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.

Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing for Mobile Devices: 5 Insights

July 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Between 12 and 19 percent of email marketing messages are now read on mobile, Internet-enabled devices like smartphones or tablets. To continue to get good results from email, marketers should consider mobile user behavior and device capabilities. Last year, eROI, a digital agency, con...
Content Marketing
Write Better Blog Posts, Pyramid Style

July 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Use a classic writing technique popularized in the newspaper industry's heyday to improve blog content and communicate with precision. The inverted pyramid is a writing structure that places a summary of the most important information about an article in the first paragraph and support...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Tips for Encouraging Email Subscriptions

July 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing is one of the most potent promotional tactics available to online retailers when, in fact, those merchants have customers to send emails to. Email can boost site traffic, drive conversions, and help build strong relationships with shoppers. The hard part is getting thos...
Conversion
How to Get Consumers Talking about Your Company

July 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The Internet is now the leading source of information for brand-related, word-of-mouth conversations, according to a new study of 3,000 American adults. This finding may indicate that online merchants and other ecommerce businesses can use well-planned content to spark product or bran...
Analytics & Data
Looking at Location in Google Analytics

June 27, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Understanding your customers — including their preferences and opinions — is an important part of ecommerce marketing. One helpful indicator of customer behavior is location, because where one lives can ...
Conversion
5 Suggestions for Naming Your Store

June 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio

An online store’s name is one of its most important assets and a potent part of its brand. In some sense the business name can define its identity. Since business naming is so important, you don’t want to simply draw a name out of a hat or let your eight-year-old choose. Rather what fo...
Email & Text Marketing
7 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing

June 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A successful ecommerce marketing strategy is an ever-changing blend of techniques and tactics aimed at achieving specific, predetermined goals. If executed well, email marketing is often one of the most ...
Platforms & Apps
25 Great Magento Themes

June 15, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms with thousands of live shops, including major retailers. The platform, which eBay recently purchased, also has a vibrant developer community that creates easy-to-integrate themes and modules. In this article, you find a list of 25 ...
Photography & Video
4 Ways Video Can Drive Traffic and Conversions

June 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Video is one of the fastest-growing content types on the Internet. More than 172 million individual Americans watched an average of 14.9 hours of web video in April, the most ...
Social Media
5 Good Reasons to Use Tumblr

June 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Tumblr is a social blogging platform that allows users to upload multimedia posts, follow other users, and engage in communities without some of the constraints found on Twitter or Facebook. As a platform, Tumblr has been growing rapidly, and some retailers are now using the service as...
Social Media
How to Install the Google +1 Button on Your Site

June 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google is positioning its +1 button as a way for consumers to leave recommendations for their social media friends, just when those friends are in need. "Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it," Google said on the +1 landing...
Platforms & Apps
10 Essential Shopping Cart Features

June 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio

There are hundreds of ecommerce platforms that online merchants can choose from. The differences between these carts can be significant, so knowing what features matter is important. In this article, you'll find a list ten "must-have shopping cart features" that either improve the shop...
Payments
Google Wallet to Impact Ecommerce Merchants?

May 31, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google has partnered with MasterCard, FirstData, Citi, and Sprint to demonstrate a new payment technology that could — in theory — change consumer payment behavior, payment security, and even PCI ...
Marketing & Advertising
Should Online Retailers Embrace SMS Marketing?

May 26, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Texting ads and promotions to customers is an excellent way to announce sales and drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, service providers, and restaurants. But can text messaging drive site traffic to online retailers, too? Dutch Bros. is a regional, drive-through coffee shop ...
Conversion
Gas Prices, Unemployment, and Smartphones Affect Ecommerce, Study Finds

May 23, 2011 • Armando Roggio

U.S. ecommerce sales rose a stunning 12 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to more than $38 billion dollars, as soaring gasoline prices, unemployment concerns, and shopping-related smartphone usage affected online retail, according to a report from research firm comScore. "Faced with...
Schools & Resources
5 Free Business Training Opportunities

