The Red Envelope, please

That part is simple — it has a nice and easy to use “select name from this list or add your own” feature so, on the product page, I can assign the individual's name to the gift. Barbara has a sweet tooth so she gets Dancing Deer Chewy Brownies, and Linda has done a huge favor for me so she gets the brownies and a random “office-munchies”-type food collection in a spiffy green box.

At the product level, you can decide whether or not you want to pay $4.95 for their signature red gift box and you can read the story that's going to go along with your present. “Every gift has a story.”

When you get to the checkout, it's a train wreck. The bill-to section is fine, but the shipping address section? It's just a flipping number! The first part says “shipping address” with a list of required fields and optional gift message. The second part? Well, that says shipping address too! You have four choices: 1) you remember how you added things to your cart; 2) you guess how you added things to your cart; 3) you go back to the view cart page and see what you order ed and then type them in accordingly; or for the best (and most likely!) choice of all; YOU ABANDON. I mean really.

If you've ordered from Red Envelope before (as I have, under many different names and various addresses) and have someone in your address book, it will say “Barbara Shipping and Gift Message.” Not that it matters though: The name pops up but the address doesn't. I'm not exactly sure what good it is to have an address book that doesn't keep addresses.

The order summary allows you to change anything you'd like to change about the address. With that said, removing an item is impossible unless you go back to the beginning and start all over from the view page.

On top of the pressing payment information, it asks “how did you hear about us?” There's a handy drop-down with choices (in no apparent order) and the field is not required, but this is not exactly the place for it. Emphasis on not exactly.

One of the benefits of the Red Envelope shopping bag is that after you submit your order, you can set up a gift reminder where “each year, they'll remind you 14 and 4 days before the occasion.”

Because subtlety is Red Envelope's middle name, it doesn't upsell at all at the view shopping bag level or in the checkout. Harry & David, another seller of gifts, has a nice feature: If you order something for someone else, you are given an incentive to order something for yourself.

Red Envelope misses out on several other opportunities. It waits until the 11th hour to address security — still an important issue for many folks. It also doesn't have a traditional temperature bar (a proven technique to guide the user through the process) or ways to easily print your cart, view your cart, save your cart, or e-mail your cart to yourself.

The latter is a big issue because the site appears to delete abandoned carts at a moment's notice so if you're shopping during the day when you're not supposed to be (read: at work), you may or may not have your cart when you come back.

Red Envelope also does not allow you to choose when your item is going to be shipped — it allows you to choose standard, next day, and second day delivery options, but if I want to order my Christmas presents right after Thanksgiving, I can't instruct the site to wait until almost Christmas to send them. (1-800-Flowers.com does an excellent job at this.)

As I mentioned earlier, Red Envelope has excellent merchandising It has great photography — the pictures are nicely done, and in several of the products it uses multiple visuals. The copy is okay, not perfect but definitely not the world's worst either.

So, how can the site “suck”?

The thing is that navigation is 40% to 60% of a site's success, at a minimum, and its navigation, although much improved, is still weak at best. That, and its somewhat dismal shopping bag, leave a site that's far from perfect and definitely not as good as it should be.

It doesn't matter who you are: You can't ignore the stuff that's important.

	STEPHAN SPENCER

Red Envelope's Website is powered by BroadVision, a sophisticated e-commerce platform when it comes to functionality — but not when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The home page redirects to a very search engine-unfriendly URL with seven parameters in the query string. That is way too many for the tastes of any of the three major search engines.

What's worse, one of those parameters is a session ID. Session IDs are anathema to search engines, as they create an infinite number of URLs that point to the same content. Also, the URL is three directories deep. Category and subcollection page URLs are similarly unfriendly to spiders, with three directories deep and up to nine parameters (in other words: eight ampersands).

Google reveals in its cached copy of the home page (i.e., search Google for “cache:www.redenvelope.com”) links containing session IDs. Furthermore, a Google search for “inurl:BV_SessionID site:redenvelope.com” confirms that session ID-containing URLs are making it into Google's index, which is bad news because a URL with a session ID will obtain only a minimal number of links.