Shopify glossary
The terms you meet when working with Shopify, defined plainly and correctly. Compiled from the questions we answer most often in client calls.
Core concepts
Shopify
A hosted (SaaS) ecommerce platform. Servers, SSL and software updates are the platform's responsibility; you deal with products, content and selling.
Shopify Plus
Shopify's tier for high-volume and enterprise stores. B2B features, multi-store, checkout extensibility and higher API limits live here.
Storefront
What the visitor sees. Produced by the theme — not to be confused with the admin.
Handle
The short name that appears in a product, collection or page URL. Keep it readable and keyword-relevant; it affects search.
Variant
A sellable version of a product differing by size, colour and so on. Each variant carries its own stock and price.
Collection
How products are grouped. Manual or automated by rule — and where most category search traffic lands.
Theme and development
Liquid
Shopify's templating language. It decides what data appears where in the theme, combining store data with HTML.
Online Store 2.0
Shopify's theme architecture. It allows drag-and-drop sections and app blocks on every template, not just the homepage.
Section
An independently addable, reorderable content block within a theme. Editable from the admin without touching code.
Metafield
A custom data field added to a product, collection or customer when Shopify's standard fields are not enough — size charts, materials and similar.
Metaobject
A reusable content type made of several fields. A store location or an author record, for example.
Dawn
Shopify's reference free theme. Built as the example implementation of Online Store 2.0, and the base for many custom themes.
Theme app extension
How an app adds blocks to a store without editing theme files — which matters because it leaves no residue when the app is removed.
Selling and checkout
Checkout
The step from cart to payment. Shopify controls it; how much you can customise depends on your plan.
Shopify Payments
Shopify's own payment infrastructure. Not available in every market — where it is unavailable, stores use local providers.
Shopify Markets
How selling into multiple countries is managed: currency, language, pricing and domain behaviour configured per market.
Abandoned checkout
A cart that reached payment and left without completing. Usually recovered with reminder emails.
Shopify Functions
How checkout logic is customised in code — discount rules, shipping options and payment method visibility.
B2B
Company profiles, per-company price lists and payment terms inside the same store as retail. Native on Plus.
Performance and SEO
Core Web Vitals
Google's page experience metrics, covering loading, interaction readiness and visual stability.
LCP
Largest Contentful Paint — how long the largest content element takes to become visible. The metric most stores struggle with on mobile.
CLS
Cumulative Layout Shift — how much content moves while the page loads. Images without dimensions are the most common cause.
INP
Interaction to Next Paint — how quickly the page responds after a tap or click.
301 redirect
A permanent redirect telling search engines an address has moved. The core tool for protecting rankings during a replatform.
Canonical
The tag that names the primary address when the same content is reachable from several URLs. Important on filtered collection pages.
Structured data
Markup that describes page content in a form search engines parse. Separate schemas exist for products, FAQs and articles.
Faceted navigation
Filter-driven URLs. They generate infinite combinations and burn crawl budget unless managed deliberately.