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.

Design & Development
A Better Way to Store Ecommerce Product Information

July 3, 2016 • Armando Roggio

How an ecommerce site stores and accesses product information can have a significant impact on site performance. Online retail businesses, small and large, may benefit from a popular database technology that ...
Schools & Resources
Lessons from 99 Retail Website Footers

June 29, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Stuffed full of links, contact information, legal notices, email subscription forms, and social media icons, the footer section of many ecommerce web pages might seem like pure miscellany. Nonetheless, I ...
Email & Text Marketing
6 Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns for Q3 2016

June 26, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing campaigns around holidays and seasons can help to drive ecommerce sales in the third quarter of 2016. Email marketing remains one of the most potent tools available to online ...
SEO
5 Reasons Why SEO Has a Bad Reputation

June 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio

If you start to type “seo is” into Google, the king of search engines is likely to autosuggest that “seo is dead” or that “seo is bullsh**,” leaving you to ...
Checkout Tactics
Taking the Unexpected Out of Cart Abandonment

June 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The Internet is full of window shoppers. They look at products on virtual shelves, but most leave without buying anything, or at least that it what years of shopping cart ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for July 2016

June 13, 2016 • Armando Roggio

National holidays, movies, useful product information, and the upcoming Olympic Games can fuel your business’s content marketing campaigns in July 2016. Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing ...
Marketing & Advertising
Use Direct Mail to Attract New Ecommerce Customers

June 8, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Online retailers Hayneedle, Wayfair, HelloFresh, and many more are using direct mail marketing to acquire new customers for their ecommerce operations. Direct mail may be a traditional, old-school way to ...
Content Marketing
Content Marketing: How to Write a How-to Article

June 3, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing is best when it is useful. Help someone solve a problem or complete an interesting project and you may have earned a customer. With this in mind, it ...
Link Building
How Link-building for SEO Fits with Content Marketing

May 30, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The terms “content marketing” and “link building” describe discrete marketing activities with distinct scope, strategies, and purposes. They are not the same thing. But that does not mean you cannot ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for June 2016

May 24, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Content marketers can often run short of ideas and inspiration. What should you write about? What should you post about? What can you make a video about? In June 2016,
Marketing & Advertising
Product Hunt May Represent a New Way to Sell Online

May 23, 2016 • Armando Roggio

A new product discovery site, Product Hunt, has begun selling directly to shoppers with help from merchant partners who list products. The business model is a blend of publishing and ...
SEO
How to Write Traffic-generating Meta Descriptions, for Ecommerce

May 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce meta descriptions can act like short, tweet-length ads capable of attracting visitors from social media and beating higher-ranked competitors on search engine results pages. HTML meta tags include information about ...
Conversion
Could Guided Selling Help Your Ecommerce Store?

May 18, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Helping online shoppers navigate complex buying decisions may help ecommerce retailers improve conversion rates, reduce returns, and earn loyal, repeat shoppers. Guided selling is a form of product recommendation to make ...
Schools & Resources
7 Ecommerce Design Conventions for 2016

May 15, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Online shoppers expect ecommerce sites to follow certain design and layout conventions, including logo position and function, the placement of product navigation, and the use of a “hamburger” menu on mobile ...
On-page SEO
Ecommerce Page Titles Key for Shoppers (and SEO)

May 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio

A thoughtful, descriptive ecommerce page title can help attract interested shoppers from social media and search engines. Page title optimization, if you will, is a low-effort, high-value task for ecommerce site ...
Product Pages
How to ‘Manufacture’ Product Descriptions, for Ecommerce

May 9, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Thinking about ecommerce product descriptions like factory-built widgets manufactured to a set of specifications may help ecommerce business owners and managers overcome writer’s block and avoid publishing duplicate content. Writing product ...
Marketing & Advertising
Using the Olympics for Ecommerce Marketing

May 5, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Note: Since I wrote this article, the International Olympic Committee and the United States Olympic Committee have attempted to restrict all use of Olympic words, phrases, and emblems on social media ...
Platforms & Apps
App Development Trends Favor Custom Ecommerce Platforms

May 1, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Application development is changing. Frameworks, services, and even tools make it possible to rapidly create web and mobile applications custom to a business’s needs. These changes mean that it may ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for May 2016

April 27, 2016 • Armando Roggio

May is good for content marketers. The month includes many holidays and events, giving marketers compelling, timely topics to cover. Content marketing seeks to attract, engage, and retain customers through the ...
Code
Make an Impressive Ecommerce Footer in Bootstrap

April 26, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The footer or bottom section of an ecommerce web page is often where shoppers look to find privacy policies, return information, or even a way to contact the store owner ...
Marketing & Advertising
9 Ecommerce Marketing Skills That Drive Success

April 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio

From pay-per-click advertising to blogging and from search engine optimization to analytics, ecommerce marketing is broad, diverse, and, potentially, complex. The aim is to find those activities, promotions, and tactics ...
Content Marketing
Content Marketing: How to Find Topics

April 19, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing can be a like a greedy monster. It may be powerful, it may be capable, but it is also hungry, devouring a constant flow of ideas. Every article,
Business
6 Principles for Small Business Automation

April 14, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Entrepreneurs and small business managers are hands-on folks. They are often involved in nearly every aspect of the business — from marketing to fulfillment to accounting to website design. At ...
Product Pages
Create Responsive Ecommerce Product Pages with Bootstrap

April 11, 2016 • Armando Roggio

The Bootstrap framework makes it easy to lay out responsive ecommerce product detail pages. Small business owners and even novice site designers can use Bootstrap to build a professional looking ...
Conversion
4 Things Add-to-cart Rates Tell an Ecommerce Business

April 6, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Monitoring an ecommerce business’s add-to-cart rate can identify and solve conversion problems, and, ultimately, help an online store earn more. Add-to-cart rates track the percentage of site visitors who add a ...
Marketing & Advertising
4 Reasons Ecommerce Marketing Campaigns Fail

April 3, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Not every social media post, or email message, or advertisement will perform. In fact, marketing campaigns and tactics often fail. So the goal is not necessarily to avoid failure. The ...
Code
Build Fixed, Responsive Navigation with Bootstrap

March 31, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Bootstrap is an open-source framework for creating responsive, mobile first websites. It can help even novice developers. But many new Bootstrap users have trouble with fixed navbars — navigation headers ...
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for April 2016

March 28, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Trials for the upcoming Summer Olympic Games, April Fools’ Day, any number of festivals, math, and even simple spring how-to articles will give content marketers plenty of material to draw ...
Design & Development
5 Ways to Improve Mobile Commerce in 2016

March 24, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Mobile commerce sales accounted for about 29 percent of all ecommerce sales in 2015, according to published reports. In spite of this, many online retailers have yet to master the ...
Business
Sales Tax: How to Collect, Process for Your Online Store

March 21, 2016 • Armando Roggio

Sales tax is relatively straightforward for brick-and-mortar retail stores. A shopper goes into a store, buys something, and pays the sales tax for the state, county, and city where the store ...