Last update: January 30, 2024

Glossary

Association: A tool that allows you to add a block of related items to a product or multiple products. For example, this could be a widget with related products or accessories that go with the product in question.

Bill of materials: A special type of Product that is actually a list of materials required for a specific item purchased by the customer that can be created for internal purposes.

Catalog: A module offered by the Virto Commerce platform that allows you to create your own product catalog linked to one or more stores. A typical catalog houses various categories of products and their variations. The catalog module consists of the storefront (the e-commerce website facing the customer) and the admin console or back office, which is used to configure your catalog according to the user's needs.

Category: Each category acts as a container, or folder, that houses various products of a particular type; these can be both physical and digital products. For example, a consumer electronics site might have categories such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, cameras, etc.

Company (Organization): A profile for an entire company, within which you can store employee profiles, other company profiles, and those of individual customers related to that company.

Contact (Customer): A profile for a customer of your store; may be either an individual customer or a member of a company.

Contract: A time-based relationship between the customer company (companies), the price list created within the contract, and the selected store.

Contract code: A unique code of the contract. Once a contract is created, the system creates a user group with the same name as the contract code. This user group is automatically terminated when the associated contract is terminated.

Contract name: The name of the contract that is visible in the contract list.

Customers: The companies and contacts to whom the contract prices apply.

Digital product: Any tangible product that the store owner can list in the Store. Digital products have unique attributes such as download type, maximum downloads, etc., unlike physical products; no shipping or inventory attributes may apply to such products.

Employee: A profile of an employee working for a specific company.

End Date and Start Date: Dates that define the contract period; the contract is considered to be within this date range.

Facet: A set of properties grouped together (e.g., size and color).

GTIN, or Global Trade Item Number: Part of a numerical code used to uniquely identify a product. Currently, GTIN is used exclusively with bar codes.

Inheritance: A technique that allows entities at different levels to inherit tags. Tags can be inherited both 'upwards' (e.g. a category inherits the tags of product) and 'downwards' (e.g. a product inherits the tags of its category).

Modified Price: A price that is different from the default price because it has been updated by the user.

Physical Product: Any tangible product that the shop owner can list in the shop. Physical products have a unique Track Inventory attribute that digital products do not have. Shipping and Fulfillment Center attributes are also relevant to them.

Product: A basic entity in Virto Commerce's Catalog module, a product is a basic type of item that can be created and listed on an e-commerce site. You can choose to create entries for both physical and digital products. There are also special types of products, such as bills of materials and variations.

Property: Properties are customizable entities that each catalog, category, or product (including its variations) can have. For example, typical properties for a physical product might include size, color, brand, etc.

SKU: Short for Stock Keeping Unit, an SKU is an alphanumeric code used to track product inventory. By adding SKUs to each product variation, store owners can easily track the number of products available and create thresholds to determine if a new order is needed.

SEO: Virto Commerce catalog offers dedicated SEO tools to increase traffic to the ecommerce store. In particular, one can add meta titles, descriptions, keywords and image alt-texts for a specific product to make it more discoverable on the web.

Store: Any digital means of marketing and/or selling products created with the Virto Commerce platform and its modules. Technically, this can be an e-commerce website, a mobile app, etc.

Variation: Each product may have one or more variations; for example, a cell phone may come in different colors: blue, white, black, etc. You can create variations based on color, size, and other properties that you configure.

Vendor (Merchant): A profile for a vendor you work with.