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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Design & Development
APIs: What Online Merchants Need to Know
August 25, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Editor's Note: In our "Need to Know" series, we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains application programming interfaces. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce M...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Feedingo Organizes Feeds, Keeps Me Informed
August 23, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Informed ecommerce entrepreneurs must stay on top of industry news, web trends, and best practices. To achieve this, some wander around the web from one blog or site to another, or they absorb dozens of email newsletters. It would be better if all of the best blog posts, articles, and...
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Photography & Video
Full 360-Degree Product Image Rotation in JavaScript
August 21, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Product imagery and video are extremely important aspects of on-site merchandising that can have a significant impact on an online retailer’s success. And, to a great degree, web developers have a ...
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Design & Development
Databases: What Online Merchants Need to Know
August 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Editor's Note: We continue our "Need to Know" series, where we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains relational databases. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce ...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Shopify
August 16, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There are nearly 600 different shopping cart solutions to choose from. While many of these carts are functional, a relative few rise to the top in terms of their ease of use, how much creative freedom they allow, and how well they help a merchant present their products. Shopify is on...
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Platforms & Apps
Getting Started in Ecommerce: What’s a Shopping Cart?
August 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
The ecommerce shopping cart is a software package that accepts customer payment and shipping information and facilitates the distribution of that information to merchants, payment processors, or others. At the surface, an ecommerce shopping cart is really something that every beginning...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Mockingbird, for Wireframes
August 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In terms of website design, wireframes serve as a visual guide to page structure and interface. Web designers use wireframes in much the same way that builders use an architect's blueprints. It is certainly possible to build a website without a wireframe, just like it is possible to bu...
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Customer Retention
Advanced Search Techniques Improve Ecommerce Sales
August 4, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Depending on which expert you ask, something like 40 to 70 percent of online shoppers will navigate an ecommerce store using a product search, making on-site search extremely important even if the most conservative estimates are assumed. Not all site search is the same, however. Rather...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Comodo Dragon, A Web Browser
August 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce merchants are digital natives. They live, in a sense, online, operating their businesses, marketing, and even servicing customers on the World Wide Web. But the Internet can be a wild place, and sometimes digital natives become a little too comfortable with their surroundings...
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Technical SEO
The PEC Review: Online Image Optimizer Speeds Load Times
July 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio
A slow-loading retail site is akin to the store clerk who ignores you in a brick-and-mortar shop. On a recent trip, I stopped at a small antique store. My wife and I entered the store, walked around for about 20 minutes, examined dozens of items, and never once during the entire experi...
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Design & Development
The PEC Review: IETester for Browser Testing
July 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers must pay careful attention to website analytics. Like conscientious doctors watching a patient for any sign of improvement, site owners and marketers study many details of visitor data, including which web browsers those visitors are using. Thanks...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Facebook Pay-Per-Click Ads
July 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There may be a positive relationship between ecommerce spending and social network participation. Internet trend tracking firm comScore recently reported that Facebook and Twitter users spend more money online than non-socialites, and that some 23 percent of Twitter users follow busine...
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Social Media
Twitter to Offer Early Bird Advertisements
July 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Twitter, the microblogging site, said that it would soon begin tweeting special, time-bound deals and offers from advertisers to its users. The program, called "@earlybird," would allow "select" advertisers to offer exclusive, short term deals on Twitter, potentially putting the social...
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Conversion
Three Simple, But Overlooked, Conversion Tips
July 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Marketing with 404 error pages and showing shipping data before a shopper puts an item in the cart were among the many powerful and often overlooked sales conversions tips that ecommerce coach and entrepreneur, Shirley Tan, shared during a recent webinar. Tan, who is the founder of Ame...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Dlvr.it for Social Media Distribution
July 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Blogging, social marketing, email marketing, onsite merchandising, and search engine advertising are just some of the tasks that an ecommerce marketer must manage on any given day. Dlvr.it is a new online service that can help you automate at least one portion of that marketing worklo...
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Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook
June 28, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Not everyone that downloads Magento can, frankly, figure it out since the platform's effectiveness comes with certain a level of complexity.
