Glossary
Commerce operations glossary
Every term your marketplace panel, your courier and your CA use — defined once, in language that assumes nothing.
- 3PL (Third-Party Logistics)
- An external provider that stores your stock and fulfils your orders — receiving, storing, picking, packing and shipping on your behalf.
- Batch pickingalso: wave picking
- Collecting the items for several orders in one pass through the warehouse, then sorting them into individual orders at a packing station.
- COD (Cash on Delivery)
- An order the customer pays for when it is delivered, with the courier collecting the cash and remitting it to the seller later.
- Credit note
- A document issued against an existing invoice that reverses part or all of its value and tax, used when goods are returned or an invoice was overstated.
- Cycle count
- Counting a small slice of your stock regularly — weekly, by category or velocity — instead of counting everything once a year.
- Dead stock
- Inventory that has not sold for long enough that it is unlikely to sell at full price, tying up cash and storage.
- E-invoice (IRN)also: IRN, invoice registration number
- An invoice reported to the government's Invoice Registration Portal, which returns a unique Invoice Reference Number and QR code that must appear on the document.
- E-way bill
- An electronically generated document required for the movement of goods above a notified consignment value, carried with the shipment.
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
- Software that runs the wider business — accounting, procurement, finance, often manufacturing and payroll — as one integrated system of record.
- Fill rate
- The share of ordered units you were able to ship in full and on time, without cancellation, substitution or backorder.
- GSTIN
- The 15-character Goods and Services Tax Identification Number issued to a registered business, unique per state registration.
- HSN code
- The Harmonised System of Nomenclature code that classifies a product for tax purposes and determines its GST rate.
- Inventory ledgeralso: stock ledger, movement ledger
- A record of every stock movement — sale, return, adjustment, transfer, receipt — from which the current quantity is derived rather than stored.
- Kitting and bundles
- Selling several component SKUs together as one purchasable item, where the bundle's availability is derived from its components' stock.
- Marketplace fulfilment (FBA / FBF)also: FBA, FBF, fulfilled by marketplace
- A model where the marketplace stores your stock in its own warehouses and fulfils orders for you, in exchange for storage and fulfilment fees.
- Order Management System (OMS)also: OMS, order management software
- Software that brings orders from every sales channel into one place and keeps a single authoritative stock number behind them, through invoicing, fulfilment and payment reconciliation.
- Overselling
- Accepting an order for stock you cannot ship, usually because more than one channel held its own idea of how much was available.
- Pick list
- The document or screen telling a picker which items to collect, in which quantities, from which locations, ordered by an efficient route.
- Putaway
- Moving received stock from the receiving area to a specific named storage location, and recording where it went.
- Reorder point
- The stock level at which you place the next purchase order, calculated as average daily sales multiplied by supplier lead time, plus safety stock.
- RTO (Return to Origin)
- A parcel that was never delivered to the customer and is being sent back to the seller, usually after failed delivery attempts or refusal.
- Safety stockalso: buffer stock
- Stock deliberately held back and not advertised, to absorb demand spikes and the lag between a sale and every channel learning about it.
- Settlementalso: payout, marketplace remittance
- The payment a marketplace makes to a seller for a period of orders, after deducting commissions, shipping, fees, promotions, penalties and tax collected at source.
- SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
- The unique code for one physically distinct thing you hold — a specific product in a specific variant, such as a red t-shirt in size M.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement)
- The performance commitment a marketplace holds a seller to — most often the window within which an order must be dispatched.
- Stockout
- Having nothing available to sell of a SKU that customers are actively trying to buy.
- TCS (Tax Collected at Source)
- Tax that an e-commerce operator collects on the net value of taxable supplies made through its platform and deposits against the seller's GSTIN.
- Warehouse Management System (WMS)also: WMS
- Software that manages the physical movement of stock inside a building: where it is stored, how it is picked, how it is packed and how it leaves.