Terminology and Concepts r7.5
Overview
Skava’s Developer Portal references terms that are generally understood by those familiar with the Commerce industry. However, to avoid confusion about the use or context of some terms referenced on the portal, the following list of terms and concepts and their associated definitions within the context of the Skava Platform are provided.
| Term | Definition | Related Microservice |
|---|---|---|
| ACL | An Access Control List (ACL) is a list of permissions attached to an object. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects. | Lists |
| AdvancedRoles | Customize user roles with advanced user privileges. For instance, in the Product Information System (PIM), the "Women's Department Manager" role, gets access only to the "Women's Department" category. A "Finance Manager" role gets access to a subset of catalog attributes, i.e. price and tax. The remaining attributes can be hidden from the role as it has no relevance to finance manager. Such customized privileges are possible, through Advanced Roles. | Corp Admin |
| Apache SOLR or SOLR | An open source enterprise search platform that Skava uses to enable real time indexing and search capabilities, such as full text and faceted search. | Search |
| Apache ZooKeeper or ZooKeeper | A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All these services are used, in some form or another, by distributed applications. | |
| API | Application programming interface is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools for building application software that can also enable 2 distinct systems to communicate. | |
| Appeasement | A credit that can be applied by a CSR towards an order after shipment, or as a store credit to a customer for other non-order related issues, ultimately reducing the cost for the purchaser. | OMS |
| Approval Workflow | Enables separation of concerns between business users on who can author, edit and approve content before it is published for external consumption. | PIM |
| ATP | Available-to-Promise, is the quantity of a specific stock keeping unit (SKU) in the specific bin actually available for sale. See SKUs. | Inventory |
| Backorder | The ability to take an order for items that are not currently in stock and process that order once stock is replenished. | Inventory |
| BinItems | Product stock keeping units (SKUs) added to Inventory bins. | Inventory |
| Bin | Containers for items or product stock keeping units (SKUs). | Inventory |
| Boost and Bury | This mechanism is used to make the ranking of certain products or SKUs higher or lower than others in the presentation layer, based on merchandising needs. | Search |
| Bundles | Allows merchandisers to group related products so that they can be presented and sold together. Generally bundles require the purchaser to buy the entire bundle. See also Collections. | Inventory |
| Business Admin | A Business Admin is one who has administrative (full control) over an implementation for a business they represent on Skava Commerce. S/he is a superuser of the business with privileges sufficient to invite new users to the business, to create/update services, stores, roles, and to customize roles. | Corp Admin |
| Business Level | The second level in Corp Admin where an Instance Admin or Business Admin can manage all the activities of a particular business. | Corp Admin |
| Business User | The business user has access only to certain privileges based on the roles assigned. For instance, if a business user is assigned "Catalog Manager" role for Product Information Management (PIM), s/he can only manage catalogs, and won't have access to other services or stores. Similarly, a user can hold multiple roles under a business and can be both "Catalog Manager" and "Marketing Manager" managing both PIM and Promotion services. | Corp Admin |
| Business | A Business is typically a customer who has signed up with Skava to launch a commerce store or a digital experience. A Business is also the parent of a Store or set of Stores. The basic use of the Business is to manage common sets of users, catalogs, and other services for Stores. Alternately, each Store can have its own set of services mapped to it. | Corp Admin |
| Cache Clear | The cache clear purges all active cache so that the requests are fetched directly from the data source, refreshing the cache with updated data/content. See Cache. | |
| Cache | A place to store something temporarily in a computing environment. The cache is often utilized to improve performance of retrieving the information and may not reflect the current state of the actual persisted data. See Cache Clear. | |
| Campaign | A campaign represents one specific type of service such as PIM, Promotion, Cart-Checkout or a content application. Typically, server campaigns (a.k.a. services) come together to create the digital application for the client. | CMS, Studio |
