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
6 Customer Retention Ideas for the Holidays

September 16, 2019 • Armando Roggio

The holiday shopping season from October to December is a boom time for most retailers. Sales are up. New customers are plentiful. What follows are six ideas to retain holiday shoppers after the busy season.
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Retail Arbitrage as a Closeout Strategy

September 12, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Retail arbitrage is a booming business. Some practitioners are making six-figure incomes buying low-priced or clearance items and reselling them on Amazon. Mimicking or encouraging the practice could help retail merchants manage closeouts.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for October 2019

September 8, 2019 • Armando Roggio

For some business, the challenge is not understanding how content marketing is supposed to work, but rather knowing what to write about or what to make a video about. Thus, this article offers five content marketing ideas for October 2019. You are welcome to use these ideas for your business.
Amazon & Marketplaces
How to Write Amazon Product Titles That Drive Clicks

September 3, 2019 • Armando Roggio

On Amazon's marketplace, a product's title can be the difference between getting a click or being ignored. Next to a compelling product photo, a title is likely the most important aspect of the description. Amazon emphasized this when it enacted new product title requirements in June 2019.
Business
3 Predictions for the 2019 Holiday Shopping Season

August 29, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Many trends will emerge from the 2019 Christmas shopping season, but I believe three will be prominent. First, click-and-collect may encourage shoppers to wait for last-minute deals and convenience. Second, mobile commerce will come into its own. And third, Amazon will account for nearly half of all online holiday sales in 2019.
Amazon & Marketplaces
Amazon Ads Boost Marketplace Search Rankings

August 27, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Amazon Ads will not only help spur marketplace sales but could start a virtuous cycle of revenue growth. Amazon favors high-converting products on its search result pages. One of the ways to improve a product's conversions and sales is to advertise it on the platform.
Marketing & Advertising
How to Launch Facebook Ads from Your Business Page

August 23, 2019 • Armando Roggio

There are many good reasons to use Facebook ads, not the least of which is its continued focus on the advertising model. A company can create an effective advertising campaign directly from its Facebook business page. I'll describe the process in this post.
SEO
Use ‘Barnacle SEO’ to Drive Traffic without Ranking

August 21, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Using so-called "barnacle SEO" tactics, an ecommerce business may be able to put its products and its brand in front of many potential customers without ranking its website for a target phrase. The idea is to place content on large established domains to win one or more spots on the search engine results page for your company's most competitive keyword phrases.
Link Building
SEO: A Common Sense Assessment of Link Quality

August 14, 2019 • Armando Roggio

A quality backlink pleases both humans and search engine algorithms. It is editorial in nature. It comes from a well-respected source, and it is relevant to the topics covered on both the linking and linked websites.
Business
‘California Consumer Privacy Act’ Impacts Ecommerce Businesses

August 13, 2019 • Armando Roggio

The California Consumer Privacy Act raises the bar for privacy protection in the United States. The CCPA is a significant step toward protecting consumer data, including the personal information most every ecommerce company collects.
SEO
3 Tools to Find Broken Links on Your Website

August 11, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Finding and fixing broken links should be part of your company's regular site maintenance. Here are three popular SEO tools and instructions on how to use each to locate broken links.
Business
Prioritize Ecommerce Tasks with the Eisenhower Matrix

August 7, 2019 • Armando Roggio

The Eisenhower Matrix organizes your to-do list based on each task's relative importance and urgency. The model requires you to think about how a task can impact the overall business. It can also encourage long-term planning.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for September 2019

August 4, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing requires a steady stream of material, such as guides, articles, and podcasts. Often this material is the result of dozens of ideas. For September 2019, your business might choose to write an article about procrastination. It could publish a useful guide, or it might even start a podcast.
SEO
SEO: That Blob of Text May Not Be Helping

July 30, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Adding on-site text for search engines and not users could confuse algorithms and may amount to keyword stuffing, according to a Google spokesman. The practice is understandable. Merchants seek to attract traffic from organic search. They know that search algorithms love unique content.
Amazon & Marketplaces
How to Obtain UPCs for Selling on Amazon

