Online store glossary: the terms behind a small online shop

Products and how they are organised

A product often comes in versions. Product variants are the buyable combinations of options such as size and colour, each with its own price and stock, and a SKU is the short code you give each one for packing and counting. A compare at price shows a genuine reduction, which consumer law expects to be real. Collections group products into pages people can browse, and a digital download product is a file sold instead of a parcel.

Payments

Most small stores take cards through a payment provider. Stripe Connect lets a platform take payments on your behalf into your own Stripe account, with its fee on top of Stripe fees. Stripe Checkout and Payment Links both open a Stripe hosted page, but a checkout built per order knows the exact cart, shipping and tax, while a link suits a fixed offer. Knowing which one you use explains how prices, receipts and refunds behave.

Stock and lost sales

Inventory reservation holds items while a buyer pays, so the last mug is never sold twice, and releases them when a checkout is abandoned. An abandoned cart is a checkout that never paid, most often because of surprise costs or a forced account. These pages explain both with the figures and settings worth knowing, and link the official sources, from the ACCC on pricing displays to Stripe documentation, so you can check details for your own shop.

How to use these pages

Setting up a shop for the first time? Read the variants and SKU pages before adding products, then the Stripe pages before you switch on checkout, and the reservation page before a limited drop.

Every page in this collection

• Stripe Checkout vs Payment Links

  Payment Links are actually built on Checkout: they are prebuilt Checkout sessions anyone can open. The difference is who creates the session and how much it knows about the order.

• What are product variants?

  Options describe how a product varies; variants are the combinations a buyer actually puts in the cart. Getting the split right keeps both the shop page and the stock count clear.

• What is a collection in ecommerce?

  Collections are how a shop turns a flat list of products into something people can browse. They are flexible: the same mug can sit in Mugs, Speckled glaze and Gifts at once.

• What is a compare at price?

  The compare at price is one field in a product editor, but it is a claim to buyers: this used to cost more. Treat it like any other claim on the page.

• What is a digital download product?

  Digital products appeal to small sellers because they are made once and sold many times. The work moves from packing parcels to protecting files and answering download questions.

• What is a SKU?

  SKUs are small, but they save time in every part of selling: packing the right item, counting stock, reading sales reports and moving between systems.

• What is an abandoned cart?

  Most abandoned carts were never going to be sales: people save items, compare, or get distracted. The ones worth fixing are those lost to friction you can remove.

• What is inventory reservation?

  Without reservations, two buyers can both reach payment for the last item and both pay. Reservations decide who gets it before anyone is charged.

• What is Stripe Connect?

  When a builder asks you to connect Stripe, it is setting up a connected account so that buyers pay you, not the builder, while the builder runs the checkout on your behalf.