#Concepts

The handful of words the rest of this documentation assumes. If something below is already obvious, skip it: nothing here is unusual, and the point is to fix the vocabulary rather than to teach e-commerce.

#Organization

Your account. An organization owns everything else on this page, and nothing is ever shared between two of them: a customer, a review or a loyalty program belongs to exactly one organization and is invisible from any other.

People are invited to an organization rather than to a store, so one login can belong to several. The organization also carries the settings that have nowhere more specific to live, including the time zone, which decides when a birthday counts and when the overnight loyalty jobs run.

#Site

A storefront. Most organizations have one, and it is created for you when you connect a store. You would add a second for a separate brand, a separate region or a separate domain.

A site has a slug (used by imports and the widgets), a base URL that links in emails point back to, and its own logo and colors for emails and customer-facing pages. Loyalty programs can be attached to a site; when nothing is attached, the organization's programs apply everywhere. See Sites.

#Customer

A shopper, identified by email address within the organization. Customers arrive from the store you connected rather than being created by hand, and their profile fields (name, email) stay owned by that store. What Cascade adds on top is its own: tags, metadata, notes, a birthday, and the marketing email opt-out.

Everything a shopper does hangs off this record: their orders, reviews, wishlists, loyalty membership and referrals.

#Product and order

The catalog and the purchase history, both synced from your store. Cascade does not sell anything and holds no inventory; it keeps products so reviews and wishlists have something to point at, and orders so a review request knows who to email and a loyalty rule knows what was spent.

Products carry variants, and both products and orders carry tags and metadata of your own.

#Review

A rating and some text about a product, usually with the customer who wrote it attached. A review is published or not, and only published reviews appear on your storefront.

Most reviews arrive through a survey flow: a rule that waits a set time after an order reaches a state you choose, emails the customer a request, and takes their answer. Reviews can also arrive from the widget on your storefront, from a CSV import, or over the API. See Reviews.

#Loyalty program

The rules of your rewards scheme. A program defines a points currency, and everything underneath it decides how points move:

• A rule is a trigger and a reward: place an order, write a review, have a birthday, spend 100 points on a discount.
• A tier is a threshold and a name. Members climb into one and get whatever it confers.
• A membership is one customer's place in one program: their balance, their tier, and the ledger of every point they have earned and spent.
• A reward is what a member claimed, in the form of a code they can use at checkout.

A stamp card is the same idea counted differently: ten coffees, then a free one. See Loyalty.

#Referral

A member's own link. Someone follows it, orders, and the order is attributed back, which usually pays both of them. Referrals live inside loyalty rather than beside it, because what a referral pays out is a loyalty rule like any other.

#Wishlist

A list of products a customer saved, kept on your storefront and readable from the dashboard. Customers can hold several, name them, and share one with a public link. See Wishlists.

#Widget

The customer-facing half. One script tag on your storefront renders review stars, the review list, the loyalty page, the wishlist manager and the rest. Widgets talk to the widget API, which is a separate, narrower API from the admin one, authenticated with a publishable key. See Storefront widgets.

#Webhook

An HTTP endpoint of yours that Cascade calls when something happens: a review is published, a customer is deleted, a reward is redeemed. This is how your systems hear about work done inside Cascade. See Webhooks.

#API key

What authenticates a request. There are two kinds and they are not interchangeable:

• A secret key (sk_...) reaches the admin API, holds a set of permissions, and must stay on your server.
• A publishable key (pk_...) reaches only the widget API and is safe to put in a page a shopper loads.

See Authentication.