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.

Customer Retention
Understanding Consumer Search Behaviors

October 2, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Shoppers have many reasons to look for products online. They may want a particular item, seek a bargain price, or even compare similar choices. Understanding these basic consumer search behaviors ...
Email & Text Marketing
7 Ideas for Better Ecommerce Marketing Emails

September 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing is an excellent way to engage customers and increase both site traffic and sales. Not all email messages, however, are equally effective. In 2012, 44 percent of promotional email ...
Customer Retention
6 Ways to Market Gift Cards Online

September 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Gift cards can be an effective way to increase online sales, acquire new customers, and encourage return visits. Marketing gift cards can be easy during holidays, like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s ...
Business
Robust User Experience May Unlock Mobile Commerce

September 20, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online sales from mobile devices are expected to exceed $41 billion in the United States this year, representing a significant opportunity for online sellers who are able to provide a ...
Customer Retention
Marketing to Affluent Customers, for High Margins

September 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Many online retailers compete on price. But selling luxury products to relatively affluent shoppers with annual incomes above $100,000 per year is an exercise in brand building and content marketing. Shoppers ...
Marketing & Advertising
6 Ecommerce Predictions for the 2013 Holidays

September 12, 2013 • Armando Roggio

U.S. online sales are expected to exceed $61 billion in November and December, making the holiday shopping season vital to small and mid-sized retailers. Six trends — ecommerce growth, mobile sales,
Inventory
7 Tips for Good Supplier Relationships

September 11, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Good supplier relationships may lead to favorable prices, generous terms, improved availability, and even the occasional buyback. With these sorts of opportunities at stake, it can be very important for ...
Fraud Prevention
Apple Fingerprint Scanner May Boost Mobile Commerce

September 9, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Next generation smartphones or tablets equipped with fingerprint scanners may provide shoppers with greater security and boost both online and in-store mobile commerce. Leading mobile device makers Apple and Samsung are ...
Cross-border Selling
6 Tips for Selling on Marketplaces this Holiday Season

September 5, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Marketplaces like eBay, Rakuten, and Amazon attract millions of eager shoppers during the holiday season. Online retailers, even small ones, can post products to these marketplaces and earn many additional ...
Marketing & Advertising
4 Facts about Mobile Commerce

September 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Shoppers are using smartphones and tablets to make purchases and research products and prices before making a purchase, meaning that mobile may be an important channel for both earning sales ...
Marketing & Advertising
2013 Holiday Ecommerce Preparedness Checklist

August 29, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online Christmas sales should top $50 billion in the United States in 2013, according to some estimates. To get your store’s fair share, be certain that your ecommerce website is ...
Business
4 Reasons to Think About Brand

August 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Developing a brand for a small ecommerce store may help otherwise hurried and busy entrepreneurs and managers do a better job of managing the business, engaging customers and potential customers,
Conversion
6 Ways to Encourage User Generated Content

August 23, 2013 • Armando Roggio

User submitted content like product reviews, guest blog posts, and rich media provide online retailers with excellent and marketable resources that might boost site traffic and encourage additional sales. When online ...
Photography & Video
Mobile Image Recognition to Revolutionize Ecommerce?

August 21, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Mobile image recognition technology identifies objects like shoes, handbags, and golf clubs in images, videos, or directly through a tablet or smartphone’s image sensor. The technology may make a new ...
Marketing & Advertising
3 Christmas Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

August 13, 2013 • Armando Roggio

More than eight out of ten Christmas-season shoppers will look for gifts and gift ideas online before making a purchase, creating a significant opportunity for Internet retailers. But to cash in on Christmas sales, many merchants need to begin executing coordinated marketing campaigns n...
Email & Text Marketing
Text Messaging Effective for Retailers

August 9, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Short message service communications — text messaging — may help online retailers deliver better customer service and represent an important marketing opportunity. Worldwide there are more than 4.3 billion SMS-enabled mobile devices and in the U.S. approximately 96 percent of smartphon...
Fraud Prevention
What to Do When Your Site Gets Hacked

