CommerceCommerce GlossaryPart 6 of 12
Marketplaces Glossary
51 terms from the Commerce book's Marketplaces part, each defined in a line and linked to the chapter that explains it.
- Account Health Rating (AHR): Amazon's 0 to 1,000 score of a seller's policy compliance, Healthy from 200, with deactivation possible below 100 (Selling on Amazon).
- ACoS and ROAS: advertising cost of sales (ad spend over attributed sales) and its inverse, return on ad spend; both inherit the network's attribution model (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Agent trust tier: the permissions an agent gets by how it proved who it is: anonymous agents may search, signed agents may do more, token-holding agents may complete checkout without handing off (Agentic & AI Shopping).
- Agentic checkout: an AI agent completing a merchant's checkout through the merchant's API, with the merchant still merchant of record and charging a token the shopper approved (Agentic & AI Shopping).
- Amazon Vine: Amazon's sampling program: free units of products with fewer than 30 reviews go to reviewers Amazon selects, whose reviews are labeled; the seller chooses neither the reviewers nor what they write (Reviews & Ratings).
- ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number): Amazon's identifier for a product's detail page, shared by every seller who offers it (Selling on Amazon).
- A-to-z Guarantee claim: an Amazon buyer's claim against a third-party seller; one Amazon doesn't deny counts toward the Order Defect Rate and may be refunded from the seller's account (Selling on Amazon).
- Authorized reseller: a reseller under the brand's agreement, with its channels, terms and dates; the record diversion and MAP steps resolve to (Brand Protection).
- Brand Registry: Amazon's free program for trademark owners that unlocks infringement reporting, brand content and the Project Zero and Transparency programs (Brand Protection).
- Clean room: a network-hosted environment where an advertiser joins its pseudonymized data with the network's and gets only aggregated results back, such as Amazon Marketing Cloud (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Commission package: a seller's commission terms on a marketplace: a base rate with category rates, thresholds and an explicit base, effective-dated (Running Your Own Marketplace).
- Contributory infringement (marketplace): a platform's liability for sellers' counterfeits; under Tiffany v. eBay it needs knowledge of particular listings, which is why takedowns run on notices (Brand Protection).
- Cost-per-sale ad: an ad charged only when an attributed item sells, as a percentage of the sale (eBay's general Promoted Listings, Etsy's Offsite Ads), modeled as a charge on the order (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Deferred transaction (DD+7): marketplace proceeds held until a set time after delivery, seven days on Amazon, before they can be paid out (Selling on Amazon).
- Featured Offer (Buy Box): the one offer on a shared Amazon product page shown with Add to Cart and Buy Now, chosen on price, delivery speed and performance (Selling on Amazon).
- First-sale doctrine: the rule that a brand's control of distribution ends at the first authorized sale, so reselling genuine goods isn't infringement (Brand Protection).
- Gated category: a category or brand a marketplace seller must be approved for before listing, often with supplier invoices as evidence (Selling on Amazon).
- Gray-market goods: genuine goods made for another market and imported without the mark owner's permission; infringing when materially different from the domestic version (Brand Protection).
- Handoff (agent): an agent sending the shopper to the merchant's own checkout with the cart filled, rather than completing the purchase itself (Agentic & AI Shopping).
- Incentivized review: a review given in return for something of value; lawful when the reward doesn't depend on the rating and the connection is disclosed (Reviews & Ratings).
- Incrementality: the sales an ad caused that wouldn't have happened without it, measured with a holdout rather than by attribution (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Managed marketplace model: a platform that takes suppliers' goods and sets the retail price and logistics itself, as Temu's original model is described; wholesale to the supplier (Walmart, eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop & Others).
- Material differences: differences between genuine goods and the brand's domestic product (formulation, packaging, warranty, removed codes) that consumers would likely consider relevant, which take resale outside first sale (Brand Protection).
- Offer (marketplace): one seller's price, stock, condition and handling for a product in the operator's catalog; many offers can sit on one product (Running Your Own Marketplace).