| Cart-Checkout (Microservice) | The important milestone in purchasing on a Commerce site is to add items to shopping bag, apply payments and place orders. The cart module facilitates adding items to bag and the checkout module supports completion of payment and placing an order. These two (2) modules work closely together and are known as the cart-checkout microservice. | Cart-Checkout |
| Cart | The cart provides end-users a place where they can gather items for purchase. The cart module facilitates this feature by allowing end-users to add, and manage items in their cart. Also knows as the Shopping Bag. | Cart-Checkout |
| Catalog | The product catalog is a set of information about individual Products/SKUs uploaded in PIM. | PIM |
| Category | A set of similar or related products grouped together, e.g. Men's Shoes - is a category with shoes where gender='men'. | PIM |
| Checkout | When an end-user browses the site, s/he needs a way to place the order. The checkout module facilitates this feature by allowing end-users to make payments and to place orders for items added to the shopping bag. | Cart-Checkout |
| CMS | A Content Management System manages the creation and modification of digital content. CMS features include Web-based publishing, format management, history editing and version control, indexing, search, and retrieval. By their nature, content management systems support the separation of content and presentation. | CMS, PIM |
| Collections | This is similar to bundles in that a Collection is a group of related products. However, in a collection, an end-user can choose to purchase only a subset of products in the collection and is not required to purchase the entire set of products as is the case in bundles. | PIM |
| Consumers | A consumer (buyer or end-user) who browses and purchases products from his/her mobile, tablet or desktop devices. | Customers |
| Content Editor | A Content Editor is a person who uploads/edits the contents such as images, data, videos in the content management systems through the content microservice. See CMS. | |
| Content Editor Role | An Content Editor is a type of role and users belonging to that role can modify or create content and submit the content for approval. | Studio |
| Corp Admin Editor Role | This includes privileges to perform view and edit operations in the service instance. | Corp Admin |
| Corp Admin (Microservice) | Corp Admin microservice manages the user accounts of the admin management tool. The three (3) types of Corp Admin users include Instance Admin, Business Admin, Business Users and accounts are managed at different levels. | Corp Admin |
| CSR | Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) manage customer inquiries. CSRs also process orders, returns, appeasements and customer registrations that require manual intervention. | Customers |
| Custom Roles | Customized user roles with advanced user privileges. For instance, in the product information system (PIM), the "Women's Department Manager" role, is given access only to the women's category. A finance manager role is given access only to certain attributes of the catalog, for example, price and tax. All other attributes are hidden as they are not relevant to the finance manager. Such customized privileges are possible through Advanced roles. | Corp Admin |
| Customer Journey | The behavior of the customer in the Commerce site is popularly known as a customer journey. For instance, a customer lands on the site, moves to women's category, adds an item to cart, moves to kids section and add two (2) items to cart and then buys these three (3) items that were added to the cart. All these actions of the customer in a single session is treated as customer journey. A journey is a collection of actions by a customer on a site for a given period of time. | Customers |
| Customers (User) (Microservice) | Provides customer-based functions for Cart, Payment, Orders, Loyalty, and Preferences management. | Customers |
| DAM | This means Digital Asset Management. In the context of Skava Commerce this generally refers to the management of brand assets with a focus on facilitation of content re-use throughout the platform. Here the content is largely marketing- or sales-related, for example, product imagery, logos, marketing collateral or fonts, to give a few examples. | CMS, PIM |
| Deep Link | Use of a hyperlink that links to a specific, generally searchable or indexed, piece of web content on a website (e.g., `http://domain/path/page`), rather than the website's home page (e.g., `http://domain/`). | |
| Default Locale | The default locale is a configured locale used when a locale is not specified in an API request. See Locale. | PIM |
| Digital Assets | This refers to images, video, audio, PDFs, and other assets electronically stored, typically in the DAM tool. See DAM. | PIM |
| Downloadable Product | It is a type of a product e.g. digital product where the fulfillment can be instantaneously downloaded after an order is placed. See Physical product, Product, and Virtual product. | PIM |
