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.

Email Armando. Follow his ecommerce tweets at @ecommerceboy.

Checkout Tactics
PeC Traffic Report: Accept Competitors' Coupon Codes

February 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

With the retail market suffering under the weight of a global economic recession, online shopkeepers must take every step to attract more site visitors. Accepting competitors' coupons in your own online store is a tactic that can help attract bargain-hunting customers, encourage loyalty...
Photography & Video
Ecommerce Know-How: Three Tips for Good Product Photographs

February 5, 2009 • Armando Roggio

In a brick-and-mortar store, customers can pick up a product, feel its texture, and sense its weight. These sensory inputs have an effect on a shopper's buying decisions. For online stores, achieving the same level of emotional buying excitement can be hard. One solution is to offer goo...
Code
Web Design Tips: Basic CSS for Headers

February 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio

How your site looks matters. Even subtle improvements—like using fonts or colors that compliment your theme—can have a positive effect on how consumers rate the trustworthiness of your store. According to a 2003 Stanford University study of 2,440 people, 46.2 percent of online shoppers...
Photography & Video
The PeC Review: Canon’s Rebel XSi DSLR for Taking Product Images

February 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Canon's Rebel XSi is a 12.2 megapixel DSLR camera that is both inexpensive and powerful. It features relatively large pixels, a very functional auto focus, and several excellent presets that together make it a very good choice for capturing do-it-yourself product photos. There is no ...
Email Marketing
The PeC Review: MailChimp is a Full-Featured Email Campaign Manager

January 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

MailChimp offers a complete email marketing solution that is simple and inexpensive enough for small businesses but powerful enough for fairly large Internet merchants with sales of $5 million per year or more. According to its staff, MailChimp has over 60,000 users. It manages lists...
Content Marketing
Ecommerce Know-How: Customer-Centric Content as Link Bait

January 26, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Online shopkeepers can use good customer-oriented content to improve PageRank and increase sales. In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), link baiting is the practice of creating web content that is virtually irresistible to bloggers, Diggers, or other members of the linkerat...
Marketing & Advertising
Ecommerce Know-How: Start a Buzz with Word-of-Mouth Marketing

January 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Consumers talk. There is nothing you or anyone can do about it. The shoppers who visit your store and purchase your wares will tell their friends and acquaintances about it if they are given a chance. This phenomenon is nothing new. But marketers are starting to understand how to use th...
Design & Dev Tools
The PeC Review: Firebug Is a Developer’s Tool Worth the Buzz

January 19, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Firebug is a free Mozilla Firefox add on that gives developers a powerful tool to inspect and edit HTML, perfect CSS, or even admire the beautiful code from other websites. For many, the add-on has become an indispensable part of website design, development, and maintenance. "This is ...
Marketing & Advertising
PeC Traffic Report: Advertising in the Post-Interruption World

January 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Advertising has changed. Companies can no longer simply interrupt consumers with advertising messages and expect them to march off and buy something like little credit-card wielding lemmings. But ad tactics that reach out to customers when they're already interested or that tell authent...
Shipping & Fulfillment
Ecommerce Know-How: The Free Shipping Equation

January 13, 2009 • Armando Roggio

In 2009, every major carrier in the United States will be raising shipping rates. Profit conscience online shopkeepers, therefore, should take pause and reevaluate whether or not offering "free shipping" is really a good idea. There is, of course, really no such thing as free shipping...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: Magento Is the Open Source Powerhouse

January 12, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Magento is an open source ecommerce platform designed to empower online merchants and remove barriers in business process and flow. The platform has been downloaded more than 600,000 times, Magento says, perhaps making it the fastest growing ecommerce solution in the market. With a fu...
User Experience
The Shopping Experience: Really Old Records

January 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Since 1998 Really Old Records of Natick, Mass. has been offering a selection of "unusual and collectible recordings," taking full advantage of the Long Tail concept. But the store was slow to ship and did not communicate at all with me after I made a purchase online. On December 22, 20...
Code
Web Design Tips: Rounded Borders in CSS

January 8, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Consumers often judge online stores by visual aesthetics alone, so Internet shopkeepers are wise to use large appealing images, handsome fonts, and occasionally an eye-pleasing curve. When that curve is added someplace unexpected, say in a border around a text box or an image, it can b...
SEO
Ecommerce Know-How: Information Architecture to Improve SEO and Usability

January 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages. In this ...
Checkout Tactics
PeC Traffic Report: Will 2009 Be the Year of the Coupon?

