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.

Social Media
The PeC Review: Firefox TwitterBar Add-on

April 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social media is one of the most cost effective ways that an online merchant can attract new customers and build relationships with existing ones. In social media, the aim is to become generally interested in your customers, including what they do and how they feel about the world. That...
Photography & Video
The PEC Review: TinEye Reverse Image Search Locates Competitors, Protects Copyright

April 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Product photography is an essential part of ecommerce merchandising. Customers like to see what they're buying, after all. Many manufacturers and distributors supply stock product imagery for merchants to use, and other retailers will invest in professional and unique product photograp...
Design & Dev Tools
Demandware Launches Marketplace to Speed Integrations

April 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Connecting and integrating an ecommerce platform with third-party services and solutions can be one of the most costly and time consuming parts of any ecommerce site development. This week, ecommerce platform maker Demandware launched a new marketplace called LINK, which gives develope...
Conversion
Online Shoppers Wait Two Days to Buy

April 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The average online shopper delays making a purchase by almost two days after initially visiting a retail site, according to data from a leading Internet security company. After monitoring the shopping behavior of 163 million consumers completing 2.52 million transactions, McAfee SECURE...
Fraud Prevention
The PEC Review: CRE Secure Eases PCI Concerns

April 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Protecting customer credit card data and then telling customers that you're doing so should be a top priority for online retailers this year. First, protecting your customers' data is an ethical responsibility. If you're selling products online and accepting credit card data, you shoul...
Content Marketing
Make Friends and Boost Sales with a Content Marketing Strategy

April 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio

More than half of consumers surveyed in a 2009 study said that how much they trusted a merchant affected how likely they were to make a purchase. The findings, which were part of a ChannelAdvisor survey, are not surprising. In fact, it is almost common sense that shoppers don't like to...
Shipping & Fulfillment
The PEC Review: Shipwire Fulfillment Services

March 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Starting an ecommerce business is no small endeavor. A would-be online entrepreneur must manage every aspect of the business, from selecting products and vendors to marketing. What's more, there is significant competition. As marketing and business guru Seth Godin says, "You can't out...
Code
Five Handy HTML Tags To Help Your Ecommerce Business

March 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There is an analogy between driving a car and operating an ecommerce business. With a car, you need to know a few basic things, like how to steer, accelerate, and brake. Likewise, the manager or owner of an online retail business really only needs to know how to process orders, manage customer service, and keep up with the accounting.
Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: LABjs for Better Site Performance

March 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Many small- to medium-sized online retailers are entrepreneurial companies. Their owners and employees often have diverse responsibilities, and it is common for a single person to handle multiple tasks, such as customer service, email marketing, order processing and website design. Unf...
Analytics & Data
The Metrics for Video Success

March 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Many online stores have begun to include product videos aimed at boosting sales conversions, reducing shopping cart abandonment, and lowering product return rates. But not all product-related videos are the same, and merchants will need some metrics for measuring which videos are, in fa...
Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Chimpified Connects Two Powerful Platforms

March 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There are thousands of ecommerce-related products and services that small- to mid-sized merchants can use to improve their businesses. But often the challenge to engaging these products and services is not funding, or even the products' capabilities. Instead, it is the difficulty associ...
Product Pages
The PEC Review: RateVoice Offers Product Reviews with Social Twist

March 3, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Adding product reviews to your ecommerce site will boost sales, drive additional traffic, and help you optimize your product catalog. In 2007, when PETCO added customer product reviews to its site, this purveyor of pet products enjoyed a 49 percent increase in sales conversions for its...
Design & Development
Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce Merchants Need to Know

February 23, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Editor's Note: Ecommerce merchants operate businesses using complex technologies. We launched our "Need to Know" series to help merchants obtain a basic understanding of these technologies, recognizing that most merchants are not web developers or programmers. In this installment, contr...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: LemonStand is One Sweet Cart

February 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The shopping-cart platform that an online business chooses can have a significant impact on its sales success. Select a cart that is too simple or basic and it may not scale as your company grows or it may not offer the features you need to cross-sell, merchandise, or engage loyal cust...
Photography & Video
Putting Video On Your Ecommerce Site, A Webinar Preview

February 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Product-oriented videos help shoppers understand what they are buying, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and boost conversion rates by as much as 30 percent. Perhaps because of these reasons, ecommerce video is increasingly popular. Forrester Research, for example, estimated that 65 pe...
Marketing & Advertising
The PeC Review: Google Buzz a No-brainer