| Drools Engine | Drools is a business rules management system that Skava uses to manage various rules for the promotions and loyalty services. | PIM |
| End-users | Customers using the commerce-enabled experiences built with Skava Commerce. | Customers |
| Endpoint | An endpoint refers to an application programming interface (API) resource that provides a response for a given request. | |
| ERP | ERP's vary in capability but refer generally to business management software that enables the tracking of inventory and resources, amongst other capabilities. Skava integrates with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to get the product and inventory details, and to submit order information. | PIM |
| Extensions | Extensions in the context of Skava Commerce refer to the enabling of new capabilities on the platform otherwise not available out of the box. | |
| Facets | Product attributes in PIM. | PIM |
| Feed or Feed Data | An ongoing stream of structured data that provides end-users or systems with updates of current information from one or more sources. | PIM |
| Filter | Allows organizing and listing of products based on certain product tags. | PIM |
| Finance Manager | A person who manages finance related information in PIM, e.g. price information. | PIM |
| Fulfillment | The process of picking items from the warehouse, packing and shipping/distributing to consumers. | OMS |
| Group | A set of related products can be grouped together so that they can be returned together on the product detail page. See also Bundles and Collections. | PIM |
| Happy Path | Happy path testing is a well-defined test case using known input, which executes without exception, and produces an expected output. | |
| Headless Commerce | The concept of supporting a Commerce frontend based on remote application programming interfaces (APIs) and platform services. | Skava Microservices |
| Hidden Products | A product that is in PIM but not shown in a category listing. The end-user must have a deep link to view the product. | PIM |
| Instance Admin | A superuser who has access to all the features of the admin tool at any level - instance, business, or user. | Corp Admin |
| Instance Level | The top level in Corp Admin where ALL businesses are created and listed. | Corp Admin |
| Instance | A full deployment of Skava Commerce platform that can be used to host one (1) or more businesses. | Corp Admin |
| Internationalization | The ability of the code to support different languages and locales. It mainly involves the code’s ability to support multiple language strings, date formats, currency etc. See Locale. | |
| Inventory Transactions | Actions performed on bin items, which impact the Available-to-Promise (ATP) and/or backorder quantity. | Inventory |
| Inventory (Microservice) | Enables a store manager (or related operations role) to monitor and manage inventory available for sale in the storefront, as well as provides that inventory information to consumers of the microservice. | Inventory |
| List ACLs | A list can be shared with friends and family and configured to be managed by users other than the list owners. Access control lists (ACLs) allow others to manage, delete, view and share lists. | Lists |
| List ItemTags | List Items can be tagged with either user-generated or business-enabled content, enabling items to be filtered and presented in various manners. | Lists |
| List Items | Products or stock keeping units (SKUs) that have been saved for later purchasing, purchase consideration or sharing. | Lists |
| ListTag | A list can be tagged with user-generated content. This allows the user to identify the list for specific purposes or search for lists. For example a customer may tag lists based on the type of items contained in it such as "household", "clothing", "toys" or "gifts". | Lists |
| List | Used to keep track of products or stock keeping units (SKUs) that are of interest to a customer or end-user. Lists are often referred to as "Favorites" or "Wishlist". | Lists |
| List (Microservice) | Implements business and customer-facing features for creating, managing and maintaining user lists (a.k.a. wish lists) maintained in end-user accounts. | Lists |
| Locale | A set of parameters that defines the user's language, region, currency and date format. e.g. en_US refers to English language, USA region, USD currency, and MM/DD/YYYY format. A set of possible locales is provided at the time of the deployment of the Instance. When a Store service is instantiated, a set of allowed locales for that store AND a default locale are identified by the administrator. See Default Locale, Localization and Internationalization | PIM |
| Localization | Translation of a software interface and messages to another language plus adaptation of some formats (e.g. measures, dates and currency) plus adaptation to local cultures. See Locale, Default Locale, and Internationalization | |