August 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Hackers attack sites of all sizes, from massive enterprises to small, family-run online retailers. When an attack occurs, there are steps any business owner can take to stop the attack, get things cleaned up, and get back to doing business. Having your site hacked is a painful, emotion...
Design & Development
Multiscreen Ecommerce: Dos and Don’ts

August 1, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online shoppers use a variety of devices — smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, and televisions — to discover and buy products online. In response, ecommerce businesses need a multiscreen strategy for both marketing to potential customers and providing those shoppers with ...
Local Business
3 Ways Showrooming Could Affect Ecommerce

July 30, 2013 • Armando Roggio

New survey data about “showrooming” may reveal weaknesses or trends that could have important implications for online or multi-channel retailers in at least three areas: product prices, product information, and customer service. About 43 percent of Internet-using American adults have “...
Email & Text Marketing
New Gmail Tabs Impact Email Marketing, Expert Says

July 26, 2013 • Armando Roggio

MailChimp, a popular email marketing solutions provider, says that the new Gmail tabs that are intended to help users clean up their inboxes have negatively impacted open rates for email marketing campaigns, but that there is no need to panic. Google began introducing its new tabbed Gm...
Local Business
Ecommerce and Brick-and-mortar Retail Converge

July 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio

While there may still be plenty of room for pure-play ecommerce businesses, retailers with physical stores should look to expand online as consumers stop seeing a distinction between shopping online and in a store. Increasingly, physical retail outlets are being transformed into a sort ...
Design & Development
Mobile Ecommerce Sites Should Be Fast and Robust

July 22, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Internet users, and online shoppers specifically, want fast and robust online experiences regardless of whether they are using a desktop computer or the most basic smartphone. Ecommerce businesses competing in this era of the emerging mobile web must take steps to provide useful and ric...
Business
5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Opening an Ecommerce Business

July 18, 2013 • Armando Roggio

You might be prepared to open an online retail business. You have the funding, cash flow planned, inventory managed, and even a marketing campaign ready to launch. But there are some other things you’ll want to know before you start doing business. U.S. ecommerce sales grew 13 percent ...
Social Media
4 Tips for Better Contest Forms

July 16, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Contest marketing is a good way to engage potential customers, increase your social media fan base, give folks positive things to say about your store, and collect data that can improve both your business’s bottom line and your customers' online experiences. Consider for a moment just ...
Marketing & Advertising
5 Ways to Get More Site Traffic

July 10, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online stores need shoppers and getting more potential customers to visit an online retailer’s site is an important part of ecommerce marketing. Many Internet merchants rely primarily on search engine optimization to drive traffic — and spend a lot of time focused on good title tags. T...
Inventory
4 Tips for Finding your Ecommerce Niche

July 5, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Finding your ecommerce niche is an exercise in discovering passions, solving problems, networking, and testing for supply, sales, and competition viability. But once discovered, marketing and selling products to a niche can lead to online retail success. Nearly anything can be sold onl...
Platforms & Apps
Ecommerce Platforms: Design Control vs. Ease of Launching

July 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Online shoppers judge an Internet retailer’s trustworthiness and a product’s value based, at least in part, on how good a site or product detail page looks. Given its importance, one might think that design control would be an essential part of every available ecommerce platform. But ma...
Amazon & Marketplaces
Selling on Marketplaces: 4 Common Mistakes

June 28, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Marketplaces like Ebay and Amazon can be a boon for the bottom line since they present your products to millions of interested shoppers. But a huge audience also means that mistakes can be glaring and costly. Amazon gets something like 21 million visitors a day and more than 100 millio...
Email & Text Marketing
Cart-abandonment Email Best Practices

June 25, 2013 • Armando Roggio

An abandoned shopping cart is like a broken promise. For the merchant, there is a lost sale and unclaimed revenue. For the shopper, there is an unfulfilled need or want. Fortunately, a quick series of cart abandonment emails may renew that promise, helping both the customer and the reta...
Staffing
5 Considerations for Choosing a Developer or Designer

June 24, 2013 • Armando Roggio

Software developers and website designers can be an extension of your online store’s marketing and branding team since these professionals have a significant amount of influence over how your ecommerce site looks and functions. Choosing an individual freelancer or agency to do design o...