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.
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Social Media
6 Pointers for Using Etsy and Pinterest Together
May 21, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Marketing items on Pinterest may be the simplest way for Esty sellers to promote their unique crafts and vintage items. “I love Pinterest because it makes me money,” wrote Charles Huff,
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Amazon & Marketplaces
6 Tips for Making Money on Etsy
May 16, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Etsy is a marketplace for crafts, art, and vintage items that empowers home-based entrepreneurs, collectors, and handicraft makers to sell their products to an audience of millions. But like any ...
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Business
Using the BCG Matrix for Ecommerce Marketing Decisions
May 14, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Designed to analyze product lines, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix or growth-share matrix can help ecommerce business owners and marketers decide which products or product categories will likely generate ...
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Conversion
How to Manage an Ecommerce Photo Shoot with Models
May 8, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Good photography is vital for online retailers. While some merchants can depend on vendor- or distributor-supplied imagery for a time, most growing retailers will eventually find the need to use ...
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Email & Text Marketing
7 Must-have Email Marketing Features
May 6, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing solutions should help an ecommerce marketer automate common messages or campaigns, service shoppers using mobile devices, deal with list maintenance, and more. Every email service provider (ESP) offers a ...
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Conversion
Use Rule-based Chat to Improve Satisfaction, Sales
May 1, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Online stores can actively encourage live chat, sending relevant greetings to site visitors, improving customer satisfaction, and reducing shopping cart abandonment or lost sales. Proactive live chat, which is the practice ...
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Email & Text Marketing
7 Crucial KPIs for Email Marketing
April 29, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers use email marketing messages to engage customers and boost sales, but not every email message is equally effective. Fortunately, there are at least seven email marketing key performance indicators ...
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Platforms & Apps
7 Things that Make WooCommerce Compelling
April 24, 2014 • Armando Roggio
WooCommerce is, arguably, the most popular and important WordPress ecommerce plugin. Its ease of use, features, and flexibility make it a leading ecommerce platform, capable of rivaling even the best ...
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Platforms & Apps
3 Things to Know About WooCommerce
April 23, 2014 • Armando Roggio
WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin, designed to transform WordPress into a capable ecommerce platform. The plugin has many superb features and capabilities, but there are also at least three ...
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Platforms & Apps
WooCommerce Leads Ecommerce Platform Pack in April 2014
April 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
WooCommerce, the popular WordPress ecommerce plugin, had nearly 260,000 active sites indexed with BuiltWith, a web technology profiling tool, as of April 14, 2014, about 37,000 more sites than its ...
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Conversion
Online Purchase Cycle in 2014 Messy; Not a Funnel
April 16, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Mobile, social, and the cacophony of modern interruption marketing has transform the retail path to purchase, and forced retail marketers to focus on building lasting relationships that benefit customers. It is,
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Business
Heartbleed Bug Impacts Online Retailers, Ecommerce
April 10, 2014 • Armando Roggio
The so-called Heartbleed bug is a serious flaw in some versions of popular, open-source security software used to protect encrypted data like passwords or payment card information during online transactions.
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for May 2014
April 8, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Content marketing seeks to create and publish useful or entertaining content like articles, photographs, videos, or similar that will attract, engage, and retain customers. But good content marketing doesn’t just ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Lowe’s Innovative Vine Campaign a Year Later
April 4, 2014 • Armando Roggio
In April 2013, Lowe’s, the second largest home improvement retailer in the world, got a lot of attention when it released a series of six-second, how-to videos on Vine. The ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Treat New Email Subscribers Right, Profits Will Follow
April 1, 2014 • Armando Roggio
How an online seller welcomes new email subscribers can impact (a) sales, (b) future engagement with the new subscriber, and (c) even the how Internet service providers and email clients ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Gmail’s Automatic Unsubscribe May Help Email Marketers
March 31, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Last month, Google started to display a prominent “unsubscribe” link on open Gmail messages, giving Gmail users a fast and easy way to disengage. This new link could help marketers ...
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Platforms & Apps
Navigating 2014’s Crowded Ecommerce Platform Market
March 25, 2014 • Armando Roggio
The ecommerce platform market is crowded with effective, feature-rich solutions, making it challenging for new or growing ecommerce businesses to know which solution is best for them. Ecommerce platforms are the ...
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Conversion
8 Essentials for High-converting Site Search
March 20, 2014 • Armando Roggio
About 30 percent of ecommerce visitors use site search to navigate. These shoppers may be 50 percent more likely to make a purchase. It seems that would-be customers who choose to ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Responsive Design for Ecommerce Marketing Emails
March 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Roughly one-half of email is now opened on mobile devices like the Apple iPhone or the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy S4. There is significant research indicating that between 70 and 80 percent ...
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Platforms & Apps
PrestaShop 1.6 Adds Improved Business Intelligence, Other Features
March 13, 2014 • Armando Roggio
PrestaShop 1.6 is scheduled for official release on March 17, 2014. It adds several new features to the popular open source ecommerce platform, including easier access to key performance indicators ...
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Local Business
4 Reasons Small Brick-and-mortar Retailers Need an Online Store
March 12, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Small, brick-and-mortar retailers should also sell online to stay competitive and meet customer expectations. Ecommerce and physical-retail commerce are merging; businesses that exist in shopping centers and malls are expected to ...
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Business
Staples Increases Online Efforts, not Brick-and-mortar
March 10, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Office supply retailer Staples announced March 6 that it would close 225 brick-and-mortar retail stores by 2015, in part, focusing investments and marketing on the online channel. The move may ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Ways to Use Vine for Ecommerce Marketing
March 4, 2014 • Armando Roggio
More than one in three retailers use the Vine micro-video publishing app as part of their content marketing campaigns. These short-video marketing pioneers use Vine to showcase products, entertain, build ...
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Marketing & Advertising
For 2014, What Is Ecommerce Marketing?
February 20, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Marketing, traditionally, has been about communicating the value of a product to potential customers for the purpose of selling that product at a profit. Given this seemingly straightforward proposition, you might ...
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Platforms & Apps
New Ecommerce Platform Claims Better Performance, Development
February 18, 2014 • Armando Roggio
A new open source ecommerce platform from a one-time Magento engineer claims it can change online selling for small and mid-sized merchants with a new set of easy-to-use features, mobile-by-default ...
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Conversion
Target Focuses on Trust, Mobile with ‘Awesome Shop’
February 14, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Target’s Pinterest-powered “Awesome Shop” may demonstrate a focus on trust building and mobile commerce — areas that could benefit any online retailer. Target launched its Awesome Shop in December at about ...
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B2B
4 Keys for Effective B-to-B Ecommerce
February 11, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Business-to-business ecommerce describes Internet-enabled transactions between businesses, such as a manufacturer and a wholesaler, a wholesaler and a retailers, or a wholesaler and a business user. The B-to-B ecommerce market ...
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Business
5 Niches for a New Ecommerce Business
February 5, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Starting an online retail business begins with knowing what products to sell. Entrepreneurs have many reasons for starting an ecommerce business. For some, they have a passion for a particular product,
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Email & Text Marketing
5 Marketing Emails from Leading Online Retailers
February 3, 2014 • Armando Roggio
Even a cursory review of other retailers’ marketing efforts can spawn ideas to drive your next campaign. Modern marketing is dynamic, multi-faceted, and competitive. On the one hand, marketers seek to ...
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Email & Text Marketing
5 Ways to Boost Email Open Rates
January 30, 2014 • Armando Roggio
A small increase in email open rates can significantly impact an online retailer’s sales and profit. In its 2013 Statistical Fact Book, Direct Marketing Association estimated that email marketing could have ...
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