Armando Roggio

Articles by: Armando Roggio

Armando Roggio

Armando Roggio is the longtime senior contributor to Practical Ecommerce. He's a global ecommerce authority and a practicing merchant, developer, and journalist.

Since 2008 he's written over 1,300 articles for Practical Ecommerce addressing all matters of ecommerce and presented dozens of webinars.

His previous positions include director of ecommerce for a regional retail chain and marketing publications manager at Micron Technology, a publicly-traded computer-chip manufacturer. He holds a B.A. in English Writing and Journalism from The University of Pittsburgh.

Contact Armando via email or LinkedIn. Follow his ecommerce tweets at @ecommerceboy.

Marketing & Advertising
5 Storytelling Mistakes That Content Marketers Must Avoid

August 6, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing has the potential to engage shoppers and develop loyal, repeat customers. But when marketers tell misleading stories or waste someone’s time there may be a negative impact on business too. Some marketers believe
Conversion
A Great Number of Products Requires Great Search

August 4, 2015 • Armando Roggio

As an online store’s product catalog grows it becomes increasingly important to provide site visitors with a robust and feature-rich search solution to help them find just the right product ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for August 2015

July 30, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Your August content marketing could be a blend of real-life seriousness, product promotion, food, listicles, and drones. Content marketing is durable stuff. The useful or entertaining articles, images, and videos
Design & Development
Monitor Competitor Prices with Python and Scrapy

July 29, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Monitoring competitors’ prices and product lineups can help online retailers win pricing battles; optimize sales and special offers; and track product trends over time. For many small ecommerce businesses, however, keeping tabs on the competition is a painful, manual process.
Marketing & Advertising
Launching a New Ecommerce Product? Research Marketing Options (Carefully)

July 24, 2015 • Armando Roggio

New product introductions require a blend of creativity and number crunching. Do it well and your online business will generate sales and profits; do it poorly and you could be wasting money on underperforming ads. Online retailers offering unique
Business
Shoppers Turn to Small Online Retailers for Unique, Hard-to-find Items

July 22, 2015 • Armando Roggio

When online shoppers cannot find niche products at big box stores or large ecommerce shops, they seek out small Internet retailers. Online stores like Amazon and Walmart carry thousands of products. These and similar massive online retailers
Conversion
7 Ways To Improve Ecommerce Category Filters

July 17, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Filtered navigation, which narrows search results or listings on a product category page, may help online shoppers quickly find or discover products, improving the shopping experience for
Content Marketing
Your Content Marketing Is a Joke (Or It Should Be)

July 14, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing helps many companies attract new customers, build lasting relationships with existing customers, and sell more. If your company is using content, but not
Photography & Video
Online Retailer’s Guide to Photo Copyrights

July 10, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Using product or lifestyle images on an ecommerce site without permission from the photograph’s creator or copyright holder is a crime that — in the United States — carries up to $150,000 penalty. So the next time you’re tempted
Business
Free and Easy Returns Build Customer Loyalty

July 8, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Shoppers have generally come to expect online stores to offer returns, refunds, and exchanges for items that are defective, damaged, or otherwise not as expected. And when retailers don’t have ...
Product Pages
How to Optimize Ecommerce Product Images for Faster Pages, High Conversion

July 6, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce product photography must convey an item’s value and functionality while inspiring shoppers to buy. Whenever possible, product images should also be lean and fast loading.
Amazon & Marketplaces
6 Things to Love About eBay Product Pages

July 3, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Founded in 1995, eBay is one of the original ecommerce pioneers. So it would stand to reason that as eBay has gone from startup to earning more than $17.9 billion ...
Business
How to Serve Empowered Ecommerce Shoppers

June 30, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Online retailers are doing business in the era of empowered shoppers. This competitive environment pits massive omnichannel retail enterprises against even the smallest of family-run, garage-based sellers. Shopping has fundamentally changed ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for July 2015

