The vocabulary, defined once.

Demand-driven commerce starts from what a customer actually requires and works back to what the business can responsibly deliver, instead of starting from what has already been published.

It does not mean producing anything a customer requests. It means serious demand is understood before a responsible commercial outcome is determined.

The Capability Gap is the difference between what the business can actually deliver and what its website enables customers to discover, configure or request.

Every business has one. It widens whenever production methods, supplier relationships, modification capability or commercial flexibility stay in people's heads and never reach the catalogue.

A Catalogue Blind Spot is an area of customer demand that the business may be capable of serving but that its published catalogue cannot see, interpret or respond to.

It is the Capability Gap seen from the customer's side: a specific request the website has no vocabulary for, even though somebody in the building could have answered it.

A Premature No occurs when a customer request is rejected before the business has properly evaluated whether it can be fulfilled.

It rarely looks like a rejection. It looks like an empty search result, an unavailable configuration or a contact form. A Premature No does not mean the request was unviable; it means the decision was made without the information needed to judge.

A Structured Opportunity records what the customer wants, what they have specified, what remains unknown, which alternatives they may accept and what action is required next.

It is what an informal enquiry becomes once it has been made evaluable: a single object somebody can price, approve, question or decline, rather than a paragraph of free text in an inbox.

A Capability Map records the governed products, materials, dimensions, modifications, methods and approval paths available behind the catalogue.

It describes what a business can responsibly deliver, which is almost always more than what it has published. Without one, the catalogue is the only account of the business that anybody can query.

A Constraint Record states the rules that determine what can be offered, under which conditions and with whose approval.

It is what lets a storefront say yes safely. Without it, capability data is a list of things that might be possible, and nobody can tell which of them are actually allowed.

A Decision Record captures the evaluation, the outcome, the owner and the reasoning behind an answer given to a customer.

It makes every answer explainable and attributable, so the business can stand behind it months later. That includes the answers that were no, which are the ones nobody records and the ones most likely to be questioned.

The Opportunity Ledger is the structured record of what customers requested, including incomplete, rejected and unresolved demand.

Most storefronts record what was bought. Very few record what was asked for and not found, which is the cheaper of the two research programmes because the customer has already done the work of describing what they wanted.