RESEARCH STORE GLOSSARY
Research store glossary: 40 terms for peptide and research-supply merchants.
Plain definitions of the terms a research peptide or research-supply store owner meets every week, from COAs, HPLC and lot numbers to chargebacks, processor underwriting, Zelle for business, abandoned checkouts, llms.txt and MCP. Each entry starts with a one-sentence definition, then explains what it means for running a store.
Lab and quality
- Certificate of analysis (COA)
- A certificate of analysis (COA) is a document issued by a testing laboratory that reports the measured identity, purity and other test results for one specific batch or lot of a material.
- High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
- High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a laboratory technique that separates the components of a dissolved sample so each can be measured, and it is the method most research-material COAs use to report purity.
- Mass spectrometry (MS)
- Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technique that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of ionised molecules, used on COAs to confirm that a sample’s molecular mass matches the expected identity.
- Lyophilized
- Lyophilized means freeze-dried: a material has been frozen and its water removed under vacuum by sublimation, leaving a dry solid, often a powder or “cake”, that is more stable to store and ship.
- Reconstitution solution
- A reconstitution solution is a laboratory liquid, such as sterile water or a buffered solution, used to return a lyophilized material to solution for research work.
- Third-party testing
- Third-party testing is analysis performed by a laboratory that is independent of the manufacturer and the seller, so the results do not depend on either party’s own testing.
- Batch or lot number
- A batch or lot number is the identifier a manufacturer assigns to a quantity of material produced together, so the material, its test results and its shipments can be traced to one production run.
- Purity percentage
- A purity percentage is the share of a sample that a specific test method measured as the intended material, most often reported on research-material COAs from HPLC peak areas.
- Endotoxin testing
- Endotoxin testing measures bacterial endotoxins, components of certain bacterial cell walls, in a sample, typically with the Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL) assay or a recombinant factor C method.
Compliance
- Research use only (RUO)
- Research use only (RUO) is a labelling and marketing position stating that a product is sold solely for laboratory research and not for human or animal use, diagnosis or treatment.
- Intended use
- Intended use is the legal concept that decides what a product is regulated as, established from how it is presented and sold rather than from what the seller privately means.
- Age gate
- An age gate is a screen shown before a visitor can browse or buy that asks them to confirm they meet a minimum age and, on research-supply stores, that they accept research-use-only terms.
- Acceptable use policy (AUP)
- An acceptable use policy (AUP) is the part of a platform’s or payment provider’s terms that lists the products, businesses and practices it will not support or will support only after review.
- Product code name
- A product code name is a catalog identifier, such as a merchant’s SKU or “GLP-1 (SM)”, that does not establish the product’s legality, compliance or payment-processor eligibility.
- Claim review
- Claim review is the process of checking product copy, pages and marketing for health, efficacy, dosing or drug-brand claims before they are published.
Payments
- Chargeback
- A chargeback is a reversal of a card payment initiated through the cardholder’s bank, which takes the funds back from the merchant while the dispute is decided.
- High-risk merchant account
- A high-risk merchant account is a card-processing account offered to businesses whose category, chargeback history or regulatory exposure makes mainstream processors decline them or apply extra conditions.
- Payment processor underwriting
- Payment processor underwriting is the review a processor or acquiring bank performs to decide whether to accept a merchant and on what terms, covering the business, its owners, its products and its website.
- Rolling reserve
- A rolling reserve is a percentage of each day’s card sales that a processor holds back for a fixed period, then releases, to cover future chargebacks and refunds.
- Payment gateway
- A payment gateway is the service that securely passes card details from a store’s checkout to the merchant’s acquiring bank or processor and returns the approval or decline.
- Zelle for business
- Zelle for business is the use of Zelle, a US bank-to-bank transfer network, to receive customer payments directly into a business bank account, usually confirmed by hand rather than through a checkout integration.
- Cash App for business
- Cash App for business is a Cash App account set up to receive payments for goods and services, identified by a $cashtag, which a store can offer as a manual pay-by-app method at checkout.
- Venmo for business
- Venmo for business is a Venmo business profile that receives payments for goods and services, subject to a per-transaction fee, which some stores offer as a manual pay-by-app method.
- Statement descriptor
- A statement descriptor is the text that appears on a customer’s card or bank statement for a charge, and an unclear one is a leading cause of “unrecognised transaction” chargebacks.
- Know your customer (KYC)
- Know your customer (KYC), and know your business (KYB), are the identity and ownership checks a payment provider runs on a merchant before it can accept or pay out funds.
Operations
- Cold chain shipping
- Cold chain shipping keeps a product within a specified temperature range from storage through delivery, using insulated packaging, refrigerants and faster services.
- Pick list
- A pick list is a document that tells whoever packs orders which items, in what quantities, to take from stock for a set of orders, usually grouped to minimise walking and mistakes.
- Batch shipping
- Batch shipping is fulfilling many orders together, selecting them as a group, picking stock once and buying and printing all their shipping labels in one step.
- Quantity pricing
- Quantity pricing lowers the unit price when a customer buys more of the same product, at defined thresholds such as 3, 5 or 10 units.
- Minimum order quantity (MOQ)
- A minimum order quantity is the smallest amount a supplier will accept on a single order, or the smallest amount a store is willing to sell in one purchase.
Marketing and growth
- Abandoned checkout
- An abandoned checkout is a checkout a shopper started, usually entering an email address, but did not complete, and abandoned-checkout emails are automated reminders sent to recover it.
- Average order value (AOV)
- Average order value (AOV) is total revenue from orders in a period divided by the number of those orders.
- Conversion rate (CVR)
- Conversion rate is the share of visits or visitors in a period that result in an order, usually expressed as a percentage.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) is the total value a customer generates for a store over their whole relationship, usually measured as revenue or gross margin across all their orders.
- Affiliate commission
- An affiliate commission is the payment a store makes to a partner for a sale attributed to that partner’s referral link or code, usually a percentage of the order’s merchandise value.
- UTM parameters
- UTM parameters are tags added to a link’s query string (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term) that record where a visit came from.
Search and AI
- llms.txt
- llms.txt is a proposed convention for a markdown file at a website’s root (/llms.txt) that gives large language models a concise, link-rich summary of the site and points to fuller text.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that lets AI assistants such as Claude connect to external systems through servers that expose tools and data in a standard way.
- IndexNow
- IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines immediately when a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for them to recrawl.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)
- Structured data is machine-readable information about a page, most often written as schema.org vocabulary in a JSON-LD script, that tells search engines and assistants exactly what the page describes.
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