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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Customer Retention
How to Earn Loyal, Repeat Ecommerce Customers
March 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Loyal, repeat shoppers convert easily, spend more, cost less to service, and help spread the word about good online shopping experiences. Earning long-term customers can significantly improve an ecommerce business. Loyal shoppers demonstrate conversion rates 5-to-9 times greater than f...
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Conversion
4 Good Reasons to Sell Online
February 27, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce sales are growing. Online sales topped $1 trillion worldwide for the first time last year and there are good reasons you should consider selling online now to start getting your share. There are really two kinds of businesses or entrepreneurs that should be considering ecomme...
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Inventory
Reducing Excess Inventory to Free-up Capital
February 20, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Reducing excess inventory, even at a loss, can free-up capital and help a small online retailer grow. Slow selling products sitting in a warehouse — or, for very small retailers, a garage — tie up cash and may make it hard to invest in marketing, new product lines, or site improvements...
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User Experience
5 Ways to Enhance an Ecommerce Site for Tablets
January 7, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers must design sites that work well and look great on tablets as those devices emerge as a favorite for online shoppers. Designing for tablets include adaptive layouts, touch-sensitive navigation, great images and graphics, and fast load times. Some 25 percent of American...
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Photography & Video
10 Compelling Product Video Examples
January 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Product videos may attract additional shoppers, encourage sharing, and increase sales for online retailers. So it is little wonder that so many leading retailers are using product videos now. Relying on data aggregated from several sources, SundaySky, a video-platform provider, reporte...
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Platforms & Apps
7 Must-have WordPress Plugins for Business Sites
January 3, 2013 • Armando Roggio
WordPress plugins extend the popular content management system’s capabilities and, in many cases, improve its performance. While each site may wish to use a different combination of plugins, there are simply some of these extensions that every business must have.
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Design & Development
15 iPad-friendly Retail Sites
January 2, 2013 • Armando Roggio
Apple's iPad tablet computer is changing the way that many consumers connect to the Internet, stay informed, and shop. A tablet-friendly website is thus a new imperative for online retailers. One out of every four adults in the U.S. owns a tablet computer like the Apple iPad or similar...
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Conversion
5 New Year’s Resolutions for Small Online Retailers
December 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio
As 2012 comes to a close and the year's robust holiday season is over, small online retailers will have a bit of time to reflect on how to improve business in 2013. The coming year is likely to see growth in overall ecommerce spending, increased competition for loyal customers, and adv...
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Email & Text Marketing
Remember a Holiday ‘Thank You’ Email
December 19, 2012 • Armando Roggio
As the 2012 Christmas shopping season comes to a close, online retailers should take the time to sincerely thank customers and offer appropriate holiday greetings. Email marketing often reaches its peak during the weeks leading up to December 25. Many, if not most, Internet retailers a...
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Conversion
Bad Marketers: 4 Evil Tactics from Marketing’s Dark Side
December 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketing can be competitive, as each online store strives to build customer relationships, boost incoming site traffic, and sell more. From time-to-time, marketers will step over an ethical line — sometimes without even realizing it. What follows are four tempting, but evil,...
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Email & Text Marketing
Transactional Emails: 5 Secrets to Improve
December 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Five relatively simple steps could help online retailers significantly improve transactional emails, and, perhaps, earn additional sales. Transactional or relationship email messages complete, confirm, or provide information about a previously agreed upon transaction. In the ecommerce ...
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Photography & Video
3 Video Trends to Watch in 2013
December 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers will be using video in 2013 to increase sales, find new potential customers, and build brand relationships if key streaming-video trends continue. Internet video consumption edged out television watching in 2012 for some groups, according to Nielsen's Global Survey of ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email, Mobile, On-site Driving 2012 Holiday Sales
December 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Retail holiday sales for 2012 from the first of November through Cyber Monday rose 16 percent year over year to more than $16.3 billion. Email marketing, mobile shopping, and on-site promotions have all played an important role in online sales. The 16 percent boost in early holiday ret...
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Design & Development
Mobile Commerce Blurs Online, Offline Retail
December 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets allow shoppers to look for products or compare prices from just about anywhere, including right in the middle of a brick-and-mortar store. These devices are changing how people shop and blurring the distinction between buying online or off. R...