May 19, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce entrepreneurs are responsible for every area of their business, from accounting to order processing to website maintenance. So it is common for some small business owners to find that they need to learn new skills to either get their business started or help it grow. In this ...
Amazon & Marketplaces
10 Deal Sites to Drive Ecommerce Traffic

May 17, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Although deal and coupon sites appear to have focused on services or brick-and-mortar retailers, online sellers can still use these services to drive additional traffic and find new customers. The rise in popularity of Groupon, Living Social, and other deal sites has created a new adve...
Marketing & Advertising
3 Crazy Ecommerce Marketing Ideas

May 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Marketing may be the single most important task an ecommerce business must tackle. To paraphrase Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, the authors of Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Lessons From Ten That Broke the Rules and Made It Big, an ecommerce business can survive using an Excel ...
Email & Text Marketing
Creating Content for Email Newsletters

May 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Content intensive email newsletters can provide potential customers with real value, present an opportunity to build trust, encourage sharing, and drive direct site traffic. In the old days of advertising and marketing, retailers would place ads in newspapers or magazines. The idea was...
Platforms & Apps
Ubuntu Linux: A User-Friendly, Desktop Operating System

May 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Last week, Canonical — the open-source development firm — released a new version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, seemingly aimed at offering casual Windows and Mac users a feature-rich alternative. Although it is certainly a bit of hyperbole to say that Ubuntu 11.04 will send Ap...
Social Media
Have You Reddit? Surging Social-News Site Can Help Merchants

May 2, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Reddit is a social media site that allows anyone to submit links to news articles, blog posts, pictures, or other web content. Once submitted, Reddit users vote content up or down, potentially driving hundreds or even thousands of clicks and visitors. Reddit has been around since 2005,...
Staffing
Crucial Skills for Ecommerce Entrepreneurs

April 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio

What does it take to be a successful ecommerce entrepreneur? The answer might surprise you. If you did a quick search for "crucial small business skills" or "must have entrepreneurial skills" in your favorite search engine, you would find dozens of articles each offering their own spin...
Platforms & Apps
Internet Explorer 10 Is Coming

April 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Microsoft released a preview version of its forthcoming Internet Explorer 10 web browser at the MIX11 developer conference in Las Vegas last week. The browser preview provides important insights into what might be a new salvo in the browser wars and could affect how online businesses develop websites and applications.
Content Marketing
5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers

April 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Engaging customers with both informative and entertaining content can be a key to keeping them long term and making additional sales. After all, what's better, a customer that buys once, or a customer that keeps on making purchases because your blog content draws them back to your site?...
Customer Retention
6 Things Consumers Hate About Ecommerce Sites

April 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce websites should inspire trust, engage customers, and make it easy to shop — ultimately leading to more sales. Unfortunately, too many online stores fall short in one or more areas. In this article, I am going to describe six things consumers — including me — hate to find on e...
Social Media
10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter

April 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Changing consumer behaviors are having a significant effect on marketing tactics and strategies. New social sites, mobile devices, or other advancements are fueling these changes. Just a few years ago no mainstream marketers had budgets for Facebook ads. But now Facebook is a leading o...
Code
What Makes HTML5 Special?

April 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

HTML5 promises to make the Internet more functional and interactive. It seeks to transform a World Wide Web of relatively flat, static pages into one filled with web applications —
Product Pages
10 Compelling Product Descriptions

April 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Product descriptions help to sell products. That's an obvious but sometimes overlooked reality. Too often, online merchants are happy to simply copy a manufacturer's product description and call it good. But since that merchant is probably not the only one just copying and pasting, t...
Design & Development
Cookies Make Shoppers Feel Welcome

March 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio

In web development, a "cookie" stores basic user information on the user's own computer, potentially improving the browsing experience and even making visitors to an ecommerce site feel more welcome. Cookies are often used to save a visitor's username and password so that the visitor d...
Content Marketing
3 Ideas for Generating Unique Content for Your Ecommerce Business

March 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Unique and entertaining content can help engage customers, encourage site traffic and earn your brand top-of-mind recognition. But sometimes, ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers struggle to find new content ideas. This demand for fresh and one-of-a-kind content may be even more imper...