FAQ: All

Question 1

What is attribution for an online store?

Accepted Answer

Attribution describes how a conversion is assigned to each of the channels involved in the purchase funnel. Through attribution, we can assess the effectiveness of individual communication channels and determine their role across the entire customer purchase path. Before buying, customers reach our online store through many sources: paid search results, price comparison engines, social media — which is why attribution models exist, used to assign a share of the conversion to specific marketing channels. We often limit ourselves to checking the effectiveness of only the last source before purchase. In reality, however, analyzing the entire path the user has taken is extremely important. Why is it worth analyzing different attribution models rather than only the defaults visible at first glance in various marketing tools? We may mistakenly cut investment in traffic sources that don't appear to convert, but actually serve as the first touch with our store or reinforce the customer's purchase decision (for example, inspirational content on our social media). By cutting the budget for these channels, we may make sure the customer never even hears about our offer.

Question 2

What is a multistore?

Accepted Answer

Multistore allows you to run multiple stores on a single engine and a single product catalog. A channel can be a separate market, a language version, B2B sales alongside B2C, or a mobile app that uses the same data as the website.
The independence of settings is key. You can enable the same product in one channel and disable it in another, and promotional rules are designed to be separate, so a coupon or special promotion works only where it’s supposed to. Without this separation, every promotion intended for a single channel ends up requiring manual workarounds.
In practice, it is the multistore feature that provides the technical foundation for product assortments available exclusively in the app or for limited-edition products targeted at a specific market. The rest is a business decision: which product, in which channel, and for how long.

Question 3

What is customer retention?

Accepted Answer

Retention describes repeat business: how many customers return to the store after their first purchase and how long they stay with the brand. This is the flip side of acquisition, which is measured by the number of new customers brought in through advertising.
The math behind this concept has been well-known in ecommerce for years: acquiring a new customer can cost several times - and in extreme cases, more than twenty times - as much as the maintenance costs for someone who has already made a purchase. That’s why channels that rely on repeat business - such as email marketing, loyalty programs, or mobile apps - are evaluated differently than campaigns focused on first-time customers.
In practice, retention is also a test of whether a brand has a reason to exist beyond price. A customer returns because they get something they can’t find elsewhere, or because you recognize them and reward them for buying again. A discount given without this foundation only teaches them to wait for the next sale.

Question 4

What is customer lifetime value?

Accepted Answer

Customer lifetime value (also known as LTV) takes the entire relationship into account: the first purchase, all subsequent purchases, and how long a customer stays with the brand. A single transaction tells us little about it, because a customer acquired at low cost who disappears after a single order is often worth less than someone who returns over the course of three years.
This metric has direct implications for evaluating channels. Customers who engage with the brand across multiple channels simultaneously - on the website, via email, through text messages, in a brick-and-mortar store, and in the app - are clearly worth more to the company than single-channel customers, with the difference reaching nearly one-third. The result, therefore, comes from the portfolio of channels, not from any single one.
This is the source of a common mistake in performance evaluation: a store looks at a single channel’s contribution to revenue and dismisses the very channel that was driving sales elsewhere. More meaningful metrics include purchase frequency, the proportion of repeat customers, and, most importantly, customer lifetime value.

Question 5

What is a Bundle Product in Magento?

Accepted Answer

A Bundle Product is one of the product types in Magento, alongside Simple, Configurable, and Grouped products. It is used to sell a bundle: the customer sees a single product page with its own name, description, photo, and URL, while underneath it contains several separate products from the catalog.
The price and SKU of the bundle operate in two modes. “Dynamic” calculates them from the components, so the bundle’s price is the sum of the component prices, and the SKU is generated based on the products included in the bundle. “Fixed” allows you to enter your own SKU and price, independent of the catalog, and this is the mode in which you can set up a discount for the bundle.
The most common surprise concerns inventory. A Bundle Product does not have its own inventory; its availability is determined by the component with the fewest remaining units. If, in a bundle of three products, you have two units of one product, the bundle is available in quantities of two, regardless of how many of the other products are in stock. The bundle’s composition is set by the administrator, who assigns products to options and specifies the quantity of each SKU; the customer can increase the number of bundles purchased but cannot change what’s inside.

Question 6

What is an EAN code?

