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.

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...
Customer Service
The Zappos Effect: 5 Great Customer Service Ideas for Smaller Businesses

March 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Zappos, the online retailer, has used incredible customer service to create an extremely loyal customer base. Small ecommerce businesses that want to grow would be wise to take a lesson from Zappos. As an example of Zappos' almost insane customer care, the company has even been known t...
Product Pages
How to Write Product Descriptions that Sell, Boost SEO Efforts

March 18, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase sales. Moreover, original product descriptions can help avoid Google's so-called "Farmer algorithm" penalty, which can affect retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or ...
Platforms & Apps
Mobile Devices to Alter Retail Landscape; 3 Predictions

March 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Internet-enabled mobile devices are going to have a huge impact on retail sales in just the next few years, especially affecting small ecommerce businesses. Anytime one discusses the future of a particular industry or where a trending technology or behavior may be taking some segment, ...
Marketing & Advertising
5 New-Media Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

March 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The growth of mobile devices, changes in search engines, social media sites, and new consumer behaviors are affecting the way that online retailers market. And often the creative and dynamic marketing plans win the customers. In this post, I'll describe five dynamic ecommerce marketing...
Platforms & Apps
Magento Releases Hosted, SaaS Version

March 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Magento, the open-source ecommerce platform, officially launched a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. The Magento platform — in my view — is one of the most robust and effective ecommerce solutions available. If, in fact, Magento has any drawbacks or weaknesses, it is that ...
SEO
Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm and What It Means for Ecommerce SEO

March 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A massive change to Google's search engine ranking algorithm has recently improved query results, while having a negative effect on businesses that had been "gaming" the system or reusing others' content. The so-called "Farmer" algorithm update went into effect in late February and aff...
Fraud Prevention
Radical Ideas to Make Credit Card Payments More Secure

March 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Credit cards approvals are not completely secure because the information those approvals rely on — cardholder names, card numbers and expiration dates — is static and relatively easy to gather. Focusing on making payment approvals less vulnerable may be more effective than asking cons...
Platforms & Apps
New Firefox 4 Mobile Released

February 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Last week, Mozilla released a new version of its Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Nokia Maemo-based mobile devices that is reported to be more than twice as fast as the devices' native web browsers. Earlier versions of Firefox for mobile have had some challenges with stability and perfor...
User Experience
10 Effective Mobile Ecommerce Designs

February 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Smart phones are everywhere. And — for many ecommerce merchants — it is not enough to have just an ecommerce website. They want an ecommerce mobile site, too. In this article, I have collected ten examples of what I believe are effectively designed mobile ecommerce designs, as viewed f...
Business
4 Ideas to Cut Costs on Your Ecommerce Business

February 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Reducing unnecessary spending will help your ecommerce business become more efficient and could increase its profits. But how do you cut costs right now without harming your business's future? Here are four suggestions for cutting costs now. Not every one of these will be applicable to...
Business
6 Common Ecommerce Mistakes

February 16, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce businesses can be founded by massive corporations or by families working out of a garage. It provides a relatively level field for everyone to compete. And, like so many businesses, ecommerce operations often find unique ways to succeed. This article's purpose is to help ecom...
Platforms & Apps
10 Innovative Digital-Download Stores

February 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The Holy Grail of ecommerce is to create a product once and sell it over and over again. Many online stores are achieving this goal by focusing on downloadable products like source code, graphics, PDF files, or ebooks just, to name a few of the digital products available. In this arti...
Business
4 Ways to Waste Money on Your Ecommerce Store

February 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio

The causes of ecommerce failures are diverse, but they frequently end with the proprietor shuttering the operation because it is losing too much money. In this article, I list four activities that I believe can destroy an ecommerce business's bottom line and waste your money. I think th...
Platforms & Apps
Google Chrome Links to New Web App Store

February 7, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google recently announced several changes to version 9 of its popular Chrome browser, including closer ties to a web store featuring products that blur the line between websites and web applications further and give ecommerce marketers a new sales channel. Google has said in the past t...