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.

Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for November 2016

October 11, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Looking for content marketing ideas for November 2016? Try Thanksgiving Day, holiday shopping survival, famous folks with birthdays, how-to articles, and helping out a community. Content marketing is the act of ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Write Your Company’s Blurb

October 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Sometimes you need a short promotional description of your business for social media profiles, directories, or even the bottom of your press releases and product announcements. What you say about ...
Photography & Video
How Much to Pay for Photography, for Ecommerce?

October 6, 2016 • Armando Roggio

What is a picture worth, in dollars and cents? Online retailers need product photography, relevant product lifestyle images, and even stock photos (for blog posts and social media). All of ...
Business
6 Ways Machine Learning Will Impact Ecommerce

October 3, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Machine learning is a discipline aimed at having computers discover patterns or trends in some set of data without being explicitly programmed to recognize the pattern or trend. A counter example ...
Email & Text Marketing
6 Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns for Q4 2016

September 28, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Powerful retail holidays — Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas — dominate the fourth quarter and should be the focus of ecommerce email marketing. Email volume increases significantly in the last quarter of ...
Marketing & Advertising
5 Interesting Uses of Customer Data for Ecommerce Marketing

September 26, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Each time a retailer interacts with a customer there is an opportunity to learn a little more about that customer and how to better serve him. There is an opportunity ...
Marketing & Advertising
2016 Holiday Marketing Checklist for Online Retailers

September 21, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The 2016 Christmas shopping season will begin in earnest in just the next month. Now is the time to make certain that you have your ecommerce marketing plan ready. While there ...
Content Marketing
YouTube’s 3H Strategy Can Fuel Your Content Marketing

September 18, 2016 • Armando Roggio

In a 100-page whitepaper, YouTube has suggested dividing content marketing into three complementary types to help your business attract, engage, and retain an audience of potential customers. Google released “The YouTube ...
Social Media
How to Set Up a Twitter Card for Your Ecommerce Site

September 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio

With a bit of data, online retailers can improve the way products are shared on Twitter, defining a specific image and description to be displayed and improving tracking with Twitter ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for October 2016

September 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio

In October 2016, content marketers have plenty of opportunities to engage customers and potential customers by publishing articles or releasing videos about Halloween, the upcoming Christmas season, Breast Cancer Awareness ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Find Your Ecommerce Subscription Niche

September 7, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Subscription ecommerce is booming. There are thousands of “box” merchants selling everything from beard oil to brioche — weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Finding a distinct segment in the ecommerce subscription ...
Marketing & Advertising
Individualized Coupon Codes Prevent Abuse, Enable Tracking

September 1, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Individual coupon codes assigned to specific shoppers help retail marketers avoid coupon abuse and make it possible to fine tune promotions. Promotional or coupon codes are simple. A shopper visits a ...
Social Media
5 Twitter Lessons from Well-known Retailers

August 30, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Many well-known retail brands use Twitter to connect with shoppers, offer deals, and market the items they sell. Those brands can inspire small retail businesses to market with Twitter, too. For some ...
Design & Development
Build a Responsive, Mobile-first Cart Page with Bootstrap

August 25, 2016 • Armando Roggio

An ecommerce shopping cart page is most naturally a display of tabular data, listing the title and price for each item a shopper has selected. But HTML tables can be ...
Local Business
How to Bring Online Shoppers into Physical Stores

August 22, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Brick-and-click retailers, those with physical stores and an online shop, can use the rich data ecommerce provides to encourage online shoppers to visit the retailers’ physical stores or pop-up shops. Many ...
Customer Retention
Using Referral Marketing to Fuel Ecommerce Subscriptions

August 17, 2016 • Armando Roggio

When your subscribers refer your ecommerce subscription service, they are helping your business grow. Both the customers who refer your products and the referred customers they bring in are likely ...
Email & Text Marketing
How to Think Like an Email Spammer

August 15, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Sending folks useless or unwanted emails may seem intuitive. But if you really want to infuriate and violate, you’ll need a plan. And remember, only a tiny percentage of the ...
Shipping & Fulfillment
For Holiday Ecommerce Fulfillment, Success Starts in August

August 9, 2016 • Armando Roggio

To be successful during the short, high pressure Christmas shopping season this year, ecommerce retailers should plan now to make certain they have the products shoppers want and that they ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for September 2016

August 8, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce marketers can use content to connect with customers and prospects in September 2016, offering up compelling videos, shopping guides, seasonal how-to articles, or celebrating holidays like Talk Like a ...
Business
Olympic Committees Seek to Restrict Content Marketing, Social Media

August 5, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) are warning athletes and businesses not to use Olympic trademarks in content and social media marketing. The Olympics are ...
Content Marketing
3 Easy (and Slightly Radical) Ways a Headline Can Spark Content Marketing

August 4, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Turn content marketing creation on its proverbial head and generate great content marketing ideas from killer headlines with these easy tricks. If you asked two professional writers whether you should write ...
Design & Development
Make Animated GIFs in Adobe Photoshop CC

August 2, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Social media networks, including Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, have sparked an animated GIF renaissance. More than a few online retailers are regularly posting GIF animations to attract and engage potential customers. Marketers ...
Marketing & Advertising
A Brief Guide to Contrarian Ecommerce Marketing

July 31, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and digital banner advertising are among the most popular forms of ecommerce marketing, but they may not be the most effective for every business.
Platforms & Apps
What Flavor Is Your Shopping Cart?

July 27, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce platforms are software solutions that make it possible to build an online store, display products, and complete transactions over the Internet. In spite of a relatively simple definition, these ...
Content Marketing
For Content Marketing, Use History

July 25, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Stories are engaging. People love listening to a well-told tale. Just ask anyone who has ever binged watched a series on Netflix, Hulu, or the History channel. For content marketers,
Business
Learning from 10 Types of Ecommerce Competitors

July 21, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Knowing your competition can help your ecommerce business discover opportunities, avoid mistakes, and differentiate. With this in mind, it can be a good idea to gather and analyze information about your ...
Email & Text Marketing
Order Confirmation Emails Can Build Loyalty, Sell More

July 18, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Shoppers love order confirmation emails. They open them repeatedly, click on links, and give them priority in the inbox. In fact, confirmation emails may help online retailers to earn trust ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for August 2016

July 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The 2016 Summer Olympic Games, the back-to-school season, a couple of insects, and history can fuel your August 2016 content marketing creativity. Content marketing is a powerful strategy wherein businesses create, publish,
Technical SEO
The Real Benefit of Accelerated Mobile Pages

July 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The Accelerated Mobile Pages project’s restrictive subset of HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript encourages web developers and designers to employ practices that may improve the mobile web experience. Contributor Jill Kocher ...
Code
CSS, JavaScript Frameworks for Ecommerce Sites in 2016

July 7, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The CSS and JavaScript frameworks an ecommerce business chooses can have a significant impact on that business’s website features, performance, and development costs. The combination of programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and ...