Accepted Answer

EAN (European Article Number) is a product number that identifies a product beyond the boundaries of a single company. The standard is managed by GS1, and the numbers are assigned, not invented, so two different products cannot have the same EAN. It is the sequence of digits under the barcode on the packaging.
It’s easy to confuse it with a SKU, and it’s important to keep these terms distinct. A SKU is your internal code; you set it yourself, and it applies only to your store and your warehouse. The EAN is common across the entire market: the same product has the same number at your store, at your competitors’, and at the manufacturer’s.
In online sales, the EAN determines whether a product can be matched to third-party databases. Marketplaces, price comparison sites, and product feeds match listings based on the EAN, so a missing EAN or an incorrectly entered number can remove the product from the sales channel where it was supposed to be sold. Bundles assembled in your own store usually do not have an EAN, because no one has manufactured such a product; only sets packaged by the manufacturer receive an EAN.

Question 7

What is an ERP system?

Accepted Answer

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a system that brings a company’s operations together in one place: inventory, orders, purchases from suppliers, purchase prices, and accounting. The online store is then one of the channels that uses this dataset, rather than a separate entity with its own version of the truth about how much of each item is in stock.
For online sales, the most important factor is what the ERP system knows about availability. When the store sells a product, the ERP system removes it from inventory; when a delivery or return comes in, the inventory is replenished. Without this synchronization, the store will sooner or later sell something it doesn’t have, and the customer will find out only after paying.
The line between their responsibilities can be confusing, because the ERP system and the store often describe the same product. The store is responsible for the presentation and what the customer sees, while the ERP system handles what the company actually has in stock and how much it cost. Problems arise when the online store handles something the ERP system cannot map - for example, when it sells bundles consisting of several products, while the ERP system only recognizes individual items. In such cases, you must decide which system will manage this information before launching your first campaign.

Question 8

What is a product bundle?

Accepted Answer

A product bundle is several products offered together as a single unit of purchase, with its own name, product page and price. The price is usually lower than the sum of the parts, and the customer makes one decision instead of several.
Bundles come in two types that behave completely differently in the warehouse. A manufacturer's bundle arrives from the supplier as a finished, indivisible set; it has its own SKU, its own EAN code and its own stock level, so systems treat it like any other product. A virtual bundle is assembled by the store from products it also sells separately: the customer sees one package, but is in fact buying several items that have to be handled one by one.
The economics of a bundle rest on a trade. The unit margin drops, because the price is lower than the sum of the parts, and a larger number of transactions has to earn it back. On top of that come decisions that are easy to forget while planning a promotion: how stock systems know how much of each component is left, and what happens when a customer wants to return only part of the set.

Question 9

What is duplicate content?

Accepted Answer

Duplicate content is a situation in which identical or nearly identical content is available at more than one URL. The search engine must then decide which version to display and ignore the others. It isn't a penalty from the rulebook, it's a consequence of the fact that the search results have room for one result, not three identical ones.
In an online store, duplicates arise in two places. Within the site, they are created by variants of the same product, filters and sorting options that generate separate URLs, and product descriptions copied from the manufacturer and used by all of its distributors. Externally, they are caused by pasting your own catalog onto a marketplace - or vice versa: launching a store using product descriptions copied verbatim from the platform where you previously sold your products.
The latter scenario is the most costly at the start, because your new product page competes with an identical page on a domain with a long-standing history. There are two solutions, and both require work: writing unique descriptions specifically for your own store, or using a canonical URL to tell the search engine which version takes precedence. The first works better; the second is faster.

Question 10

What is an Order Management System (OMS)?

Accepted Answer

An Order Management System (OMS) is a system whose sole purpose is to receive orders from various channels and standardize them before they are processed further. An online store, Allegro, Amazon, and any other marketplace transmit orders in different formats, with different sets of fields and different status logic. The OMS standardizes them into a single format.
With a single sales channel, such a layer is unnecessary, because the store can communicate directly with the ERP. The need arises as the number of platforms increases: without an OMS, each integration adds its own rules to a system that was never designed for multichannel operations, and every new marketplace requires changes in the same place.
OMS is sometimes confused with two related systems, and it's important to draw a clear line between them. ERP handles the company's finances, purchasing, and accounting. WMS manages physical warehouse operations, including storage locations and order fulfillment. OMS sits between them both and ensures only that orders from every channel look the same before either of these systems sees them.

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