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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Platforms & Apps
15 Productivity Apps for Your Google Chromebook
August 15, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Chromebook and its browser-as-operating-system approach to computing have put the spotlight on web-based applications. The Chromebook's Chrome OS represents a completely new approach to computing. On a traditional Mac or Windows-based computer, there is the operating system on t...
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Google Ads
Google Study Finds PPC Traffic ‘Incremental’ to Organic
August 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A new Google study reports that pay-per-click ads tend to generate new site visitors and do not simply divert traffic from organic search result links, as some marketers have feared. PPC ...
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Email & Text Marketing
How Email Marketing Can Help SEO
August 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization. The canonical link element, which is often referred to as rel="canonical," (pronounced rel canonical, no "equals") is a way of describing the pref...
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Email & Text Marketing
How to Reduce Email Unsubscribes; 3 Tips
August 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
When one considers that 93 percent of American online shoppers receive at least one permission-based email each day, it is little wonder that email marketing is a mainstay of Internet promotion and an excellent source of traffic and sales for ecommerce businesses. Sometimes, however, t...
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Design & Development
Can a Chromebook Do Real Work?
August 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Chromebooks are fast-loading netbooks running the new Google Chrome OS. Chromebooks depend on web applications for everything from word processing to spreadsheets. These browser-only devices are supposed to provide a better user experience for common tasks like reading email or s...
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Design & Development
Low-Price Acer Chromebook: What a Computer Should Be?
July 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The Acer AC700 Chromebook is an excellent, lightweight, and fast booting computer that just might have users thinking about computers in a complete new way. This Acer computer is the least ...
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Analytics & Data
Google Analytics Adds Social Data
July 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Google Analytics has added social-media-related data to its reports. Google +1 button data is available by default. Facebook "Like" and Twitter "Tweet" sharing statistics can be added with some setup and additional tracking code. The new Google Analytics "Social" report tracks what Goo...
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Platforms & Apps
Goodsie Helpful for Beginning Entrepreneurs
July 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A new ecommerce platform helps novice ecommerce entrepreneurs get up and running quickly, but it limits choices and, perhaps, creates some marketing challenges. Goodsie — which costs $15 per month — uses a simple web interface and a well-defined set of options to help would-be merchant...
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Analytics & Data
Understanding ‘Traffic Sources’ in Google Analytics
July 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio
The Google Analytics "Traffic Sources" section can help ecommerce marketers understand how well campaigns are working and how better to invest in site content, advertising, or other forms of engagement. Google Analytics is a free service that uses cookies — which we explain in "Cookies...
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Design & Development
5 Gmail Techniques to Boost Productivity
July 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Gmail is full of time saving features and capabilities that can make you more productive. In this article, I'll review five Gmail techniques that will help you master your inbox. It is important to note, before exposing you to these productivity-boosting wonders, that Google actual...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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