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.

Business
The PeC Review: Onehub Enables Virtual Collaboration

November 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

As an online merchant’s business grows, it is important to add new staff that will manage such things as operations, fulfillment, marketing, design, and customer service. But adding staff and growing an ecommerce business does not necessarily mean leasing office space and hiring locally...
User Experience
The PeC Review: MyBuys Personal Recommendations

November 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Offering shoppers personalized product recommendations can increase conversion rates and profits while fending off shopping cart abandonment. Onsite product merchandising—the idea of cross-, up-, and down-selling to shoppers—is a potent tool for ecommerce marketers that often takes th...
User Experience
The PeC Review: SLI Offers Superior Search

October 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Research indicates that as many as 60 percent of online shoppers use a merchant's search feature to navigate the website. With so many potential customers typing keywords rather than using a site's navigation hierarchy, advanced search features are not just nice to have. They are a comp...
Amazon & Marketplaces
PeC Review: Sellit Makes Marketplaces Social

October 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A new "self-promotion" tool lets merchants selling on Yahoo!, CafePress, Etsy, or Cartfly promote their products on leading social media sites, access a social media advertising network, and post a Flash-based widget on their blog or other sites. Sellit is a "bolt-on" solution that pr...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: TrialPay Creates Additional Revenue

October 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A payment and promotion platform originally built to boost conversion rates for merchants selling downloadable software may also help all types of online retailers increase sales. If your typical affiliate marketing program had a hip big brother, his name would be TrialPay. Aimed at cu...
Analytics & Data
The PeC Review: ClearSaleing Ties Profit to Marketing Tactics

October 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce marketers want to generate the greatest possible revenue from every promotional dollar invested. But tracking or measuring exactly how each ad, each promotion, or each press release affects shoppers can be allusive. ClearSaleing provides a platform that helps companies accura...
Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Consider YouTube Promoted Video

October 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

YouTube Promoted Video lets ecommerce merchants combine the power of television commercials with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Internet video is one of the fastest growing media forms in the world. From June to August 2009, American Internet video consumption grew from 19.4 billion to...
Customer Retention
The PeC Review: SeeWhy.com Helps Capture Exiting Shoppers

October 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A six year-old, real-time analytics firm seeks to help online merchants boost conversions by enabling stores to follow up with potential customers after those shoppers leave the site or abandon the shopping cart. According to SeeWhy, sending shoppers a customer-service-oriented email a...
Analytics & Data
Ecommerce Know-How: Avoid The Last Click Effect

October 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

As ecommerce marketers strive to get the best return for every dollar they invest, there is a danger that they will fall prey to the last click effect, attributing all of a campaign's success to just the last interaction a customer has before arriving on site or making a purchase. The ...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: BadCustomer.com Makes Good Business

October 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A free service protects merchants from bad customers—both malicious and foolish—saving time, frustration, and money. Ecommerce merchants love customers and love providing good customer service. It is at the industry's heart. But some customers are not so loveable and knowing who they ar...
User Experience
The Shopping Experience: ChristianBook.com Needs Breadcrumbs

September 30, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Christian Book Distributors (CBD) and its website, ChristianBook.com, has become largest catalog and online seller of Christian books and products in the world. Two teenaged brothers, Ray and Steve Hendrickson, founded it in 1978, in Massachusetts. The brothers launched the company, ac...
Conversion
Shop.org 2009 Summit Round Up

September 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Exhibitors, attendees, and speakers at last week's Shop.org Annual Summit were encouraged and excited about the future of ecommerce, both in terms of growth and technology. In fact, walking around the convention center at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas seemed to make everyone fee...
Conversion
Yahoo! May Sell Small Business Unit, Focus on Core Business

September 25, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The Yahoo! small business services unit, which includes the hosted ecommerce platform used by thousands of online merchants, may soon be sold, clearing the way for Yahoo! to focus on its core businesses, according to published reports. News that Yahoo! had garnered some interest for th...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: StoreSync Lets You Manage Your Ecommerce Business On Your iPhone

September 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce can be a 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week business. For many small-to-medium sized merchants, providing great customer service means paying close attention to their businesses, even after normal business hours. A new iPhone application assists with monitoring orders, inventory,...
SEO Tools
Ecommerce Know-How: Optimizing Your Site for Microsoft Bing

September 22, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The Microsoft, Yahoo! search deal announced in July still faces legal hurdles, but as more details have become available, it is clear that the companies' combined search share has—for the first time in perhaps a decade—created some real competition for Google. Depending on which poll o...
Payments
The PeC Review: Braintree Payment Solutions Protects Merchants and Customers

