyer and seller are organizations, typically involving larger order volumes, negotiated pricing, purchase requisitions, and approval workflows that differ sharply from consumer retail.

A transaction model where a business sells directly to individual end consumers, usually characterized by high transaction counts, small basket sizes, and heavy reliance on marketing and self-service checkout.

A model in which online channels drive customers to physical stores or services, or offline purchases are completed and recorded digitally, linking web traffic to local inventory and fulfillment capacity.

An approach where web, mobile, store, and call-center channels share inventory, customer profiles, and order data, so a shopper can buy, return, or collect through any combination of channels.

A one-page planning template that describes a venture through nine building blocks, including customer segments, value propositions, channels, revenue streams, and cost structure, used to compare e-commerce business designs.

A structured assessment of whether a proposed e-commerce system is technically achievable, economically justified, legally permissible, and operationally supportable before major resources are committed.

The ability to link each requirement forward to design elements, code, and test cases, and backward to its business source, so that changes and gaps can be assessed systematically.

A behavioral model showing actors, system boundaries, and the goals they pursue, commonly used to scope e-commerce functions such as placing orders, refunding payments, and managing catalogs.

A system structure separating presentation, business logic, and data storage into distinct layers that communicate through defined interfaces, allowing independent scaling and replacement of each tier.

An architectural style in which an application is composed of small independently deployable services, each owning its data and communicating over network APIs, often adopted for order, catalog, and payment subsystems.

Distribution of incoming requests across multiple server instances according to a chosen algorithm, improving throughput and availability while hiding individual node failures from clients.

Adding more server instances to a pool rather than enlarging a single machine, which suits stateless web tiers and requires shared session storage or sticky routing to work correctly.

A geographically distributed set of edge servers that caches static assets and sometimes dynamic responses close to users, reducing latency and absorbing traffic spikes during promotions.

A temporary high-speed store holding frequently requested data, such as product pages or session records, so repeated reads avoid slower databases; correctness depends on a deliberate invalidation strategy.

A defined contract through which software components exchange requests and responses, specifying endpoints, parameters, authentication, and error behavior so that clients and services can evolve independently.

An architectural style for web services that uses resource-oriented URLs, standard HTTP methods, and stateless requests, making interfaces predictable and easy to cache or test.

A technique using flexible grids, fluid images, and media queries so one HTML document adapts its layout to phones, tablets, and desktops without maintaining separate sites.

A website enhanced with service workers, a manifest, and offline caching so it can be installed on a device and behave partly like a native application while remaining delivered over the web.

Server-side or token-based storage of a user's authenticated context across multiple HTTP requests, which must be shared or replicated when traffic is spread over several servers.

The process of organizing tables and keys to eliminate redundant data and update anomalies, typically progressing through first, second, and third normal forms before deliberate denormalization for performance.

A set of guarantees-atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability-ensuring that a group of database operations either fully succeeds or fully rolls back, essential for order and payment records.

An auxiliary data structure that speeds up lookups on selected columns at the cost of extra storage and slower writes, so index design must follow actual query patterns.

Splitting a dataset horizontally across multiple database instances by a partition key, such as customer identifier, to spread load and storage beyond what one server can handle.

A distributed protocol in which a coordinator first asks all participants to prepare, then instructs them to commit or abort, providing atomicity across multiple databases at the cost of blocking on failure.

An asynchronous buffer that decouples producers from consumers, letting order placement, notification, and inventory updates proceed independently and absorb bursts without losing work.

A cryptographic protocol that encrypts traffic between client and server and authenticates the server via certificates, underpinning secure checkout, login, and payment pages.

A signed electronic document binding a public key to an identified entity, issued by a certificate authority, which browsers use to verify that a site is genuine before encrypting traffic.

The policies, roles, and software that issue, distribute, renew, and revoke digital certificates, providing the trust framework on which encrypted web and payment communications depend.

An authentication arrangement in which one successful login grants access to multiple related applications through a trusted identity provider, reducing password sprawl but concentrating risk.

A property whereby repeating the same request produces the same result as issuing it once, which prevents duplicate charges or duplicate orders when clients retry after timeouts.

An external service that authorizes and captures card or wallet payments on a merchant's behalf, returning transaction identifiers and status callbacks that the order system must reconcile.

A payment arrangement in which funds are held by a trusted intermediary and released to the seller only after agreed conditions, such as delivery confirmation, are met.

A standardized format for exchanging structured business documents such as purchase orders and invoices between organizations' systems without manual re-entry.

Software that directs receiving, put-away, picking, packing, and stock counting inside a fulfillment center, feeding real-time availability back to the online catalog.

The final leg of fulfillment that moves a parcel from a local hub to the customer's door, typically the most expensive and least predictable stage of the logistics chain.

The share of visitors who complete a desired action such as a purchase, calculated by dividing conversions by sessions and used to judge the effectiveness of pages and campaigns.

A controlled experiment that randomly shows two or more variants of a page or message to comparable visitor groups and compares outcomes statistically to choose the better performer.

Systems and practices for recording customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history so that marketing, service, and retention efforts can be targeted and measured.

A hierarchical decomposition of project scope into deliverable-oriented work packages that supports estimation, assignment of responsibility, and progress tracking.

A scheduling technique that identifies the longest dependent sequence of tasks in a project, whose delay directly extends the completion date and therefore demands closest monitoring.

A zero-duration checkpoint marking a significant achievement or decision point in a schedule, used to report progress to sponsors without representing actual work effort.

A contract clause defining measurable service targets such as uptime percentage, response time, and remedies for shortfall, which shapes architecture and vendor selection decisions.

A concise statement of the specific benefit a product delivers to a defined customer segment and why that benefit is preferable to available alternatives.