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.
-
Platforms & Apps
Microsoft Office Alternatives for Ubuntu Linux
August 13, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Maintaining spreadsheets, composing business documents, or even building slide-style presentations are a mainstay of modern business, including small and mid-sized online retail operations that often depend on the Microsoft Office suite to compete these tasks. The dependency on Office ...
-
Conversion
Observations on Marketing to Men
August 7, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Male shoppers may be more difficult to reach with Internet marketing than their female counterparts in an era focused on social sites and so-called gender-neutral media. Sites like Facebook and Pinterest have rightly become a major focus for Internet marketers. In the case of Facebook,...
-
Social Media
5 Tips for Pinterest Pin-to-Win Contests
August 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest is the most important new social sharing site in 2012, giving online marketers both a new way to engage potential customers and a means of boosting sales. Although there have been conflicting reports of just how Pinterest is impacting business fundamentals like sales, the gen...
-
Business
Will U.S. Online Sales Tax Mandate Hurt Small Business?
August 1, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Struggling states and some brick-and-mortar retailers have reinvigorated an effort to mandate that online merchants collect sales taxes for all U.S. jurisdictions, whether or not those retailers actually have operations there. The most recent legislation is the so-called Marketplace Fa...
-
Social Media
7 Tips for Pinterest Pinning
July 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Social sharing site Pinterest has grown to 12 million users and sparked a new surge in social marketing. Some online businesses are hoping to use Pinterest as a way to engage customers and make sales. As with any form of marketing there are some best practices that may make a business'...
-
Business
To Maintain Productivity, Keep Some Margin
July 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers are accustomed to thinking about margin in a purely financial sense — as the difference between what an item costs and the amount at which it is sold. There are, however, other areas of an online retail business that need margin too. Margin may be thought of as a borde...
-
Business
5 Reasons to Consider Ubuntu for Your Small Business
July 24, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Ubuntu is a Linux-based operating system focused on ease of use, simplicity, and security. This operating system is a good alternative to either Microsoft Windows or Apple's OS X, and may help small businesses get improved performance while saving money. Although some small business ow...
-
Customer Service
Be a Customer Service Superhero, Like Ron Burley
July 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Customer concerns, complaints, and problems give online merchants an opportunity to build lasting customer relationships and boost word-of-mouth marketing. Providing super customer service can make your business a hero to your customers. The classic “Adventures of Superman” television ...
-
Social Media
14 Pinterest-Like Sites for Product Promotion
July 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Popular photography and video tagging site Pinterest and its many clones have sparked a product-photo sharing frenzy that may present a good marketing opportunity for retailers. Pinterest and similar sites allow users to “pin,” “fancy,” “tag,” and “tap” images and videos in a manner ve...
-
Amazon & Marketplaces
Setting Up an Amazon Webstore
July 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Amazon offers a software as a service ecommerce platform with solutions ranging from a quick shopping cart for individual sellers and small businesses to enterprise level services. What's more, Amazon promises that its Webstore solution is both good quality and easy to use. Is that re...
-
Design & Dev Tools
Qwiki’s New Video Creator May Have Ecommerce Applications
July 2, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A New York-based rich-media technology firm has released a new platform that may make it easier for online retailers to produce product-detail videos with little more than product images and a microphone. Qwiki first announced its Creator platform in May 2012 and set up a private beta ...
-
Social Media
Putting a Dollar Value on Fans, Friends, and Followers
June 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio
According to studies from diverse research and analysis firms around the globe, a Facebook Fan is worth $136.38, a Twitter follower is worth $2.00, and a would-be friend on Pinterest is worth, perhaps, $5.00. Unfortunately, as concise and direct as these figures might seem when used a...
-
Social Media
Moving Beyond Likes on Facebook
June 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A new study seeks to better understand how businesses may use Facebook to go beyond just acquiring Likes, to engaging and communicating with customers in effective and measurable ways. The study comes from Internet analysis firm comScore and includes data from comScore's "Social Essent...
-
Design & Development
5 Mistakes to Avoid on Ecommerce Sites
June 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio
What makes great ecommerce-site aesthetics, layout, and even features are a matter of opinion. But there are some things that simply are not smart for online retailers. Online retail sites have a distinct job: selling something. While site design can be a matter of taste, I believe th...
-
Conversion
Tablets and Phablets Could Boost Value of Ecommerce Video
June 11, 2012 • Armando Roggio
New research shows that tablet users are more likely to watch video. Separately, a new and potentially popular smartphone category may be similar to tablets in video consumption. A report released June 8, 2012 from trend-tracking firm comScore found that tablet users in the U.S. are th...
