E-commerce Operations Management

The web site to be discussed is Red Envelope, Inc. This web site offers gifts on any occasion. Procrastinators may find it very helpful, since Red Envelope offers next day delivery opportunity. The web site’s mission is to “make gift giving – no matter what the occasion or circumstance – simple and fun.” Many of the gifts offered by Red Envelope are made exclusively for them, which makes their assortment broad and unique. Over all, Red Envelope comprises good navigation tools, great variety of gifts on all kinds of occasions, and kind, good looking, and friendly interface. 
What makes Red Envelope a competitive online resource, is its simplicity, availability, and the quantity and diversity of products offered. As any successful profit-oriented business, Red Envelope aims to sell products, but the way they do it makes them stand out from the crowd. Not only the fact that buying products online is a lot easier makes Red Envelope so famous, but also the entire web site structure, prompt delivery opportunity, and friendly customer support center. They do not offer tons of “unique opportunities to win thousands of dollars,” or inundate clients with junk mail offering “free” gifts. They simply offer their clients good, honest, old fashioned online service; this approach works just fine and attracts more and more people because internet users love reliable and trustworthy resources. 
No matter how good a web site performs, there is always room for improvement; there is no limit to perfection. Red Envelope is no exception. The most vivid spot that needs work is the shortcoming of the Cascade Sheet Style (CSS) of the document. The actual misconception consists in the sizes of the fonts of the page. There is no opportunity to enlarge them, while they are rather small. Since some people might have sight troubles, this little discrepancy with Internet Ethics could easily deter a visitor. Moreover, the CSS of the document makes it impossible to change the sizes of page font manually via “View > Text Size” menu (in Microsoft Internet Explorer). In order to avoid this defect, webmasters of Red Envelope should develop another CSS made for people with bad eyesight. The ideal would be to have a special button on each page that would switch accessibility mode on and off. This option would definitely accumulate the number of visitors (potential customers), and broaden the availability of their services to a niche, which has been unavailable before. Another benefit would be the positive effect on company’s public relations.
Shopping online has many advantages over wandering about tangible physical stores. Some of the main advantages are: 
•	the shopper does not have to leave home to place an order; 
•	the ability to view the products by category in any order; 
•	opportunity to search for desired item.
However, online stores have several disadvantages as well. For example, some shoppers like to try a shirt (or whatsoever) on before buying it, others might love the actual process of shopping (or window shopping). Buy despite this disadvantages, online shops surely have much more advantages over actual physical ritual of shopping.
Now let us take a closer look at advantages of online stores, and then compare purchasing the same item both online and in a tangible store. Few advantages mentioned above are the most vivid ones, and constitute only a little part of the whole set of advantages. I surely can delve into deep consideration, but would rather focus on the main differences on tangible and online stores. An online shop, in our case Red Envelope, offers possibility to view products by category, and most importantly, the visitor can see dozens of available products at a time. In a tangible store, one would have to go and ask a shop assistant to take the item out and show it, and then would go on and on with every product. In a tangible shop, this procedure of acquaintance takes a lot of time, while web site visitor shall only click the link, read the description and view the photo, which takes seconds. 
Another major difference between these two methods of shopping consists in prompt search opportunity on the web site, and absence of it out on the streets. With the help of easy-to-use internal search engine, the user can find the desired product within seconds, or otherwise observe the absence of it. This opportunity saves a lot of precious time. On the other hand, searching for desired product in a tangible store might take hours, especially if it is a huge super-market.
As compared to other major online stores I had used, Red Envelope does not differ significantly. The main structure of nearly all grand online stores is the same. However, I remember that some smaller businesses offered different payment method. While big companies can afford to have their own payment system, smaller companies outsource credit card processing to other specialized companies for commission.
Ultimately, Red Envelope is a great online store, with thousands of products offered, good-looking and easy-to-use design, simple navigation tools, friendly customer care department, and secure money processing system.

Bibliography
1.	Red Envelope, web site http://www.redenvelope.com
2.	Totty, Michael. E-commerce: Cover Story – The Consumer’s Choice: Why do Certain Sites Become Favorites? We Went Straight to the Source. Wall Street Journal. New York, 2001. Pg. R.6