About this glossary

Definitions of the words that come up when showroom retailers talk about customers, selling and measurement, grouped by topic. The three that matter most: clienteling is selling from memory, so every conversation picks up where the last one ended; a single customer view is the one record per customer that makes it possible; and ROPO — research online, purchase offline — is how most considered purchases are actually made.

Clienteling and selling

Associate
A member of the sales team on the shop floor. Depending on the trade they may be called a sales advisor, consultant, stylist, designer or specialist.
Clienteling
The practice of building a long-term relationship with each customer from what the business knows about them — what they bought, what they're considering, what they said last time — so every conversation picks up where the last one ended. See what is clienteling?
Clienteling app
Software, usually on a tablet or phone, that shows an associate a customer's record while they're serving them and helps them follow up afterwards. See the buyer's guide to clienteling software.
Considered purchase
A purchase that takes research and time: typically a four-figure order, a decision measured in weeks, and at least one conversation with a person before buying. Furniture, kitchens, jewellery and instruments are typical.
Follow-up
A commitment to contact a customer, with one person who owes it, a day it's owed by, the reason, and — once it's done — a note of what happened. See how to follow up after a showroom visit.
Lead
In showroom retail, usually a warm prospect already known to the business: someone who left a basket, showed strong interest without buying, or bought before and has gone quiet. Not, as in some industries, a stranger from a web form.
Opener and closer
In sales credit, the person whose recorded act started a sale, such as raising the quote, and the person whose act finished it, such as the follow-up before the order. A common split gives each 40%, with 20% shared by anyone in between. See who gets the commission.
Quote
A written, itemised offer for a configured product and its services — delivery, installation, discounts, tax — which the customer can accept, pay a deposit on or decline. For considered purchases it's often the real point of sale.
Sales credit
The share of a sale credited to each person who earned it. It's the input to commission, not the commission itself: pay rates are applied separately, usually by payroll.
Walk-in
A customer who arrives without an appointment. Rarely a complete stranger: many walk-ins have researched on the website first.

Web and store

Anonymous visitor
A website visitor whose browsing is recorded but who hasn't yet told you who they are. Most visitors to a showroom retailer's website are anonymous most of the time.
Channel
Any place a business sells: its website, each showroom, a pop-up, a concession, a franchise or a marketplace.
Concession
A counter or space a brand runs inside another retailer's premises, often trading through the host's tills, so its sales reach the brand as a report rather than as orders in its own systems.
A cookie set by the website a visitor is actually on, rather than by a third party, used to recognise a returning browser on that site.
Identification
The moment an anonymous visitor becomes a known customer — by signing up, enquiring, booking, being sent a quote or buying. Done well, their earlier browsing joins their record at that point.
In-store code
A QR code or NFC tag in a showroom that opens a product or page on the retailer's own website when it's scanned or tapped. Useful to the customer, and a way of recording a store visit.
Omnichannel
Selling through several connected channels — website, stores, phone, concessions — so customers can move between them and be recognised in each. Also describes customers who shop that way.
ROPO
Research online, purchase offline: researching on the web and then buying in person, by phone or on a quote. See research online, buy in store.
Showrooming
The reverse of ROPO: looking at a product in a shop, then buying it online, sometimes from a competitor.
Single customer view
One record per customer that joins everything the business knows about them across every channel: browsing, store visits, quotes, orders and the team's notes. See single customer view.
Store visit
A recorded visit to a physical location, known from an appointment, an in-store code, a quote raised in the room or a purchase.
Webrooming
Another name for ROPO, coined as the opposite of showrooming.