July 25, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Amazon requires private label brands and direct-to-consumer manufacturers that sell on its marketplace to have universal product codes or similar for virtually all products. Fortunately, for as little as $250 just about any company can register a UPC prefix and obtain the required code.
Technical SEO
SEO: How Google Reads and Renders JavaScript

July 24, 2019 • Armando Roggio

JavaScript can improve a shopper's buying experience, encourage interaction, and even bolster site performance in some cases. But where search engine optimization is concerned, JavaScript requires an extra degree of care.
Technical SEO
SEO: Optimizing Crawl Budget for Ecommerce Sites

July 17, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Optimizing an ecommerce site for crawl budget may impact how often Google's web crawler, Googlebot, visits a given page and how quickly that page appears in search results. It can also guide Googlebot to the most important content on a site, which could impact how those pages rank.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for August 2019

July 9, 2019 • Armando Roggio

In August, consider focusing your business's content marketing efforts on senior citizens, your product or brand story, technologies that were invented or patented in August, things to do during the month, and the growing interest in veganism.
SEO
New Search Console Updates Confirm Mobile-first Indexing

June 27, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Recent changes to Google’s Search Console made it easier to identify whether a site was primarily indexed based on mobile or desktop content and identified which crawler (Googlebot Smartphone or Googlebot Desktop) was primary on a given report or chart.
Product Pages
Optimize Responsive Product Images with SRCSET

June 25, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Online retailers may have an image problem. In many cases, the images they need to sell a product are so large and so slow-to-load that they are driving shoppers away. Fortunately, a simple HTML attribute could significantly improve site performance.
SEO
Tips for Diagnosing Steep Drops in Organic Search Traffic

June 19, 2019 • Armando Roggio

If you own or manage an ecommerce business and organic search traffic drops suddenly, it can feel like the sky is falling. You might not know what went wrong. Here are a few tips for diagnosing a steep drop in organic traffic to your ecommerce site.
Business
Use CAC and CLV to Monitor Ecommerce Growth, Profit

June 14, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce owners and managers have so much data available and so many key performance indicators, it can be difficult to know where to focus. But businesses aimed at long-term, stable growth may do well to focus on two: customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for July 2019

June 10, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing inspiration for July 2019 can come from many sources, including advice columns “Dear Abby” and “Ask Ann Landers,” sporting events, space exploration, American politics, and even Facebook. Content marketing ...
Content Marketing
Essential Social Media Metrics for Content Marketing

June 5, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Social media sites can be powerful tools for distributing content and driving engagement. But, like much of marketing, long-term social media success requires constant improvement. In this article, I'll suggest the primary social media metrics to track as part of your company's content marketing efforts.
Content Marketing
How to Generate High-traffic Article Topics

May 31, 2019 • Armando Roggio

I have to come up with lots of article ideas. I have a few methods, including reading industry-specific posts and following links in them. This morning, I was sitting in ...
Marketing & Advertising
A Disciplined Approach to Marketing an Ecommerce Business

May 28, 2019 • Armando Roggio

The means and methods of driving ecommerce site traffic and conversions are clear. Marketers at mid-sized ecommerce and omnichannel retail businesses know the tactics to employ. Thus the challenge to grow a business is often discipline — not knowledge.
Conversion
A 7-step Cart Recovery Program for Luxury Brands (That Actually Works)

May 24, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Imagine a company selling high-end products that cost thousands of dollars each. A few abandoned ecommerce shopping carts could add up to a small fortune. The recovery series described below has generated as much as $40,000 in a few hours.
Business
4 Steps to Discover an Ecommerce Product Niche

May 21, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Amazon sells everything, seemingly, as does Walmart. And they do it well. But for most ecommerce businesses, attempting to sell everything to everyone can lead to failure. A niche with fewer competitors can have a better chance at success.
Business
Use Pre-orders to Gauge Demand, Generate Cash

May 17, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Pre-orders have dual advantages for product makers and for retailers selling online or in a brick-and-mortar store. First, pre-orders can be a good indicator of demand. Second, pre-orders can generate cash ahead of a product's release.
Content Marketing
5 Ways to Recruit Content Creators for Your Business

May 13, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing is not a one-and-done tactic. It is a commitment. But you don’t have to do it alone. Recruit other people to create content for you. Here is a list of five ways to do just that.