The CPG data glossary, in plain English.

A measure of distribution weighted by how much total business the stores carrying you actually do. Being in 40% of stores that ring up 80% of the dollars gives you 80% ACV — which is why %ACV matters more than raw store counts when you talk to a buyer.

How fast your product sells where it's actually available — usually units per store per week. Distribution tells you where you are; velocity tells you whether you deserve to stay there. Category reviews are largely a velocity conversation.

Sales dollars divided by points of distribution — a way to compare items fairly regardless of how widely they're distributed. High SPPD with low distribution is the classic 'give this item more stores' argument.

The retailer's shelf map: which products go where, how many facings each gets, at what height. Getting 'on the planogram' is winning shelf space; the reset is when the new map takes effect in stores.

The retailer's official record of which of your items each store or banner is approved to carry — the planogram authorization. It's the denominator for distribution math: cross it against actual store-level sales and voids surface themselves.

A door that's authorized to carry your item but isn't selling it — the shelf never got set, or the item quietly fell off. Every void has a dollar value; a maintained authorization list is what makes voids computable instead of anecdotal.

The scheduled re-arrangement of a category's shelf, usually once or twice a year, when the new planogram is executed. Miss the reset window and you're typically waiting until the next one — which is why category review timelines rule the CPG calendar.

One unit-width of your product visible on the shelf front. More facings mean more visibility and fewer out-of-stocks between restocks. Losing facings is often the first quiet signal a buyer is losing patience.

The upfront payment a retailer charges to add a new item to its shelves — covering the admin, warehouse slot, and risk of an unproven product. Often negotiable, sometimes payable in free product (a free fill), and always worth modeling before you celebrate the authorization.

Free product supplied to fill the shelf when a new item is authorized — a common alternative (or addition) to slotting fees. One free case per store across a large chain adds up; treat it as a launch cost, not a rounding error.

A short-term shelf-price cut, usually funded by the brand through trade dollars. The workhorse of promotion: cheaper than a display, easier than an ad, and the first thing to audit when margin quietly erodes.

Two retail pricing philosophies. EDLP (everyday low price) keeps one steady low price; Hi-Lo runs higher everyday prices punctuated by deep promotions. Your promo strategy, trade budget and even pack sizes should differ by which type of retailer you're selling.

The retailer's periodic re-evaluation of everything on the shelf in a category — who stays, who gains facings, who gets discontinued. Suppliers present data-backed cases; the ones with clean velocity and distribution numbers walk in with an advantage.

The supplier a retailer designates to advise on managing an entire category — assortment, planogram, pricing strategy — not just its own brands. An influential seat that comes with data access and a duty (in theory) to grow the whole category.

One physical store location that carries your product. 'We're in 2,400 doors' counts locations, not chains. Door counts are the industry's favorite growth stat — and meaningless without the velocity to back them up.

A route-based model where products go straight to individual stores — often merchandised by the delivery rep — instead of through the retailer's warehouse. Common in beverage, snacks and bread, where freshness and shelf presence justify the route cost.

A distributor carrying a wide catalog across many categories and delivering to many retailers from central warehouses — the standard route into natural, specialty and independent retail. Your sell-through data now lives in their portal, which is exactly the problem platforms like ours exist to fix.

How your product commercially and physically reaches a buyer: direct to a retailer from your ERP, three-tier through a distributor, marketplace-fulfilled (FBA, WFS), seller-fulfilled D2C from your own store, or a wholesale platform like Faire shipping straight to stores. Most brands run several at once — which is why no single system's numbers ever tell the whole story. Amazon alone can be three of them: Vendor 1P is direct retail, FBA is marketplace-fulfilled, FBM is D2C.

Brand sells to distributor, distributor sells to store, store sells to shopper. The standard route into natural and specialty retail (KeHE, UNFI) and the legally mandated one in beverage alcohol. You see your sell-in; the distributor's depletion reports are how you find out what actually moved to stores.

Cases leaving the distributor's warehouse for stores — the sell-through side of a three-tier model, reported in portals like VIP. The gap between your sell-in and their depletions is inventory sitting at the distributor, and it's the earliest honest read on real demand.