| Loyalties | Structured marketing strategy designed to encourage consumers to return to a site by rewarding them with loyalty points to shop or use various services of businesses. Privileged end-users can earn loyalty points and use them for purchases. | Loyalty |
| Loyalty CSS | The primary feature of Loyalty Admin, the Loyalty Customer Service Support page is where Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) can search, view, and manage an end-user's loyalty points. | Loyalty |
| Loyalty Group | Allows a Loyalty editor or manager to organize multiple similar loyalties within one (1) group. | Loyalty |
| Loyalty (Microservice) | Designed to encourage consumers to return to a site by rewarding them with loyalty points to shop or use various services of businesses. Privileged end-users can earn loyalty points and use them for purchases. The Loyalty Admin allows Customer Service Representatives (CSR) to view and manage loyalty points earned by end-users. | Loyalty |
| Manager Role | A rule set that covers almost all available privileges in a Service instance. | Corporate Admin |
| Marketing Manager | A person who manages promotions to market offers and discounts throughout the Commerce site. | Promotion |
| Master Catalog | Refers to the one (1) single hierarchically highest catalog in Product Information Management (PIM). Each instance of PIM will always have a Master Catalog and may also have other sub-catalogs or child catalogs. All PIM data is first entered in the Master Catalog and may subsequently have different/overriding values in a sub-catalog, while inheriting Master Catalog properties. | PIM |
| MCAdmin | An interface that services the entire platform by managing businesses, services, and stores associated with the business. | |
| Memcache | An in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, application programming interface (API) calls, or page rendering, intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. | |
| Merchandiser | A person who manages the display of products or offers on the Commerce site with the goal of increasing sales. S/he works on the product information management (PIM) services to manage catalogs. | PIM |
| Microservice | A self-contained application construct that is building block of a loosely coupled services architecture consisting of other microservices. | Skava Microservices |
| Model | This describes the context of the promotion or offer type: SKU, Cart, Payment, User, Store, or Cookie. | Promotion |
| Mongo DB | A free and open-source cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with schemas. See `www.mongodb.com`. | |
| Multitenancy | Single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. See Tenant. | |
| MySQL | An open-source relational database management system. See `www.mysql.com`. | |
| Omni-Channel Cart | This is a single cart experience across mobile and web visits to a client's shop and across multiple devices when the end-user is logged into the client's online store. | Cart-Checkout |
| Omni-Channel | Retail that integrates the different methods of shopping available to consumers (e.g., online, in a physical store, or by telephone). | Cart-Checkout |
| OMS | Order Management System (OMS) encompasses order management, order tracking, and customer service. Additionally, it offers detailed reporting capabilities and interfaces seamlessly with all existing order fulfillment solutions. | OMS |
| Operational Information Flow | Information flows associated with the operational aspect of Commerce, such as information flows regarding overall health of the system. | |
| Order Management | The ability for CSRs to manage orders, assist consumers, and help them resolve order-related issues. | Customers |
| Order on Behalfof | This refers to the act of a CSR adding products to a consumer's cart and placing an order on the consumer's behalf. Typically this done under problem circumstance or customer has a custom request that cannot be fulfilled on their own via online channels. | Customers |
| Payment Gateway | A merchant service provided by a businesses which they use to process payments for orders. | Cart-Checkout |
| Payment Splits | The act of splitting a single, but full payment amount, into two (2) or more simultaneous transactions made by different payment methods. | Cart-Checkout |
| Payment Types | Refers to available purchase payment methods (e.g. credit and debit card payments, cash, bank transfer, Apple Pay, Android Pay, etc.). | Cart-Checkout |
| Payments | The act of making payments for products added to the consumer's cart in order to place the order. | Cart-Checkout |
| Physical Product | A product that has physical dimensions, size, shape, weight and therefore needs to be packed and shipped to a consumer. See Downloadable Product, Product, and Virtual Product. | PIM |
