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 Service
The Zappos Effect: 5 Great Customer Service Ideas for Smaller Businesses

March 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Zappos, the online retailer, has used incredible customer service to create an extremely loyal customer base. Small ecommerce businesses that want to grow would be wise to take a lesson from Zappos. As an example of Zappos' almost insane customer care, the company has even been known t...
Product Pages
How to Write Product Descriptions that Sell, Boost SEO Efforts

March 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase sales. Moreover, original product descriptions can help avoid Google's so-called "Farmer algorithm" penalty, which can affect retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or ...
Platforms & Apps
Mobile Devices to Alter Retail Landscape; 3 Predictions

March 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Internet-enabled mobile devices are going to have a huge impact on retail sales in just the next few years, especially affecting small ecommerce businesses. Anytime one discusses the future of a particular industry or where a trending technology or behavior may be taking some segment, ...
Marketing & Advertising
5 New-Media Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

March 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The growth of mobile devices, changes in search engines, social media sites, and new consumer behaviors are affecting the way that online retailers market. And often the creative and dynamic marketing plans win the customers. In this post, I'll describe five dynamic ecommerce marketing...
Platforms & Apps
Magento Releases Hosted, SaaS Version

March 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Magento, the open-source ecommerce platform, officially launched a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. The Magento platform — in my view — is one of the most robust and effective ecommerce solutions available. If, in fact, Magento has any drawbacks or weaknesses, it is that ...
SEO
Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm and What It Means for Ecommerce SEO

March 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A massive change to Google's search engine ranking algorithm has recently improved query results, while having a negative effect on businesses that had been "gaming" the system or reusing others' content. The so-called "Farmer" algorithm update went into effect in late February and aff...
Fraud Prevention
Radical Ideas to Make Credit Card Payments More Secure

March 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Credit cards approvals are not completely secure because the information those approvals rely on — cardholder names, card numbers and expiration dates — is static and relatively easy to gather. Focusing on making payment approvals less vulnerable may be more effective than asking cons...
Platforms & Apps
New Firefox 4 Mobile Released

February 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Last week, Mozilla released a new version of its Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Nokia Maemo-based mobile devices that is reported to be more than twice as fast as the devices' native web browsers. Earlier versions of Firefox for mobile have had some challenges with stability and perfor...
User Experience
10 Effective Mobile Ecommerce Designs

February 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Smart phones are everywhere. And — for many ecommerce merchants — it is not enough to have just an ecommerce website. They want an ecommerce mobile site, too. In this article, I have collected ten examples of what I believe are effectively designed mobile ecommerce designs, as viewed f...
Business
4 Ideas to Cut Costs on Your Ecommerce Business

February 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Reducing unnecessary spending will help your ecommerce business become more efficient and could increase its profits. But how do you cut costs right now without harming your business's future? Here are four suggestions for cutting costs now. Not every one of these will be applicable to...
Business
6 Common Ecommerce Mistakes

February 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce businesses can be founded by massive corporations or by families working out of a garage. It provides a relatively level field for everyone to compete. And, like so many businesses, ecommerce operations often find unique ways to succeed. This article's purpose is to help ecom...
Platforms & Apps
10 Innovative Digital-Download Stores

February 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The Holy Grail of ecommerce is to create a product once and sell it over and over again. Many online stores are achieving this goal by focusing on downloadable products like source code, graphics, PDF files, or ebooks just, to name a few of the digital products available. In this arti...
Business
4 Ways to Waste Money on Your Ecommerce Store

February 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The causes of ecommerce failures are diverse, but they frequently end with the proprietor shuttering the operation because it is losing too much money. In this article, I list four activities that I believe can destroy an ecommerce business's bottom line and waste your money. I think th...
Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Links to New Web App Store

February 7, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google recently announced several changes to version 9 of its popular Chrome browser, including closer ties to a web store featuring products that blur the line between websites and web applications further and give ecommerce marketers a new sales channel. Google has said in the past t...
Platforms & Apps
Firefox 4.1 Will Shun Tracking

January 31, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A personal privacy organization praised new features in several leading browsers last week, singling out the forthcoming Firefox 4.1 as the leader in personal privacy. This latest chapter in the effort to inhibit online tracking may also affect some personalization and behavior driven t...
Customer Retention
Consider the Subscription Model for New Revenue

