E-commerce data terms, defined plainly

Anti-bot protection is any measure a website uses to detect and block automated traffic, ranging from rate limits to browser fingerprinting and CAPTCHAs.

Assortment is the full set of products a store carries within a category, at a point in time.

The Buy Box is the primary, default purchase option shown on a marketplace listing when multiple sellers offer the same product, the one a shopper sees without clicking through to see other offers.

A category path is the sequence of categories and subcategories a store files a product under, like Home > Kitchen > Mugs, usually shown as breadcrumbs on the product page.

Crawl frequency is how often a data source is checked, for example weekly, daily or hourly.

Data delivery is how a finished dataset reaches the person or system that uses it, for example a cloud storage bucket, a database, a spreadsheet or an API endpoint.

Data freshness is how recently a piece of data was collected relative to when it's used, usually measured as the time since the last observation.

Deduplication is the process of identifying and merging records that refer to the same real-world product, so it's counted once instead of multiple times.

A headless browser is a web browser that runs without a visible window, controlled by code instead of a person clicking around.

List price is the price a product is advertised at before any discount, markdown or promotion is applied.

MAP, or minimum advertised price, is the lowest price a manufacturer allows a reseller to advertise a product for, set to protect margin across a distribution network.

A marketplace is a platform where multiple independent sellers list and sell products alongside each other, rather than a single retailer selling only its own inventory.

Price monitoring is the practice of repeatedly checking what a product sells for across one or more stores and recording each price over time.

A product catalog is the complete set of products a business sells or tracks, along with the attributes that describe each one, such as title, brand, price and category.

Promotion tracking is the practice of recording when and how deeply a store discounts a product, including the discount label, coupon text or sale price shown on the page.

Rate limiting is a restriction a website places on how many requests a single source can make within a given time period, used to protect server load and deter abuse.

Review mining is the collection of customer reviews, ratings and review text from product pages for structured analysis, rather than reading them one at a time.

Schema drift is when the structure of a dataset changes over time, fields get added, renamed or removed, without the systems consuming it being updated to match.

Sentiment analysis is the process of classifying text, like a review, as positive, negative or neutral, usually with a model rather than a person reading each one.

Share of shelf is the percentage of visible listings in a category or search result that belong to a given brand or retailer, measured the way a shopper would actually see the page.

A SKU, or stock-keeping unit, is the identifier a retailer assigns to a specific product variant, used internally to track inventory and pricing.

Stock availability is whether a product is currently purchasable on a store's page, typically captured as in stock, out of stock, or a limited-quantity state.

Structured data is information organized into a consistent, predictable format, like fields in a table, instead of free-form text or an image.

A variant is a specific version of a product that differs by an attribute like size, color or pack count, while sharing the same base product.

Web scraping is the automated extraction of data from web pages, done by a program that requests a page and reads its content the way a browser would.