February 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Google recently announced a new social media tool that is integrated into the company’s popular Gmail service. Google Buzz seeks to make it easier to start and follow social media-like conversations ...
Fraud Prevention
The Technical Side of PCI DSS

February 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio

What merchants don't know about the technical side of protecting customer data can be costly. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) describes 12 system and procedural requirements for securing customer credit card data that is transmitted, processed, or stored by a...
Photography & Video
The PeC Review: Shotfarm Streamlines Use of Manufacturers’ Photography

February 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Compelling product photography is a must for online merchants. Without a good visual representation of the products a store is selling, customers probably won't buy. Generally speaking, online stores have two basic ways to get product images: (1) take the photos, or (2) use the stock i...
Business
The PeC Review: eStore-Opoly Game for Family Businesses

February 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The smallest ecommerce businesses are often family operations. An entrepreneurial family member starts selling online. Before long a spouse is helping to manage the accounting and teen-aged children are processing orders. Sharing the work becomes an outgrowth of sharing a life under on...
User Experience
Four Strategies to Improve Shopper Experience

January 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio

How we shop is going to change. Digital interactivity at brick-and-mortar stores, mobile commerce, and rich Internet applications are going to have a significant effect on shopper experience in the next few years. But most of the changes to the shopper experience will not come overnigh...
Design & Development
The PeC Review: Google’s Translator Toolkit

January 25, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce makes the world smaller. Or, so it might seem. Shoppers in Budapest can by products from the U.S., while an American teen could be downloading folk music from a site in Nepal. What's more, expanding your customer bases to include potential shoppers from around the world can s...
Social Media
The PEC Review: The Social Media Marketing Book

January 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Some 70 percent of shoppers trust consumer opinions posted online. Facebook has more than 350 million users. By some estimates, Twitter will have 26 million users by the end of this year. And YouTube is the third most popular website on the Internet, bar none. Social media cannot be ig...
Social Media
Social Media Webinar Sparks Hundreds of Questions

January 14, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There was news this week that Pepsi planned to forgo a Super Bowl Ad in favor of investing $2 million into social media marketing. With so much focus on connecting to customers via social communities, it was little wonder that attendees to the Practical Ecommerce "Social Media 201: Ho...
Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: VeriSign Badge and EV SSL Instill Trust

January 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Customers want to feel safe when they make online purchases. They need to know that the credit card or account data they are providing to the merchant is transmitted and handled in a secure way. To protect customer information, an online merchant will comply with the Payment Card Indus...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: Use Dropbox for File Storage and Team Collaboration

January 4, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Many small and midsized ecommerce businesses use virtual offices, meaning that shipping and logistics might be in Kentucky near the FedEx hub, web development could be managed in Italy, and the online store's marketing and customer service teams may be in Oklahoma. What's more, many of...
Conversion
The PeC Review: Using Gmail For Your Business

December 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

For many online retailers, customer service is managed via email or chat. When a customer has questions or concerns, that customer often replies to a transactional email or submits a contact form, launching an engagement experience that is completely managed online, without face-to-face...
Payments
The PeC Review: PayPal’s Website Payment Pro is a Good Value for Small Merchants

December 18, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce is not possible without online payment processing. You might have the best products. You might have the best website. But, if customers cannot order and pay for products online, you’re not in the ecommerce business. PayPal’s Website Payments Pro is an all-in-one payment proc...
Fraud Prevention
The PeC Review: Filtrbox for Reputation Management

December 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio

An increasingly social Internet has transformed Facebooking moms, tweeting trend-followers, and Digging teens into powerful brand and product influencers. And as your ecommerce business grows, you should be concerned about what these social Internet influencers are saying regarding yo...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: Crucial Webhosting Offers Value and Service

December 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Most small-to-midsized online retailers don’t own their own web servers. Instead,these companies rent space on servers at data centers around the globe—a practice we commonly call “web hosting.” An online merchant’s web host can have a significant effect on business success. For examp...
Checkout Tactics
The PeC Review: WinBuyer Puts Competitors’ Prices on Your Pages

November 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

By some estimates, 94 percent of online shoppers will invest at least some time comparing prices before they make a buying decision. That comparison process often takes shoppers to as many as four different online retailers and a price comparison engine or two, but now one vendor is off...