January 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Selling to a customer once is great. Selling to a customer every year, month, or week is even better. This mantra of sorts — along with apparent growth in consumer demand and several new subscription-specific billing solutions — is creating opportunity for ecommerce entrepreneurs large...
Platforms & Apps
$5 Marketing, with Fiverr.com

January 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio

How you market your ecommerce business in 2011 may be different than how you marketed in 2010, or before. Unique sites like Fiverr are enabling edgy, entertaining, and engaging ways to reach new customers. On Fiverr, individuals post listings describing what they would do for $5. It's ...
Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Will Drop H.264 Codec, Impacting Future of Video

January 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google announced last week that forthcoming versions of its increasingly popular Chrome browser would drop support for the patent-entangled H.264 video codec, potentially making HTML5 more open and available, but also challenging competitors like Apple, which is closely tied to H.264. ...
Design & Development
The PEC Review: A Pen and Touch Pad to Supplement a Mouse

January 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The monitor, keyboard, and mouse are the three most ubiquitous computer peripherals. In fact, it would be hard to image using a computer without them. But consider that prior to the invention of the mouse, most folks thought only of using keyboards or punch cards. So just as the mouse ...
Conversion
Two Lessons that Groupon Can Teach Ecommerce Merchants

January 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Selling products online is a challenge. Ecommerce merchants rarely benefit from spontaneous buys, cannot easily generate emotional buying responses, and face tremendous price competition, since thousands of competitors are only a click away. Nonetheless, many companies — from tiny purv...
Social Media
Facebook Insights Helps Measure Social Media Efforts

January 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Social media marketing can be an effective way to engage customers and, ultimately, sell more products. There have certainly been lots of articles, publications, and webinars that describe tactics you can use in social media campaigns. But there may be comparatively few resources that h...
Social Media
How to Rescue Posts from Facebook’s Spam Filter

January 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

In October 2010, Facebook introduced automatic content filtering to business pages (sometimes called Fan pages) in an effort to help stop Wall spammers from successfully posting unwanted or dangerous messages to dozens or even hundreds of pages daily. For social media marketers, the fi...
Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Try Netgear’s Stora for Small-System Backups

January 3, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Managing an online retail business, even a very small one, can be more labor intensive than some might imagine. Even in the smallest of sole proprietorships, there is accounting to be done; state sales tax to be collected, reported, and paid; vendor price lists to keep track of; a webs...
Business
Microsoft Announces Major Vulnerability in All IE Browsers

December 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft announced a major vulnerability in all versions of the popular Internet Explorer (IE) web browsers that makes it possible for malicious websites to hijack a visitor's computer. Microsoft said that it did not believe that any serious criminals were either using or previously w...
Customer Retention
The PEC Review: Ethnio Helps Understand Customers

December 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Successful online retailers are often customer-focused service companies rather than just purveyors of products. Put another way, many successful retailers are successful not just because of the products they offer or the effectiveness of their marketing, but rather because they do a g...
Design & Dev Tools
New Chrome Update Includes Native 3D Graphics; Nifty Human-Body Tool

December 21, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Google has released a new updated version of its popular Chrome web browser that supports the WebGL extension to HTML5, making it possible to render 3D graphics in a web browser without the use of a plug-in. Google's inclusion of WebGL in Chrome helps the browser catch up to Firefox an...
Business
The PEC Review: Fonality VOIP for Small Business

December 20, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The telephone, like it or not, is an integral part of every business — whether you're speaking with suppliers about shipments, having a teleconference with your web developer, or following up on a customer service question. I am not a big fan of telephones — except for the mobile ones ...
Design & Development
Prepare for the Mobile Commerce Surge

December 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio

In the past year, mobile commerce has doubled in volume and by 2015 consumers could be spending nearly $24 billion per year from Internet-enabled mobile devices in the U.S. alone. The mobile commerce market must be taken seriously, explained TRUSTe's director of mobile products Janet J...
Business
Internet Explorer 9 to Include Tracking Protection, Content Blocking

December 14, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft announced that its forthcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser will include an opt-in anti-tracking feature that will block third-party content, and even prevent programs like Google Analytics from working. This is on the heels of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rep...
Photography & Video
The PEC Review: Aviary’s Embeddable HTML5 Photo Editor

December 13, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Online merchants should never forget that their core business is selling products. But it can be an effective marketing tactic to offer other services to potential customers. Examples of offering more than just products abound. They include things like the how-to articles, blogs, enter...