Ecommerce glossary

A booking fee is an additional charge added to the price of an event ticket, typically covering the cost of processing and administering the sale, and shown alongside the ticket price at checkout.

Cart abandonment happens when a shopper adds an item to their cart or starts checkout but leaves without completing the purchase.

A chargeback is a forced reversal of a card payment, initiated by a cardholder's bank rather than the seller, that pulls the disputed funds back out of the seller's account while the claim is investigated.

A checkout page is the page where a customer enters payment and order details to complete a purchase, separate from the product or cart page that came before it.

A conversion funnel is the path a visitor follows from first arriving on a site to completing a purchase, moving through narrowing stages where some visitors drop off at each step.

A downsell is a lower-priced or scaled-down offer shown to a customer who has just declined an upsell, giving them a smaller way to say yes instead of leaving with nothing.

Dunning is the process of recovering failed subscription payments by retrying the charge on a schedule and prompting the customer to update their payment details.

Early bird pricing is a temporary lower price offered for a limited time or unit count on a ticket tier, before the standard price for that tier takes effect.

A free trial is a limited-time period during which a customer can use a product or subscription at no cost, typically converting to a paid subscription automatically unless the customer cancels before the trial ends.

General admission is a ticket type that grants entry to an event without an assigned seat, sold up to a venue's overall capacity rather than against a fixed count of individual seats.

A hosted checkout is a payment page run and served by a third party, so the seller collects payments without building or maintaining the checkout themselves.

A merchant of record is the legal entity that appears on a customer's payment as the seller, responsible for processing the transaction, remitting sales tax, and handling chargebacks and refunds.

MRR, or monthly recurring revenue, is the predictable revenue a subscription business collects each month from its active, paying customers.

An order bump is a small add-on offer shown directly on the checkout page that a customer can accept with a single click, without leaving checkout, entering payment details again, or restarting the purchase.

A payment gateway is the technology that securely captures a customer's payment details at checkout and passes them to a payment processor for authorization.

A payment link is a shareable URL that lets a customer pay for a product or service without visiting a store or filling out an order form first, generated once and sent by email, text, or direct message.

A paywall is a system that restricts access to content or features until a visitor pays or subscribes, typically used by publishers, creators, and membership sites to monetize content.

Proration is the practice of charging or crediting a customer for only the portion of a billing period they actually used, typically applied when a subscription plan, seat count, or billing cycle changes mid-period.

Recurring billing is the automated process of charging a customer's saved payment method on a set schedule without requiring them to check out again each time.

A service fee is an additional charge added to a transaction to cover the cost of providing a service, separate from the price of the item or ticket itself.

Stripe Connect is Stripe's platform product that routes payments directly into a platform's users' own Stripe accounts, while the platform handles onboarding, payouts, and account management on their behalf.

Subscription billing is the business model where a customer pays a recurring fee on a set schedule in exchange for ongoing access to a product or service, typically organized into tiers with support for upgrades, downgrades, and proration.

A subscription model is the pricing structure a business chooses for recurring revenue, whether a flat fee, tiered plans, usage-based pricing, or a per-seat rate, rather than a single price paid once for permanent ownership.

Ticket tiers are different price levels offered for the same event, each with its own name, price, and quantity cap, distinguished by access, timing, or perks rather than by the event itself changing.

An upsell is an offer to buy a more expensive or upgraded version of a product, usually shown after the customer has already decided to buy, on a follow-up page rather than on the checkout itself.

A will call ticket is a ticket reserved under the buyer's name for pickup at the venue, rather than delivered electronically or by mail, and verified at pickup with photo ID and order details.