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Shipping & Fulfillment
3 Tips for Holiday Returns and Exchanges
November 28, 2012 • Armando Roggio
When the giddy days of holiday sales end, online retailers frequently need to deal with the inevitable returns and exchanges barrage. But when customer contacts are seen as opportunities, even returns can be a tool to improve an ecommerce business. Online returns and exchanges are a po...
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Conversion
4 Ideas for After-Christmas Sales
November 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The first quarter of the year can be a slow time for online merchants, especially in the wake of robust Christmas sales. Fortunately, offering after-Christmas specials may boost revenue, reduce inventory, and make for happy customers. The buying frenzy that began seemingly right after ...
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Schools & Resources
5 Sins of Retail Site Design in 2013
November 20, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A great retail site design is aesthetically pleasant; it reflects current trends; and it includes the best and often latest in functionality. When these areas are ignored the resulting design can be downright sinful — even harmful to the bottom line. To some extent, site design is subj...
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Social Media
Pinterest Releases Business Accounts
November 19, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest, the popular image and video sharing site, now allows for specific business accounts that have a separate set of terms and conditions and may eventually include promotional options not currently available on the platform. "Thousands of businesses have become part of our commu...
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Design & Development
3 Tactics for Mobile Commerce
November 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Mobile shopping may be the fastest growing retail trend this year and next. How merchants market to mobile shoppers could soon have a significant impact on sales and customer loyalty. There is no question that shoppers are using mobile devices — smartphones and tablets — to research bu...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: Planning Your Holiday Calendar
November 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Email marketing is a powerful driver of holiday sales. But haphazardly sending emails is not the way to optimize campaigns. Taking just a few minutes to think about what an email will contain and when it will be sent should help to improve results. What follows is an example holiday em...
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Conversion
Preparing for Television Commerce; 4 Steps
November 7, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A recent survey found that almost half of American television viewers were interested in making purchases directly from their television sets, using remote controls or companion devices. Given that consumers may spend five times as many hours a week watching television as they do browsi...
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Marketing & Advertising
3 Marketing Lessons from Goruck.com
November 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Goruck is an American manufacturer and retailer of high-quality rucksacks, bags, and gear that does an exemplary job of marketing its products. In fact, there are at least three lessons ...
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Conversion
8 Key Ecommerce Marketing Tactics
October 31, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce merchants have many options for acquiring site traffic, building customer relationships, and ultimately improving sales and profitability. Enumerating all of the marketing tactics available and creating an ecommerce marketing playbook of sorts may encourage new campaigns and...
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Conversion
4 Ideas for Cyber Monday Sales
October 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The Monday after Thanksgiving — Cyber Monday — could see more than $1.25 billion in online U.S. sales this year, as eager holiday shoppers look for special web pricing. Like it or not, since about 2005 online retailers have trained shoppers to bargain hunt the weekend after the Thanksg...
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Conversion
7 Steps to Better Ecommerce Marketing
October 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Effective marketing rarely happens accidentally. Successful campaigns are most often the result of good planning and execution. Planning a marketing campaign can provide an excellent opportunity to focus on a business's unique marketing problems or challenges and the proper actions req...
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Amazon & Marketplaces
Getting Started with eBay
October 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio
eBay is a global marketplace and an opportunity for online sellers, including businesses as small as garage-based, family operations — or as large as major ecommerce merchants. In the second quarter of 2012, eBay's marketplace helped to sell approximately $3.1 billion in clothing, shoe...
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Social Media
Is Pinterest the Best Social Platform for Ecommerce?
October 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest may owe its popularity to human nature. Early this year, Monetate, the shopping-personalization firm, made headlines when it pronounced that Pinterest was reshaping social commerce and could be a leading source of social media traffic to online retail sites. And even if the M...
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Product Pages
3 Tips for Encouraging Product Reviews
October 15, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online product reviews can be an influential form of marketing, with the potential to help merchants make more sales. Properly encouraging reviews includes making reviews obvious on a site, giving reviewers expert status and prestige, and making it very easy to review products. There i...
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Customer Retention
5 Ways to Attract New Customers
October 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
For ecommerce merchants, new customers mean new business. There are many customer-acquisition tools available to online retail marketers. Five of the best can be pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, marketplaces, and contest marketing. 1. Buy Pay-Per-Cli...
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User Experience
3 Tips for Better Online Merchandising
October 8, 2012 • Armando Roggio
The way that products and buying opportunities are presented on an ecommerce site can have a significant impact on sales. Making good merchandising choices especially around how search results are managed, how complementary products are displayed, and how the site's hierarchy is arrange...
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