An outsourced sales agency that represents your brand to retailers and distributors for a commission (typically 3–10%). A good broker is leverage; an unmanaged one is a line item. Either way, you still need your own view of the numbers they report.

A deduction a distributor or retailer takes from your payment for a claimed infraction — short ship, late delivery, missing paperwork, promo billing. Individually small, collectively enormous, and worth auditing: a meaningful share of chargebacks are disputable if you have the data to fight them.

The distributor-world mechanism where a distributor sells to a retailer at a promoted price and bills you back for the difference. The plumbing behind most natural-channel promotions — and a common place for billing errors to hide.

A discount taken directly off the distributor's invoice at purchase time, rather than billed back later. Simple to administer, but it rewards buying, not selling — pair it with sell-through data or watch it fund a forward buy.

The percentage of ordered cases you actually shipped. Below the high-90s and you're leaving revenue on the table, inviting chargebacks, and giving buyers their favorite reason to discontinue an item. One of the first numbers worth watching daily.

The compliance standard big retailers hold suppliers to: the complete order, in the delivery window, or a fine. Walmart made it famous. OTIF performance is a data problem before it's a logistics one — you can't fix what you track in five portals.

Product that expires or is damaged before it sells, typically deducted from your payment under a spoils allowance. Chronic spoils in one region is rarely bad luck — it's usually an over-ordering, rotation, or velocity signal hiding in plain sight.

When a distributor or retailer stocks up heavily on a deal price to resell after the promotion ends — juicing your shipments this month and hollowing out next month's. If sell-in and sell-through diverge after every promo, you've found your answer.

Buying product cheaply in one market or deal and reselling it into another outside authorized channels. It muddies your pricing, wrecks regional data, and usually surfaces as a mystery: strong sales in a market where you have no distribution.

Everything you pay retailers and distributors to promote and carry your products — TPRs, ads, displays, slotting, MCBs. Typically a brand's second-largest cost after COGS, and the one most often managed in a spreadsheet with a name like 'FINAL_v7'.

Money a customer subtracts from your invoice payment — for promotions, chargebacks, spoils, freight claims, or reasons you'll spend an afternoon decoding. Deduction management is the unglamorous discipline that routinely recovers real margin.

Money set aside on your books for trade commitments you've made but haven't been billed for yet. Under-accrue and Q4 delivers a nasty surprise; over-accrue and you're sandbagging your own margin. Accuracy requires knowing what promotions actually ran — a data problem.

Base is what you'd have sold anyway; incremental is what the promotion added. Every trade-spend ROI conversation is really an argument about this split — and without a defensible baseline, every promo looks like it 'worked'.

The sales bump during a promotion versus baseline, e.g. a 3x lift. Impressive lifts can still lose money once you fund the discount, count forward buys, and watch the post-promo trough — which is why lift is a starting point, not a verdict.

The true cost of getting a unit to a sellable location: product, freight, duties, warehousing, and fees. Margin math done on factory cost alone flatters everyone; landed cost is where the honest unit economics live.

Margin is profit as a share of the selling price; markup is profit as a share of cost. A 50% markup is a 33% margin. Retailers speak margin. Confusing the two in a line review is a rite of passage nobody enjoys twice.

The suggested retail price. You suggest; retailers decide. Where your SRP lands versus the shelf reality — and versus your margin math at each tier of the supply chain — is worth tracking with data, not spot checks.

The price after every discount, allowance and billback is stripped out — what you truly sold for. List price is a press release; dead net is the truth. Brands that know their dead net by item and customer negotiate differently.

Point-of-sale data: what actually scanned at the register, by store, item and day. The ground truth of retail — when you can get it, normalize it, and line it up with your shipments, which is precisely the work most brands never get to.

Market-level sales data collected across retailers and sold by measurement firms — the industry scoreboard for share, velocity, and trend versus competitors. Powerful for the category argument, blind to your operational detail; it complements your own data rather than replacing it.

Data from households that record their purchases, revealing who buys you, how often they come back, and what else lands in their basket. The place to look when the question is 'who is my shopper?' rather than 'what did I sell?'