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Photography & Video
The PEC Review: Animoto for Quick, Basic Product Videos
June 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Product videos give shoppers a better idea of what they're buying, slash return rates, and boost conversions. So it is little wonder that many online retailers are adding videos to their product detail pages. But not all product videos are created equally and, frankly, not every produc...
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Analytics & Data
The PEC Review: WooRank Website Analysis Tool
June 14, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Search engine optimization (SEO) is changing. As search engines like Google, Bing, and Ask seek to provide better, more relevant, personalized, and, perhaps, even real-time results to search queries, so-called traditional SEO tactics may not work as expected. What's more, since search ...
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Conversion
Four Ways to Increase Conversion Rates
June 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
To make more sales, an online retailer can increase traffic, convert site visitors into customers at a higher rate, or, ideally, do both. On Tuesday, Practical Ecommerce hosted a webinar aimed at helping merchants boost conversion rates. The webinar's panelists described four distinct...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing Has Always Been Social
June 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social marketing is one of the most important new trends in online retail promotion. It is effective, builds customer relationships, and offers a better return on investment than some other marketing techniques. But often, online merchants don't realize that they are already engaged in ...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Twitalyzer Offers Analytics for your Twitter Accounts
June 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio
As more online retailers invest marketing dollars and time into social marketing, it is becoming increasingly important to measure the return on that investment. As with any concerted marketing effort, social marketing has real costs in terms of hourly labor expenses for time spent twe...
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Conversion
Trusted Brands Drive More Traffic, But Smaller Merchants Can Compete
June 2, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In the U.S., the largest 25 online retailers enjoyed improved sales in the first quarter of 2010 while all other retailers struggled. To perform better, some smaller online merchants should seek to drive more traffic with brand-based marketing, a topic that was discussed during a rece...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: TwitPic, for Sharing Photos on Twitter
June 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing is one of the most potent new promotional trends available to ecommerce businesses. Services like Twitter allow you to build two-way relationships with your customers wherein you can get nearly instant feedback about your product offerings and promotions, and gain...
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Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: Buffalo Technology’s HD-HX2.0TU3 External Hard Drive
May 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio
One of the computer industry's greatest apocryphal tales has Microsoft founder Bill Gates telling a newspaper in 1981 that "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need." The story is false, and Gates has been adamantly denying the quote for nearly three decades. But false as it is,...
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Customer Retention
Using Offsite Trust Marketing to Build Site Traffic
May 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Consumers buy from online retailers they trust, and unfortunately, nearly half of American consumers probably don't trust your business. Data from the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that in 2009 only 36 percent of Americans surveyed said that they thought U.S.-based companies were trust...
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Technical SEO
The PEC Review: Speedtest.net
May 17, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Most ecommerce merchants are digital natives, spending hours each day online, managing orders, marketing, or just staying ahead of the competition. When so much of your working day is spent on the Internet, even modest changes in upload and download speeds can have a major impact on pr...
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Business
Ecommerce Video Production
May 11, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Product videos have been shown to increase conversions rates on ecommerce sites. Online retailer eBags famously tested some 210 product videos on its site beginning in 2007. The test compared conversion rates for products with video against conversion rates for the same products withou...
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On-page SEO
The PEC Review: Page Speed
May 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Site performance or speed is a key factor in improving sales conversions. How quickly your website loads may be the difference between making a sale or losing a potential customer. For example, 52 percent of respondents to a 2009 study from Akamai and Forrester Research said that page ...
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Business
The PeC Review: AVG LinkScanner Identifies Malicious Code
May 3, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Seventy-one percent of websites that contain malicious code or malware are actually legitimate sites that have been compromised, according to web and data security firm, Websense. What's more, 61 percent of the top 100 sites on the Internet were infected at some point in 2009. Malware ...
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Email & Text Marketing
The PEC Review: GetResponse’s Email-to-Speech Service
April 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio
In 2009, there were approximately 90 trillion emails sent, or about 13,200 emails for every one of the world's 6.8 billion residents. This is according to data from web monitoring firm Pingdom and the U.S. Census Bureau. Narrowed to likely email recipients, this staggering data indica...
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