Attribution

Attribution
Deciding how much credit each marketing touch deserves for a sale. See how to attribute showroom sales.
Attribution model
The rule for splitting a sale's credit across the touches before it. The five common models are first touch, last touch, linear, position-based and time decay. None is objectively correct; each is an opinion about what mattered.
Attribution window
How long before a sale a touch can be and still receive credit. Also called a conversion or lookback window. For decisions that take weeks, 60 to 90 days is common.
Campaign touch
A recorded arrival on your website from a campaign, identified by its UTM parameters or an ad click ID.
Click ID
An identifier an ad platform adds to the link when someone clicks an ad — gclid for Google, fbclid for Meta, msclkid for Microsoft — which lets the arrival be matched to the ad.
First touch
An attribution model that gives all the credit to the first recorded touch.
Last touch
An attribution model that gives all the credit to the final touch before the sale. Also called last click. It tends to flatter searches for your own brand name.
Linear
An attribution model that splits the credit evenly across every touch.
Position-based
An attribution model that gives fixed shares to the first and last touches — commonly 40% each — and splits the rest across the touches in between.
Time decay
An attribution model that gives more credit to touches closer to the sale, halving over a set period called the half-life. Seven days is a common default.
Offline conversion
A sale that happens away from the website — in a showroom, by phone, on a quote — and is connected back to the online marketing that preceded it.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Revenue credited to advertising divided by what the advertising cost. It needs both the sales side and the cost side; a figure produced without the ad spend is a guess.
Unattributed sales
Sales with no recorded campaign touch before them: walk-ins, word of mouth, repeat customers. An honest attribution report counts them rather than dropping them.
UTM parameters
Tags added to the end of a link — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and others — so that arrivals can be traced to the campaign that sent them.

Measurement

Holdout group
A random share of the people who qualify for a message or offer who are deliberately not shown it, so the effect can be measured against them. Also called a control group. See holdout groups.
Incrementality
The extra outcome caused by an action, beyond what would have happened anyway, measured against a holdout group.
Lift
The difference in outcome between the group that received an action and the group held back — for example, 6.7% against 4.4% is a lift of 2.3 percentage points.
Statistical confidence
How sure you can be that a measured difference isn't down to chance. The usual bar is 95%: a difference that large would appear by chance less than one time in twenty.
Repeat rate
The share of your customers who have bought more than once — the number most clienteling work is ultimately trying to move.

Orders and money

Average order value (AOV)
Revenue divided by the number of orders, calculated for paid orders and one currency at a time. See how to raise average order value.
Average transaction value (ATV)
The in-store name for much the same measure: revenue divided by the number of transactions.
Configurable product
A product sold in options — size, fabric, finish — where each combination is a separate variant with its own code and, often, its own price.
Variant
One specific, purchasable combination of a product's options, such as the three-seater in green velvet.
SKU
Stock keeping unit: the code that identifies a specific product or variant in your catalogue and on your orders.
Deposit
A part-payment that secures an order, with the balance usually due before or on delivery.
Net revenue
Revenue after refunds. The honest basis for reporting sales and for crediting them to people.

Privacy, data and AI

Consent management platform (CMP)
The software behind a website's cookie banner, which records what each visitor agreed to and tells other scripts on the page what they may do.
Global Privacy Control (GPC)
A signal a browser can send to tell websites the person doesn't want their personal data sold or shared. Some tools treat it as a refusal of tracking, whatever the cookie banner says.
Data minimisation
The principle of collecting, keeping and sharing only the personal data a purpose actually needs.
Salted hash
A one-way scrambled version of a value, such as an IP address, mixed with a secret so it can't be reversed by lookup. It lets a system recognise a repeat without storing the original.
Row-level security
A database feature that restricts which rows each account can read, so one business's customers can't appear in another's results even if a query forgets to filter.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open standard for connecting AI assistants to tools and data, so the assistant asks a system questions through defined tools instead of being handed the data. See using AI with customer data.
Seat
A named, individual access to a system — including an AI connection — that is granted to one person or agent and can be revoked on its own.

Looking for Stitchwork's own terms — cookie names, key prefixes, status values? They're in the documentation glossary.

The Stitchwork teamWe build clienteling software for showroom retail: one record of each customer across your website, your floor and your sales team. See what Stitchwork does.