- Offer-only listing (match): a listing that offers the seller's price and stock on a product the channel already has, without sending product content (Multichannel Listing & Feeds).
- Operator: the business running a marketplace: it owns the catalog, the checkout and the customer, sets the rules and takes a commission (Running Your Own Marketplace).
- Order Defect Rate (ODR): Amazon's share of a seller's orders over 60 days with negative feedback, an A-to-z claim or a chargeback; the target is under 1% (Selling on Amazon).
- Product facts and sales terms: the shared description of a product (title, brand, attributes, images) and one seller's offer on it (price, quantity, condition, fulfillment), synced separately (Multichannel Listing & Feeds).
- Product type (channel): a channel's schema for a kind of product, listing the attributes it requires and allows, such as Amazon's product type definitions and Walmart's item spec (Multichannel Listing & Feeds).
- Project Zero: Amazon's program letting brands with accurate report histories remove counterfeit listings themselves, without Amazon's review (Brand Protection).
- Reseller (marketplace): a partner that buys a brand's goods and sells them on marketplaces as the seller, as Pattern does, making the channel a wholesale customer for the brand (Multichannel Listing & Feeds).
- Restricted Data Token (RDT): an SP-API token required to call operations that return Amazon customers' personal data (Selling on Amazon).
- Retail media: advertising a retailer or marketplace sells on its own shelves and with its shoppers' data, on site, off site and in stores (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Review gating: asking buyers how they feel first and inviting only the happy ones to review; banned by Google's policies and potentially unfair under FTC law (Reviews & Ratings).
- Review suppression (product reviews): withholding reviews for their rating or sentiment, or deterring them by threats; moderation is lawful only on sentiment-neutral grounds (Reviews & Ratings).
- Review syndication: sending a brand's reviews to retailers' product pages, with provenance and removals carried along (Reviews & Ratings).
- Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP): Amazon's program for sellers who ship Prime-badged orders from their own warehouse after a 30-day trial (Selling on Amazon).
- Seller order: the part of a marketplace checkout one seller accepts, ships and refunds; one checkout produces one per seller (Running Your Own Marketplace).
- Settlement report: a marketplace's statement for a payout period, one line per transaction and amount type, reconciled to orders and the deposit (Selling on Amazon).
- SP-API (Selling Partner API): Amazon's REST APIs for sellers and vendors, authorized by OAuth through Login with Amazon and limited by roles (Selling on Amazon).
- Sponsored Products: cost-per-click ads for individual listings in a marketplace's search results and product pages; on Amazon the product must be eligible for the Featured Offer (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Store ratings: Google's ratings for a store, shown in Shopping and ads, generally from at least 100 eligible reviews (Reviews & Ratings).
- Suppressed listing: a listing that was live and is hidden by the channel for an issue, as opposed to a submission rejected before it took effect (Multichannel Listing & Feeds).
- TACoS (total advertising cost of sales): ad spend over all sales of the advertised items, attributed or not, checkable against the order book (Retail Media & Marketplace Ads).
- Test buy: ordering a suspect listing's product to inspect it, the evidence behind a counterfeit or material-differences claim (Brand Protection).
- Transparency (Amazon): Amazon's per-unit serial codes, which shoppers can scan, that let a genuine unit be told from a fake in commingled stock (Brand Protection).
- UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol): the open protocol Google announced in January 2026, co-developed with retailers and Shopify, for agents to discover a business's capabilities and run checkout and orders (Agentic & AI Shopping).
- Valid tracking rate: the share of seller-fulfilled shipments with a tracking number the carrier recognizes; above 95% on Amazon, 99% on Walmart (Walmart, eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop & Others).
- Vendor (1P) purchase order: Amazon's order to a vendor, acknowledged line by line as accepted, backordered or rejected, then shipped and invoiced (Selling on Amazon).
- Verified purchase: a review tied to a delivered, unrefunded order line; computed from the link, never set by hand (Reviews & Ratings).
- Web Bot Auth: signing an agent's HTTP requests with keys published in a directory, so a site can verify which operator sent them (Agentic & AI Shopping).