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In Chinese society, “red envelope” refers to a monetary gift placed in a red packet because the color symbolizes good luck. That's where Red Envelope got its name. Was the San Francisco-based gifts merchant lucky with the results of its Website critique? Well, while critiquers Amy Africa, president of Helena, VT-based Web consultancy Eight by Eight, and Stephan Spencer, founder/president of Madison, WI-based SEO-specialist agency Netconcepts, tried to handle Red Envelope's site with care, they both found areas that need serious improvement. Africa reviewed the site's content and functionality, and Spencer tested its search capability. Here's what they had to say.
AMY AFRICA
I love Red Envelope. The catalog breaks many traditional direct marketing rules, which is one of my pet peeves, yet I still think it's fantastic.
I like the products. Red Envelope has a great selection of unique gifts for weddings, new arrivals, anniversaries, birthdays, thank yous, and especially holidays. Its merchants pick quality items that are often accompanied by excellent visual representation, good stories, and topnotch packaging.
The company has great online and offline customer service. Its phone reps are consistently friendly and helpful, and its LivePerson-hosted chat is probably one of the best and most efficient around.
And I think Red Envelope's Website sucks.
Granted, it does a lot of things right. But for a company its size and with a reputation as one of the best places to find a present, RedEnvelope should be doing a lot of things better. A lot better, in fact.
Let's start by reviewing the site's search and navigation.
In recent months, Red Envelope has made major improvements in the site's navigation. It is now using at-a-glance, left-hand navigation (albeit inconsistently) on the entry page to help you find gifts faster.
You can find gifts by occasion, recipient, and shops (what's new, favorites, home and garden, and so on.) It also has links to business gifts, gift certificates, last-minute gifts, and the sale shop. Hopefully, you'll be able to find what you're looking for, because the text search function leaves so much to be desired it's almost humorous.
A quick search for “food” yields Murano heart bracelets, baby milestone photo frames, and a grilling set — among other things. Is that the best example I can come up with? Probably not. A search for “cigar” gets you a crocodile-embossed wallet. “Bar” yields a golfer's shoe carrier. “Sale” finds 35 items, 10% of which don't even have special pricing. “Kids” gets you therapeutic spa slippers — and if you buy them, Acorn (the company that makes them) will donate to Earth-care concerns or a children's charity. “Business associate” yields exactly zero results, which is interesting because it's one of their navigational drop-downs.
This list goes on and on, and I haven't even begun to mention the particularly amusing things — like when you search for “wedding,” you get 26 items, one of which is a personal compass.
The search refinement function — which is a must-have for any site — has good choices. You can sort by favorites, new items, catalog items (kind of odd), and price high to low and price low to high. Copious testing shows that it's not always consistent, but at least it's a good start.
Another thing that's missing from a navigational perspective is a recently viewed items listing. The site does employ breadcrumbs, just not a listing of items you've looked at. So if you find something that you want, you'd better put it in your “shopping bag” because if you don't, you have to find it again, which isn't always easy.
When it comes to asking for the order, I hear it all the time: “When you're a hoity-toity, chi-chi-la-la site, you don't feel like you should be too aggressive.” But it's been empirically proven — over and over — that the more you ask for the order, the more customers think you want it. The little, red “add to bag” with the mini, mouse-sized font on the second view doesn't really show much interest on Red Envelope's part.
Web designers will design things as one page, but users see things differently. They see every view as a different page. If they have to scroll down, it's “another page.” So if you don't have a request-for-the-order on the page they are looking at, you're not going to get as much conversion as you would if you have it on say, every view, like Collectibles Today (www.collectiblestoday.com) does.
Of course, the big difference between a gift site like Collectibles Today (a division of Bradford Exchange) is that it asks for the order on every view and reminds you how much it wants the sale by showing you a perpetual cart, actually three of them, throughout the site. (A PC, perpetual cart, is a cart that stays with you at all times. Collectibles Today uses one at the top, the right-hand, and the bottom of their navigation.)
Asking for the order on every view, adding perpetual carts, allowing people to buy an item when they see it (for example, on category and gate pages), are all little things that go a long way to making viewers feel that you are interested in their purchase.
The Red Envelope shopping bag/cart/U-Haul truck needs work. It's functional if you order one gift, but if you order two or more to be shipped to different addresses, you'd better have a Ph.D. and a heck of a lot of patience. Here's why:
Say I want to buy two gifts, one for my friend Barbara and another one for my friend/client Linda. I go through the site and pick out a gift for each of them.