June 26, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Patriotism, projects, smooches, and even summertime activities can drive your company’s contact marketing campaigns this July, boosting site traffic and, ultimately, sales. When businesses create, publish, and distribute content with the ...
Marketing & Advertising
4 Ways to Grow Ecommerce Traffic in 2015

June 24, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Unique site visits — the number of individuals that frequent a website — are a proxy of sorts for an online business’s new customer acquisition. If month-to-month a site has more unique visitors, it stands to reason
Business
APIs Bring Ecommerce to Any Page, Service

June 22, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Application programming interfaces (APIs) from payment processors and service providers make it possible, if not easy, to bring ecommerce to essentially any page or any service. Often the first thing that ...
Conversion
7 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Site Navigation

June 17, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce site navigation should help shoppers find products quickly and easily. Good navigation improves the online shopping experience and helps merchants increase sales and profits. Website design includes a combination of user experience ...
Business
How to Buy a Small Ecommerce Business on Flippa

June 15, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Flippa is a leading marketplace for buying and selling websites, including active online stores, those with established site traffic, revenue, and profit. One of the sites available at auction on Flippa at the ...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing Evolving to Personalization, Behavior

June 10, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to modern marketers. It is vital for most businesses. But what makes email marketing effective is changing in response to ...
Platforms & Apps
WordPress’s WooCommerce Acquisition Could Improve Support, Features

June 4, 2015 • Armando Roggio

The announcement that WordPress’s parent company, Automattic, would purchase WooThemes and its widely used WooCommerce plugin could be good news for online sellers using the ecommerce platform. WooCommerce, which by some ...
Platforms & Apps
8 Questions before You Choose an Ecommerce Platform in 2015

June 2, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Selling online requires an ecommerce platform. Fortunately, for entrepreneurs there are many good ecommerce solutions available. Selecting which one to use can be a matter of choosing the best option ...
Email & Text Marketing
The Secret to Email Subject Lines, for 2015

May 27, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Email subject lines can make or break a marketing campaign, either generating lots of opens, clicks, and sales or prompting recipients to delete messages and move on to a competitor. For 2015,
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for June 2015

May 26, 2015 • Armando Roggio

In June 2015, content marketers have plenty of opportunities to connect with customers and prospects — producing articles, videos, graphics, and tools around holidays, summertime advice, entertainment, and decision making. Content marketing ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
Ecommerce Shipping Innovations Just Over Horizon?

May 22, 2015 • Armando Roggio

How orders are delivered to ecommerce shoppers might change dramatically in just the next few years as retailers and carriers come up with ways to reduce shipping costs and speed ...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Buy Button to Impact Ecommerce?

May 20, 2015 • Armando Roggio

If reports that Google will add a buy button to some mobile search results are true, the new service could impact ecommerce, particularly for small and mid-sized online stores that might not ...
Conversion
3 More Tips for Better Ecommerce Video Results

May 13, 2015 • Armando Roggio

A good ecommerce product video can help online shoppers learn more about a particular item, make an emotional connection to some products, and, ultimately, make a good buying decision. The premise ...
Content Marketing
4 Great Content Marketing Examples in 2015

May 12, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing has the potential to drive retail sales. But for small and mid-sized ecommerce merchants, it is not always clear what sort of content to produce. Fortunately, there are ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Discover Your Ecommerce Brand

May 11, 2015 • Armando Roggio

An online seller’s brand can guide business decisions, encourage customers to trust you, and boost both sales and profits. But for some small business owners, “brand” is an intangible, amorphous ...
Business
3 Bad Ecommerce Customers You Should Fire

May 6, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Online sellers, including business-to-consumer retailers and business-to-business wholesalers, need to occasionally fire a bad customer, if for no reason other than to benefit good customers. In ecommerce, a bad customer can ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for May 2015

April 29, 2015 • Armando Roggio

Content that helps, entertains, and delights your customers can build lasting relationships that may make the folks who read or watch your content more likely to purchase. In fact, this is ...