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.

Code
Web Design Tips: Rounded Borders in CSS

January 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Consumers often judge online stores by visual aesthetics alone, so Internet shopkeepers are wise to use large appealing images, handsome fonts, and occasionally an eye-pleasing curve. When that curve is added someplace unexpected, say in a border around a text box or an image, it can b...
SEO
Ecommerce Know-How: Information Architecture to Improve SEO and Usability

January 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages. In this ...
Checkout Tactics
PeC Traffic Report: Will 2009 Be the Year of the Coupon?

January 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

2009 begins in the shadow of global economic recession. The Consumer Confidence Index hovers at 38, a new low in United States, and those consumers that are shopping want deals. So could 2009 be the year of the ecommerce coupon? According to a Dec. 10, 2008 comScore report, coupon use ...
Customer Retention
Survey: 2008 Holiday Sales Slipped for Many Internet Merchants

January 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

For the first time in years, holiday ecommerce sales fell in 2008 as online shoppers, apparently worried about the global economy and their personal finances, cut seasonal spending 3 percent, according to an established Internet tracking firm. But 47.7 percent of Internet store keepers ...
Customer Service
The PeC Review: Boldchat is An Easy-to-Use Live Chat Solution That May Improve Sales

January 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

BoldChat provides online communication software that allows Internet retailers to actively engage customers and potentially increase both conversions and profits. The BoldChat software (I tested version 5.20.3240.27126) was a responsive and powerful solution for live chat on any ecomme...
Technical SEO
Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding, A SEO Internal Linking Tactic

December 30, 2008 • Armando Roggio

A relatively simple SEO linking strategy can improve how well and how often your store's product pages are indexed and displayed in organic search engine results. This linking technique goes by several names. Bruce Clay Inc., an Internet business consultancy, refers to it as "siloing."...
Keyword Research
PeC Traffic Report: Use Blog Titles that Reflect Keywords and Content

December 26, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Blog titles play an important role in how search engines index blog posts. Bloggers that want to get the most web traffic possible seed post titles with important keywords and make interesting promises about the content. Many online retailers use blogs to both communicate with consumer...
Shipping & Fulfillment
The PeC Review: Stamps.com is A Helpful Tool for Many Merchants

December 22, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Stamps.com provides online retailers with a simple-to-use, software-based service that calculates official U. S. Postal Service postage from any PC, formatting printing labels and any required shipping documents. The Stamps.com software, which was developed in conjunction with the Pos...
Technical SEO
PageRank: What Is It? And How Do You Calculate It?

December 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Google’s PageRank technology plays an important role in how online stores show up in search results. Understanding how this ranking system works will help ecommerce merchants improve their search engine optimization and potentially increase website traffic. PageRank is a proprie...
Design & Dev Tools
Ecommerce Know-How: Create a Google Gadget to Promote a Weekly Feature

December 17, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Creating and publishing promotional web gadgets is a great way to spread the word about the products or services you sell and increase traffic to your website. Think about a web gadget as a form of social media. Your customers and potential customers can add the gadget to their iGoog...
Amazon & Marketplaces
The PeC Review: Shopzilla Is a Good Site That Could Use Better Instructions

December 15, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Shopzilla.com is one of the Internet’s leading price comparison engines. The site can expose an online retailer’s products to more than 30 million price-conscience shoppers every month, making it a powerful marketing vehicle. But uploading products—particularly for smaller merchants—c...
Design & Dev Tools
Web Design Tips: Add An Image Flip for More Sales

December 12, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Consumers will judge your website mainly by the size, quality, and interactivity of the images you use. Adding a simple interactive feature—like a JavaScript image flip—may lend your store credibility and improve your conversion rates. Consumers rely on an ecommerce site's aesthetic...
Fraud Prevention
Ecommerce Know-How: Avoiding Chargebacks and Improving Business

December 9, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Chargebacks are frustrating and expensive assaults on a retailer's bottom line. But practical and smart merchants can learn from some chargebacks, improving their stores' performance, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. When a consumer asks his or her credit card company...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Volusion

December 5, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our "Cart of the Week" feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a customer about the cart, too. This week, we ...
Google Ads
Advertising in Recession Leads to Competitive Advantage

December 3, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Economic anxiety and a lack of insight have prompted some online retailers to slash their advertising budgets. However, when fewer of your competitors are investing in advertising, you can step up and command a market, improving sales now and in the long term. In a notable study that i...
SEO Tools
Review: Google Insights Can Help Merchants Optimize PPC/SEO Campaigns