Sell-in is what you shipped to a distributor or retailer; sell-through is what actually left their shelves. The gap between them is inventory building up — or draining down — somewhere you can't see. Managing a brand on sell-in alone is driving by the rear-view mirror.

A store that should carry an item but doesn't — authorized but never set, discontinued by a manager, or simply missed. Void-closing is among the highest-ROI activities in field sales, provided you can generate the store-level list.

The opportunities you haven't pursued yet: channels, regions, retailers or category segments where you're absent but comparable brands aren't. Real whitespace analysis is data work — where your distribution ends and demand doesn't.

The modeled 'what would have happened anyway' — the reference line for measuring promotions, distribution wins, and everything else. Every incrementality claim depends on one; ask how it was built before you trust the answer.

The EDI document retailers use to send suppliers product activity data — typically weekly sales and inventory by location. Unglamorous, widely available, and criminally underused: many brands receive 852s and never load them anywhere queryable.

A retailer or distributor's supplier-facing website where your sales, inventory, orders and chargebacks live — one login, one export format, one more tab. Multiply by every trading partner and you have the reason data unification is a category.

Two ways to sell on a marketplace: 1P, you wholesale to the marketplace and it retails your product; 3P, you sell directly to shoppers through its storefront. Different economics, different data feeds, different levers — many brands run both at once.

The 'Add to Cart' slot on a marketplace listing when multiple sellers offer the same item. Winning it drives the overwhelming share of sales; losing it — often to an unauthorized reseller undercutting your price — is how MAP problems become revenue problems.

Advertising cost of sales: ad spend divided by ad-attributed sales (ACoS), or by total sales (TACoS). TACoS is the honest one — it shows whether ads are building a business or just buying the sales you'd have gotten anyway.

Return on ad spend: revenue attributed to ads divided by cost. Platforms self-report it, each attributing generously to themselves — which is why the sum of your channels' claimed revenue usually exceeds your actual revenue. Judge it cross-channel, in one place.

Advertising sold by retailers on their own sites, apps and stores, targeted with their shopper data. The fastest-growing line in many trade budgets — and a new silo of performance data to reconcile against actual sales.

The floor price you allow resellers to advertise. Without monitoring and enforcement it's a suggestion; with a rogue 3P seller it's a daily fight that erodes retailer relationships — enforcement starts with knowing who's selling you, where, at what price.

Customer acquisition cost versus lifetime value — the two numbers that decide whether DTC growth is an engine or a bonfire. LTV is only knowable from joined order history; CAC is only honest when every channel's spend is counted.

Marketplace and DTC subscription programs trading a discount for recurring orders. Subscribers are your highest-LTV customers and your most sensitive to out-of-stocks: one missed shipment can cancel dozens of future ones.

An outsourced warehouse-and-fulfillment partner that stores your inventory and ships your orders. Their WMS knows your on-hand truth — which is only useful if that data flows somewhere you can line it up with demand.

A contract manufacturer that produces your product to your spec. Most emerging brands rely on one, and their production schedules, yields and lot data become an essential — and often invisible — part of your supply picture.

The smallest run a supplier or co-packer will accept. MOQs turn cash into inventory in big discrete chunks, which is why demand forecasting matters more for small brands, not less.

The buffer inventory held against demand spikes and supply hiccups. Too little and you short orders and eat OTIF fines; too much and cash sleeps in a warehouse. The right level is a forecasting output, not a gut feeling.

How long current inventory lasts at the current rate of sale. The single most useful inventory number — and only as good as the sales velocity feeding it, which is why it belongs next to live sell-through, not last month's export.

The batch identifier and expiration or best-by date tied to each production run. The backbone of traceability and recalls, and — matched with spoils and velocity by location — a leading indicator of freshness problems before they become deductions.

How long between placing an order and having sellable product — ingredients, production, freight, receiving, all of it. Every forecast is really a bet placed one lead time in advance; shrinking lead-time uncertainty is worth as much as improving the forecast.

The unbroken temperature-controlled path from production to shelf that refrigerated and frozen products require. Every handoff is a risk and a data point; a broken cold chain usually surfaces later, disguised as spoils.