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.

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...
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.
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
Social Media
The PeC Review: Firefox TwitterBar Add-on

April 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social media is one of the most cost effective ways that an online merchant can attract new customers and build relationships with existing ones. In social media, the aim is to become generally interested in your customers, including what they do and how they feel about the world. That...
Photography & Video
The PEC Review: TinEye Reverse Image Search Locates Competitors, Protects Copyright

April 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Product photography is an essential part of ecommerce merchandising. Customers like to see what they're buying, after all. Many manufacturers and distributors supply stock product imagery for merchants to use, and other retailers will invest in professional and unique product photograp...
Design & Dev Tools
Demandware Launches Marketplace to Speed Integrations

April 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Connecting and integrating an ecommerce platform with third-party services and solutions can be one of the most costly and time consuming parts of any ecommerce site development. This week, ecommerce platform maker Demandware launched a new marketplace called LINK, which gives develope...
Conversion
Online Shoppers Wait Two Days to Buy

April 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The average online shopper delays making a purchase by almost two days after initially visiting a retail site, according to data from a leading Internet security company. After monitoring the shopping behavior of 163 million consumers completing 2.52 million transactions, McAfee SECURE...
Fraud Prevention
The PEC Review: CRE Secure Eases PCI Concerns

April 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Protecting customer credit card data and then telling customers that you're doing so should be a top priority for online retailers this year. First, protecting your customers' data is an ethical responsibility. If you're selling products online and accepting credit card data, you shoul...
Content Marketing
Make Friends and Boost Sales with a Content Marketing Strategy

April 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio

More than half of consumers surveyed in a 2009 study said that how much they trusted a merchant affected how likely they were to make a purchase. The findings, which were part of a ChannelAdvisor survey, are not surprising. In fact, it is almost common sense that shoppers don't like to...
Shipping & Fulfillment
The PEC Review: Shipwire Fulfillment Services

March 29, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Starting an ecommerce business is no small endeavor. A would-be online entrepreneur must manage every aspect of the business, from selecting products and vendors to marketing. What's more, there is significant competition. As marketing and business guru Seth Godin says, "You can't out...
Code
Five Handy HTML Tags To Help Your Ecommerce Business

March 24, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There is an analogy between driving a car and operating an ecommerce business. With a car, you need to know a few basic things, like how to steer, accelerate, and brake. Likewise, the manager or owner of an online retail business really only needs to know how to process orders, manage customer service, and keep up with the accounting.
Design & Dev Tools
The PEC Review: LABjs for Better Site Performance

March 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Many small- to medium-sized online retailers are entrepreneurial companies. Their owners and employees often have diverse responsibilities, and it is common for a single person to handle multiple tasks, such as customer service, email marketing, order processing and website design. Unf...
Analytics & Data
The Metrics for Video Success

March 9, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Many online stores have begun to include product videos aimed at boosting sales conversions, reducing shopping cart abandonment, and lowering product return rates. But not all product-related videos are the same, and merchants will need some metrics for measuring which videos are, in fa...
Platforms & Apps
The PEC Review: Chimpified Connects Two Powerful Platforms

March 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio

There are thousands of ecommerce-related products and services that small- to mid-sized merchants can use to improve their businesses. But often the challenge to engaging these products and services is not funding, or even the products' capabilities. Instead, it is the difficulty associ...
Product Pages
The PEC Review: RateVoice Offers Product Reviews with Social Twist

March 3, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Adding product reviews to your ecommerce site will boost sales, drive additional traffic, and help you optimize your product catalog. In 2007, when PETCO added customer product reviews to its site, this purveyor of pet products enjoyed a 49 percent increase in sales conversions for its...
Design & Development
Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce Merchants Need to Know

February 23, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Editor's Note: Ecommerce merchants operate businesses using complex technologies. We launched our "Need to Know" series to help merchants obtain a basic understanding of these technologies, recognizing that most merchants are not web developers or programmers. In this installment, contr...
Platforms & Apps
The PeC Review: LemonStand is One Sweet Cart

February 22, 2010 • Armando Roggio

The shopping-cart platform that an online business chooses can have a significant impact on its sales success. Select a cart that is too simple or basic and it may not scale as your company grows or it may not offer the features you need to cross-sell, merchandise, or engage loyal cust...