| PIM (Microservice) | Product Information Management (PIM), allows Business Users and Admins to manage catalogs and product data including pricing. This catalog data is served to various consumers/storefronts and can be searched. PIM is often integrated with other micro services such as Inventory microservice to get the availability of products in the catalog. | PIM |
| Plug-Ins or Plugin | Typically, a third-party module or software component that can be configured to work with our products to add a specific feature or functionality, such as a payment processor. | |
| Postman | A Google Chrome extension that acts as a REST client in a browser, allowing the user to create application programming interface (API) requests and inspect responses. | |
| Predictive Search | The Search user interface (UI) presents immediate results based on how prediction is (optionally) enabled in the Search Admin tool. | Search |
| PREPROD | Preproduction in Skava Studio. See Studio Environments. | SkavaStudio |
| Price Manager | A person who manages prices of the catalogs in Production Information Management (PIM) system. | PIM |
| Privileges | Permission or right given to a user role to perform an action in the admin console. | Corp Admin |
| PROD | Production in Skava Studio. See Studio Environments. | PIM |
| Product Enrichment | Refers to the process of enriching the product data and imagery such that consumers receive sufficient product information to enable the consumer to make quick and informed decisions about purchasing the product. | PIM |
| Product | Refers to an item that is manufactured and available for sale. Since a Product can have multiple variants, those variants are referred to as SKUs. For example, an *Oxford Classic Casual Shoe* would be a product, but a Black version of the shoe in size 9 shoe would be a SKU. See Downloadable Product, Physical Product, SKU, Virtual Product | PIM |
| Production | Generally, refers to a live, consumer-facing application state incorporating best-practices for performance, scalability and security. Applications are promoted from the pre-production tier to the production tier, after validation and testing. | |
| Promotion Group | Container for individual promotions that are grouped logically based on an event or marketing campaign. Creation of a Promotion Group is required and must be defined before a Promotion can be created. | Promotion |
| Promotion (Microservice) | The microservice that supports the ability to define and manage offers presented to end-users or consumers in client storefronts and apps. | Promotion |
| Publisher | A role in Skava Studio that provides the user with the ability to publish the content created using Skava Studio. | SkavaStudio |
| Publishing | The process of publishing content/data to a production environment. | PIM |
| Rewards | A marketing strategy used to encourage customers to return to the client's site by awarding them points, which can be used for future purchases. | Loyalty |
| Role | A role is the function assumed or part played by a person. As such, it is a combination of different access privileges within Skava Commerce. For example, an Editor role will have access to Skava Studio where she/he can create the digital experiences for the consumers. A Publisher role would have sufficient privileges to review and approve content created by an Editor. | All Microservices. See Corp Admin |
| Rules Engine | An environment that provides flexible definition of business rules such as promotions. Skava uses the Drools rules engine within its platform. | Promotion |
| Sale Price | Typically, the price at which the particular item is sold. Product Information Management (PIM) offers multiple prices and offers the ability to define the specific price which will be used for the sale as well as what label should be attached to that price. | PIM |
| SEO | Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a range of techniques that aid in promoting site content and products within search results (i.e. Google, Bing). | Search |
| Service Level | The third level in Corp Admin where users can manage all the services of a business by navigating to the respective service (e.g. PIM, Promotion, etc.) in the console. | Corp Admin |
| Shop | An act of purchasing a client's product or services by consumers or end-users. | Cart-Checkout |
| Single Tenant | In a single-tenancy architecture, the tenant purchases their own copy of the software and the software can be customized to meet the specific and needs of that client. | |
| SkavaStream | Data management and orchestration layer that performs transformation and data capture for requests flowing through Skava Commerce Platform. | |
| SkavaStudio | A cloud-based design tool that allows users to create and manage engaging next-generation digital experiences with Commerce features across multiple devices, including native mobile applications, mobile web, tablet, and desktop. | SkavaStudio |
| SKU | Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) refers to a particular variant of a Product which is purchased by a consumer. See Product. | Inventory |