-
Social Media
Ecommerce Marketing on Google+
June 5, 2012 • Armando Roggio
As Google rolls more features and functions into Google+, marketing on the new and fast growing social media network is increasingly important. Last week, Google announced the launch of Google+ Local, which provides users with recommendations and information about local businesses incl...
-
Social Media
Who is Using Twitter and Why?
June 4, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Mobile adoption may be driving a surge in Twitter use, according to a major research firm. A report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released May 31, 2012 said, “Twitter usage is highly correlated with the use of mobile technologies, especially smartphones.” This find...
-
Design & Dev Tools
RSS Plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes
May 29, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Yahoo! Pipes is a free content manipulation service that lets you mix and mash up web content using a visual editor that doesn’t require any code writing experience. The Pipes service has been around since February 7, 2007, and is the primarily the work of then Yahoo! Engineers Pasha S...
-
Platforms & Apps
Automating Social Media Posts with Dlvr.it
May 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Social media campaigns have become a mainstay of ecommerce marketing. Even the smallest of online retailers are likely to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and there are indications that social engagement may improve shopper relations and, possibly, sales. But the process of ...
-
Conversion
Publishers to Become Ecommerce Merchants?
May 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Trends in online commerce, content marketing, and advertising sales may have set the ecommerce and publishing industries on a collision course as both strive for trust, relevance, and profits. U.S. online sales in just the first three months of 2012 were more than double American newsp...
-
Platforms & Apps
Bing Goes Social with New Redesign
May 15, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Microsoft's Bing search engine will get a major redesign in the next month, extending the tool's integration with Facebook and introducing a new feature to help searchers get more done. “In 2009, we launched Bing with a simple proposition: people should expect more from a search engine...
-
Conversion
Drop Shipping: The Good and The Bad
May 8, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Drop shipping may help online retailers increase sales and profits. But the strategy is not without problems — ranging from gathering product information, managing orders, providing good customer service, and removing poor-performing items. As a business model, drop shipping has online...
-
Social Media
Survey Says: Pinterest-like Sites Drive Sales
May 1, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Some 32 percent of respondents to a March survey reported making a purchase after seeing a product on Pinterest or a similar picture and video sharing social media website. Bizrate Insights, which sells customer feedback and ratings solutions to online retailers, surveyed 3,741 online ...
-
Social Media
3 Examples of Contest Marketing
April 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Contest marketing seeks to give shoppers a positive retailer-related experience, create an affinity for the products a retailer sells, and collect information about shoppers that may help with future sales-oriented marketing campaigns. The idea of giving away hundreds of dollars worth ...
-
User Experience
Emphasizing Site Search in Web Design
April 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio
A website's own search engine is fundamental to helping customers find products, make purchases, and have a positive shopping experience. Speaking at an ecommerce conference in Brazil, Ed Huffman, vice president of global sales and business development for SLI Systems, a site search pr...
-
Checkout Tactics
3 Tips for Managing Shopping Cart Abandonment
April 24, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Recent studies indicate that 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are exited before a sale is completed. This abandonment rate seems to be rising, as online shoppers become more comfortable comparing prices and other product or service attributes. SeeWhy, a website conversion service, rep...
-
Inventory
3 Tips for Deciding What to Sell Online
April 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio
What a merchant sells online has a significant effect on that merchant’s success, including profitability and longevity. New ecommerce entrepreneurs should choose products wisely. According to estimates from Forrester, the research firm, U.S. online retail sales should reach about $278...
-
Google Ads
Google AdWords Ad Extensions Basics
April 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Google AdWords extensions give potential shoppers more information about a merchant and more options to engage with that merchant before clicking a search ad. Although ad extensions have been around for a couple of years, Google recently added conversion tracking data to extensions, ma...
-
Social Media
Pinterest: Choosing Cover Images, Tracking Pins
April 9, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Pinterest released a new feature last week, giving marketers significantly more control over how their companies' Pinterest boards are represented. This new feature allows users to choose the cover images for their pin boards, which serve as a sort of directory for a user's Pinterest p...
-
Business
7 Reasons to Start an Ecommerce Business
April 4, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Owning a business can be emotionally fulfilling and financially enriching. Tens of thousands of new ventures are started each year. Ecommerce businesses frequently require less capital and less time to start than brick-and-mortar retail or service operations. So why not get going? Cer...
New Ecommerce Tools: February 18, 2026
Email Marketing Awaits True AI
The Truth about 'Direct' Traffic
AI Content Licensing for Merchants
New Ecommerce Tools: February 11, 2026
Ask an Expert: Should Merchants Block AI Bots?
SEO for AI, Low Traffic, No Clicks