September 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Without a safe, reliable means of processing payments, there would be no ecommerce. So it is not a surprise that managing payments and securing credit card and customer information is a major concern for online retailers. Braintree Payment Solutions offers merchants a complete electron...
Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know How: Public Relations 101

September 15, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Public relations is the art of managing your business' public reputation through media engagement, and it is an important and often overlooked part of successful ecommerce marketing communications. In public relations (PR) the aim is to build relationships with media outlets and blogge...
Conversion
Ecommerce Know-How: Branding Helps Connect With Consumers

September 10, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Building an emotional and social connection with shoppers can create lasting relationships that produce both pleasing shopping experiences and increased profit. This is most commonly referred to as "branding" and it can be one of the most important keys to ecommerce success. In July 20...
Cross-border Selling
The PeC Review: i-BEAK Offers First Rate Translation and Cultural Services

September 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

One of the great promises of the Internet is that it brings together buyers and sellers from around the world. But, that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone can communicate. Ecommerce marketers who want to sell their products or services worldwide should therefore consider translati...
Code
Web Design Tips: Combining jQuery Effects and Plugins For A Great Marketing Effect

September 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The lightweight (small file size) and concise jQuery library makes it relatively easy to add interactive effects and merchandising to just about any ecommerce website. In this edition of “Web Design ...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: PowerReviews

September 3, 2009 • Armando Roggio

The term "Web 2.0" has come to describe web design and architecture that facilitates user interaction. And on ecommerce sites, that interaction often takes the form of customer-generated product or service reviews. PowerReviews and PowerReviews Express offer online retailers—from multi...
Design & Development
Ecommerce Know-How: Making Use of Use Cases

September 1, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Developing clear and concise use cases when you design or redesign your ecommerce website, can improve user experience and satisfaction, potentially leading to more sales and more profits. Use cases have their beginnings in software engineering, where they were used to visually or text...
User Experience
The Shopping Experience: Newegg

August 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Newegg, the second largest ecommerce retailer in the U.S., provided a flawless shopping experience that made it easy to understand why the company has become one of the most trusted and respected electronics retailers, bar none. Newegg set an excellent example of how online retailers c...
Schools & Resources
The PeC Review: “Online Marketing Inside Out” Is a Helpful Book

August 26, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Boiled down to its essence, ecommerce is really about marketing. In the brick-and-mortar world, a small retailer might have a half-dozen competitors citywide, and location, longevity, and luck can be as important as marketing. For example, there is a small, dirty bike shop I know that ...
Design & Development
Web Design Tips: Three Ecommerce Web Design Trends

August 25, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Like fashion and architecture, web design enjoys an ever changing ebb and flow as trends become popular, become mainstream, and then become passé. To maintain a modern and aesthetically-pleasing look, web designers should examine current trends, estimate their staying power, and impleme...
Keyword Research
Ecommerce Know-How: Understanding Brand-Influenced Search Queries

August 25, 2009 • Armando Roggio

When shoppers navigate to a search engine and begin their queries, they usually have some idea of what they are looking for. In many cases, that initial idea is the result of brand-influence. In very general terms, search engine queries fall on a specificity scale. On one end of this s...
Customer Retention
The PeC Review: Runa Converts Reluctant Website Visitors

August 21, 2009 • Armando Roggio

By some estimates, fewer than 20 percent of online retailers have conversion rates above 5 percent. Most Internet merchants experience sales conversions of only 2-to-3 percent. To compensate for such low conversion rates, many companies make significant advertising investments to boost ...
Cross-border Selling
Ecommerce Know-How: Translate Your Ecommerce Site

August 19, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Language translation is an increasingly important part of ecommerce marketing, as many small- to mid-size businesses seek non-English-speaking customers. But translating a product detail page into Spanish, French, Czech, or Chinese is, frankly, not as simple as hopping over to Google, ...
Platforms & Apps
Twenty Design Examples of Magento Commerce-based Stores

August 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Magento Commerce is perhaps the most popular open-source ecommerce platform available today because of its rich feature set, excellent backend, and extremely flexible theme structure. Magento's theme structure is of particular interest to ecommerce web designers because it allows for a...
Analytics & Data
PeC Review: Clicky Web Analytics

August 12, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Web analytics newcomer Clicky offers real-time site data, Twitter activity, and custom data tracking for a nominal monthly fee, making it an attractive choice for some ecommerce businesses. Web analytics have become the definitive means of measuring marketing campaigns and search engin...