| Sorting | Sorting refers to the order or sequence in which Categories/Products/SKUs are presented to consumers. | PIM |
| SSO | Single Sign-On (SSO), an authentication process that allows an end-user to access multiple applications with one (1) set of login credentials. | |
| Staging | A runtime tier that precedes the production or live state. Staging is typically used for QA and/or end-user testing. | |
| Standard Roles | Roles created, automatically by Skava Commerce, when a new business is created. Standard roles include Editor, Viewer, and Manager. | Corporate Admin |
| STG | The Staging environment in Skava Studio. See Studio Environments, Staging | SkavaStudio |
| Store Manager | A role which has the privileges to manage and update the details of a Store. | Corporate Admin |
| Store | An instance of the Store microservice, which represents a specific physical location or online store. A store contains both properties about the store and a product catalog which can be the same or different from a master product catalog. | PIM |
| Storefront | The consumer-facing website that presents products, content and promotions across multiple channels. | |
| Stores (Microservice) | Allows a Business Admin to map the relationships of all microservices to a Store and provides store details including store name, store ID, locales for the store, the default locale, store status, and store type. | Stores |
| Studio Environments | Skava Studio offers four (4) different environments: 1) DEV - Development; 2) STG - Staging; 3) PREPROD - Pre-Production and 4) PROD - Production. These environments enable authors to create and manage experiences through different environments such that only finalized and approved items are published to the PROD environment. Each environment serves a distinct purpose to support the life cycle from development, testing, validation and end-user production availability. | SkavaStudio |
| Subcategory | Frequently, there is a need to define hierarchically related subcategories inside a category for further classification (taxonomy) of the catalog, e.g. Category - Men, Subcategory - Shoes, Subcubcategory - Casual Shoes. See Category. | PIM |
| Swagger | Standard tools and specification used to describe a RESTful application programing interface (API) so that human-readable documentation and client examples can be generated automatically. Swagger aides in development across the entire API lifecycle, from design and documentation, to test and deployment. | |
| Synonym Mapping | A technique for providing search terms that have a contextual relationship or other similarity to user search input, effectively allowing the display of results for 'like' words in addition to direct string matching approaches. For example, a user's search for "Dress" could yield suggestions/results for 'Skirts', where "Skirt" is setup as a synonym for the term "Dress". | Search |
| Taxonomy | The classification of products using categories and subcategories to enable the end-users to browse and find items easily for faster purchase. | PIM |
| Tenant | A group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to a software instance. See Multitenancy. | |
| Threshold Limit | A limit (number) in the inventory count at which either out-of-stock or low inventory alerts can be triggered. | Inventory |
| Transactional Information Flow | The information flow associated with the consumer's browse-purchase-customer-service transaction flow. | |
| Typeahead Search | Aids in predicting search terms during entry by recommending synonyms or words having related spelling / lexical relationships. | Search |
| Variable Price | Products, such as gift cards, that can be purchased at a price chosen by consumer choice (e.g. 10, 25, 50, etc.). | PIM |
| Variant | Version of a product that differs in some respect from other versions of the same product. For example, a shoe called "Oxford Classic" available in different colors and sizes. | PIM |
| Versioning (Content) | When creating/editing content, the system will automatically maintain different versions upon editing. Each version must be processed through established workflows for approval and ultimately publishing. Previous versions of content can be utilized allowing editors to "Rollback" content to a previously desired version in the case where it is required. | PIM |
| Viewer Role | A Role that includes only those privileges sufficient to allow a user to View a service instance and its data. | Corp Admin |
| Virtual Product | A product that is distributed electronically, e.g. a digital gift card. See Downloadable product, Physical product, and Product. | PIM |
| Visual Merchandising | The ability to highlight certain 'featured items' (boost) within a product category and also to de-emphasize certain products (bury) using a convenient drag and drop user interface. |
Revision History
2019-06-14 | PLK – Page created and content uploaded.