January 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio

2009 begins in the shadow of global economic recession. The Consumer Confidence Index hovers at 38, a new low in United States, and those consumers that are shopping want deals. So could 2009 be the year of the ecommerce coupon? According to a Dec. 10, 2008 comScore report, coupon use ...
Customer Retention
Survey: 2008 Holiday Sales Slipped for Many Internet Merchants

January 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

For the first time in years, holiday ecommerce sales fell in 2008 as online shoppers, apparently worried about the global economy and their personal finances, cut seasonal spending 3 percent, according to an established Internet tracking firm. But 47.7 percent of Internet store keepers ...
Customer Service
The PeC Review: Boldchat is An Easy-to-Use Live Chat Solution That May Improve Sales

January 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio

BoldChat provides online communication software that allows Internet retailers to actively engage customers and potentially increase both conversions and profits. The BoldChat software (I tested version 5.20.3240.27126) was a responsive and powerful solution for live chat on any ecomme...
Technical SEO
Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding, A SEO Internal Linking Tactic

December 30, 2008 • Armando Roggio

A relatively simple SEO linking strategy can improve how well and how often your store's product pages are indexed and displayed in organic search engine results. This linking technique goes by several names. Bruce Clay Inc., an Internet business consultancy, refers to it as "siloing."...
Keyword Research
PeC Traffic Report: Use Blog Titles that Reflect Keywords and Content

December 26, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Blog titles play an important role in how search engines index blog posts. Bloggers that want to get the most web traffic possible seed post titles with important keywords and make interesting promises about the content. Many online retailers use blogs to both communicate with consumer...
Shipping & Fulfillment
The PeC Review: Stamps.com is A Helpful Tool for Many Merchants

December 22, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Stamps.com provides online retailers with a simple-to-use, software-based service that calculates official U. S. Postal Service postage from any PC, formatting printing labels and any required shipping documents. The Stamps.com software, which was developed in conjunction with the Pos...
Technical SEO
PageRank: What Is It? And How Do You Calculate It?

December 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Google’s PageRank technology plays an important role in how online stores show up in search results. Understanding how this ranking system works will help ecommerce merchants improve their search engine optimization and potentially increase website traffic. PageRank is a proprie...
Design & Dev Tools
Ecommerce Know-How: Create a Google Gadget to Promote a Weekly Feature

December 17, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Creating and publishing promotional web gadgets is a great way to spread the word about the products or services you sell and increase traffic to your website. Think about a web gadget as a form of social media. Your customers and potential customers can add the gadget to their iGoog...
Amazon & Marketplaces
The PeC Review: Shopzilla Is a Good Site That Could Use Better Instructions

December 15, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Shopzilla.com is one of the Internet’s leading price comparison engines. The site can expose an online retailer’s products to more than 30 million price-conscience shoppers every month, making it a powerful marketing vehicle. But uploading products—particularly for smaller merchants—c...
Design & Dev Tools
Web Design Tips: Add An Image Flip for More Sales

December 12, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Consumers will judge your website mainly by the size, quality, and interactivity of the images you use. Adding a simple interactive feature—like a JavaScript image flip—may lend your store credibility and improve your conversion rates. Consumers rely on an ecommerce site's aesthetic...
Fraud Prevention
Ecommerce Know-How: Avoiding Chargebacks and Improving Business

December 9, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Chargebacks are frustrating and expensive assaults on a retailer's bottom line. But practical and smart merchants can learn from some chargebacks, improving their stores' performance, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence. When a consumer asks his or her credit card company...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Volusion

December 5, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our "Cart of the Week" feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a customer about the cart, too. This week, we ...
Google Ads
Advertising in Recession Leads to Competitive Advantage

December 3, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Economic anxiety and a lack of insight have prompted some online retailers to slash their advertising budgets. However, when fewer of your competitors are investing in advertising, you can step up and command a market, improving sales now and in the long term. In a notable study that i...
SEO Tools
Review: Google Insights Can Help Merchants Optimize PPC/SEO Campaigns

November 25, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Google Insights, a free and relatively new research tool, provides detailed search data that can help online retailers improve their pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Like it or not, many online retailers depend on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engi...
Checkout Tactics
Sharable Coupons Can Boost Sales

November 24, 2008 • Armando Roggio

What our friends and relations think matters to us. I care about what my wife thinks of my new shirt, and when I got a 12-inch table saw this summer, I was sure to discuss the tool’s finer points my friend Steve. I am not alone. Shoppers like and trust recommendations and opinions from...
Platforms & Apps
Cart of the Week: Sure Solutions’ Actinic Shopping Cart

November 21, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Practical eCommerce counts over 300 different shopping cart platforms. In this, our "Cart of the Week" feature, we’ll profile—but not evaluate—a specific shopping cart and ask its management about its strengths and weaknesses. We’ll then ask a customer about the cart, too. In this in...