November 25, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Google Insights, a free and relatively new research tool, provides detailed search data that can help online retailers improve their pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Like it or not, many online retailers depend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engi...
Checkout Tactics
Sharable Coupons Can Boost Sales

November 24, 2008 • Armando Roggio

What our friends and relations think matters to us. I care about what my wife thinks of my new shirt, and when I got a 12-inch table saw this summer, I was sure to discuss the tool’s finer points my friend Steve. I am not alone. Shoppers like and trust recommendations and opinions from...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Sure Solutions’ Actinic Shopping Cart

November 21, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our "Cart of the Week" feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a customer about the cart, too. In this in...
Conversion
Survey: Female Shoppers are Influenced by Their Friends

November 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Personal recommendations and coupons or flyers passed on by friends are key factors in how female shoppers select products, according to a survey of 2,000 women from SheSpeaks, a marketing agency and social network for women. “SheSpeaks members are representative of influential and eng...
Checkout Tactics
Secure Checkout Most Important in Attracting New Customers

November 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

A newly released consumer survey from Harris Interactive, a research firm, and Volusion, a hosted shopping cart company, suggests that payment security is—not surprisingly—a top issue for online shoppers. The survey asked more than 2,400 online shoppers aged 18 or older what factors in...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: MightyMerchant Offers Full-Service Ecommerce Platform

November 14, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our “Cart Of The Week” feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a competitor or a customer about the cart, to...
Conversion
Direct Traffic is Better Than Google Traffic

November 14, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Not all web traffic is equal and understanding the value of direct traffic can help online retailers hone their marketing. “Direct traffic” is web traffic you get from people who already know about your website or store. They either click a bookmark to come to your site or type your si...
Fraud Prevention
New PCI Compliance Standards Take Effect

November 13, 2008 • Armando Roggio

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council recently released a new version of its Data Security Standard (DSS), making minor but important changes and clarifications to the PCI compliance standard that responsible online merchants follow to protect their customers and av...
Conversion
Online Retailers Want More Web Traffic

November 12, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Preliminary results from a new Practical eCommerce survey showed that at least 63 percent of respondents thought traffic generation was a big challenge, and more than 31 percent saw it as their biggest challenge. Practical eCommerce launched the first of a series of reader surveys on N...
Platforms & Apps
Maxthon: China’s Ad Smashing, Proxy Switching, Web Browser

November 11, 2008 • Armando Roggio

The Maxthon web browser brings several great features to the same platform as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and lets users pretend to be from other counties so they can access otherwise restricted sites. For the past several weeks, Practical eCommerce has been reviewing the leadin...
Platforms & Apps
Opera 9.6 Browser: Links Email, Desktop, and Mobile

November 4, 2008 • Armando Roggio

If you want evidence that there is a hot browser war underway, you need look no further than the new Opera 9.6 web browser that some believe is a response to Google’s game-changing Chrome browser. When Google launched the beta version of its Chrome browser on September 2, 2008,...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Interspire ‘Obsesses over Quality’

October 31, 2008 • Armando Roggio

In this installment of "Cart of the Week," we’ve featured Interspire, an Ajax-intensive, licensed shopping cart that boasts easy design and update tools without needing extensive XHTML, CSS, or other coding skills.
Platforms & Apps
Google’s Chrome: The Prototype for Tomorrow’s Browsers

October 28, 2008 • Armando Roggio

When Google introduced its Chrome browser on September 2, 2008, it began the foundation for an improved Internet experience—full of rich web applications—and launched the next round of commercial combat with chief rival Microsoft. If Google is going to compete against Microsoft for a sh...
Customer Retention
Use Comparison Shopping Sites To Boost Leads

October 21, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Savvy online retailers can attract thrifty customers this holiday season with a sound comparison shopping strategy, but those merchants must be careful not to create a lot of extra work, damage their reputation, or waste money. Comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com, Bizrate.com, ...
Platforms & Apps
Browser Review: Mozilla Firefox 3

October 14, 2008 • Armando Roggio

By some estimates, more than 1.4 billion people use the Internet for work, entertainment, or commerce. All of those web surfers must use a browser to visit websites or shop at online stores, and if browsing speed, security, and functionality matter, those users should be cruising the in...