E-commerce Glossary - M

Mail Box

A repository for messages in an electronic mail system or EDI server. Only authorised messages are allowed into mailboxes.

MAP (Merchant Account Provider)

A bank or other institution that hosts merchant accounts and processes online credit card transactions (sometimes provides e-commerce services). The term is also often used broadly to include any credit card processing service, including ISOs.

Marketplace

The world of commercial activity where goods and services are bought and sold.

Markup Language

Commands that define how the contents of a file are displayed or printed and how individual data elements within a file are to be processed.

MB Megabyte

In data communications, a megabyte is one million bytes (1,048,576 bytes to be exact). Byte - a group of eight binary digits processed as a unit by a computer and used especially to represent an alphanumeric character.

M-Commerce

Mobile e-commerce using wireless devices.

Merchant

Someone who sells goods.

Merchant Account

A special account account where money from credit card sales is first routed to and held before transfer to your own business account. This process is usually fully automated in ecommerce transactions. Money may be transferred into your standard business account in real-time or during various points in a 24 hour period. A merchant account is a crucial part of e-commerce.

Merchant Bank

A bank that holds a merchant account. After a consumer buys a product using a credit card, the merchant bank places funds into a merchant account in exchange for the right to collect on the debt owed by a consumer.

Merchant ID

An account number with a bank which allows a company to accept e-commerce payments by credit card.

MIDS (Merchant Identification Number)

Unique merchant identification number that is used in conjunction with all transactions.

Merchant Services

A credit card transaction handling service. Enables the use of credit cards issued by participating banks for the purchase of product and services on the internet and in the real world.

Meta-Tag

Embedded words in a web page used to provide information about that page to internet information resources such as search engine crawlers or spiders.

MHz (Megahertz)

A million cycles of electromagnetic currency alternation per second and is used as a unit of measure for the "clock speed" of computer microprocessors.

Micro GeoPortal

A potential reference for a local node in the 21st Century Internet. A node to serve a local population with advanced applications and communications. Examples include e-business data centers, geographic oriented communications, ensured site data throughout the Internet, geographic oriented email for people and small businesses, telephony services, voice services, visual communications, enhanced multi-media, and unlimited technology based services and products to populations.

Micropayments

Very small charges, perhaps even less than a penny, processed through e-commerce systems. Until this time, e-commerce has been largely limited to purchases of $10 ( U.S.) or more. With micropayments, however, e-commerce merchants can sell products for far lower prices, such as charging small fees for downloading documents or charging per click for online advertising. Micropayment systems are still largely experimental and not widely available.

Microsoft Front Page Extensions

FrontPage extensions are available on both Unix and NT in order for you to use the FrontPage web site creation software to build your web site. Support for FrontPage software is provided by Microsoft.

Mirror

An FTP server that provides copies of the same files as another server. Some FTP servers are so popular that other servers have been set up to mirror them and spread the FTP load to more than one site.

Modem

Stands for MOdulator/DEModulator - a device that translates the digital information from your computer into analogue signals that can be passed down an ordinary telephone line. This allows one computer to "talk" to another computer using the telephone line as a medium.

Monthly Minimum

The minimum amount in fees and percentages charged by a merchant services provider in a given month. If account activity does not generate the monthly minimum, the account holder must make up the difference.

Mosaic

An early web browser developed by Marc Anderson, Eric Bina and others while at NCSA.

MOTO Discount Rate

MOTO discount rate (mail order / telephone order discount rate): The discount rate charged by an e-commerce merchant account provider for credit card transaction in which the actual credit card was not available to the merchant. MOTO discount rates are generally higher than swipe discount rates to account for the increased chance of fraud or nonpayment.

MP3

A digital audio compression algorithm that acheives a compression factor of about 12 while preserving sound quality. It does this by optimizing the compression according to the range of sound that people can actually hear. MP3 is currently (July 1999) the most powerful algorithm in a series of audio encoding standards developed under the sponsorship of the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and formalized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). MP3 files (filename extension ".mp3") can be downloaded from many Web sites and can be played using software available for most operating systems (also downloadable), e.g., Winamp for PC, MacAmp for Macintosh, and mpeg123 for Unix.

MySQL

A true multi-user, multi-threaded SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. SQL is the most popular database language in the world. MySQL is a client/server implementation that consists of a server daemon mysqld and many different client programs/libraries.