PIM & iPaaS e-commerce glossary

A centralised system that stores and manages product information: descriptions, attributes, media, translations. The PIM is the catalogue "source of truth" — it doesn't push directly to sales channels; it provides data to integration tools that handle the transit.

A cloud platform that orchestrates data exchange between heterogeneous systems (ERP, PIM, CMS, storefront, marketplace). A catalogue iPaaS specialises in product data flows: ingestion, transformation, scoring, publication.

A neutral intermediate data model representing a product in a common format, independent of sources and destinations. Vyxflow uses vyxflow.catalog.v1 as its pivot format — each connector translates into this format at ingestion, and from this format at publication.

Management of product feeds to distribution channels (marketplaces, price comparison sites, Google Shopping). A feed management tool takes the prepared catalogue and pushes it to each channel in the right format. Vyxflow handles the preparation; tools like Lengow or Channable handle the distribution.

An open-source durable workflow orchestration engine. Unlike a simple cron job, Temporal handles failures, automatic retries and timeouts without losing state. Vyxflow uses Temporal for every catalogue pipeline — allowing you to see exactly where an execution stands and replay it if needed.

An architecture where multiple clients (tenants) share the same software infrastructure but with strict data isolation. At Vyxflow, each workspace is a tenant: its connections, catalogue data and members are invisible to other workspaces.

An event notification mechanism via HTTP POST, cryptographically signed with a shared HMAC key. The recipient verifies the signature to ensure the message genuinely comes from Vyxflow and has not been tampered with in transit.

An indicator calculated on each product record according to configurable rules (title present, valid EAN, HD image, description > N words, etc.). Vyxflow calculates this score before each publication attempt — a record below the threshold can be blocked or simply flagged.

An immutable snapshot of a product record's state at a point in time, kept in history. Allows comparing two states, auditing a change, or reverting to a previous version without touching the active record.

A software component that can read from or write to a target system (Shopify, PrestaShop, BigCommerce, Akeneo…). At Vyxflow, each connector translates data to or from the pivot format, and exposes its configuration parameters (authentication, mapping) in the interface.