Students' new shopping website gives back

While most students are worrying about finals Tyler Zey (‘12) and Kelly Dotseth (‘12) are working on their recently launched website, Changejars.com.

The site, which donates percentages of online sales from various companies to charity, started as a project for a management class.

“You can click on the business link and you shop on the site as normal,” Zey said. “You don’t pay anything more, but a percentage goes to a charity you support,” Zey said. Zey conceived the concept and presented it in the Entrepreneurship Club’s Elevator Pitch Competition. After his idea won, he promoted the website at a national pitch competition before approaching Dotseth in September about joining him.

Since both Zey and Dotseth are in Entrepreneurship Club and had run online businesses before, they knew the steps involved and they recognized the opportunities online shopping presents.

“Once you dabble in the online business world, you see very quickly that there are a wealth of opportunities to make a lot of money,” Dotseth said.

Dotseth and Zey wanted to direct that money to nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity, Kiva and the American Red Cross.

“The goal is to change why people shop online, to turn marketing costs into something that goes to a cause, and we’re trying to allow you to have some say in where your money goes,” Zey said.

The pair of entrepreneurs have done calculations about how much money they could raise for organizations.

“If we could pick one organization that has a million followers and if we could even get 50 percent of those people to use Changejars once, they would make four million dollars,” Dotseth said.

“It’s absolutely insane once you run the numbers and realize how much consumerism is going on online.”

Changejars.com is now launched and Zey and Dotseth are constantly working on improving and expanding the site.

“We’re getting more affiliates now, Zey said. “We’re making official connections and we’re making the website interface better.”

Although the site is new, the traffic has been encouraging.

“For an early stage we’ve gotten some good traffic, and even more impressive is the average time people are spending on the site, which means people are looking around and staying there,” Dotseth said.

As they continue to grow the business, Dotseth and Zey say they will steer away from past mistakes and keep brainstorming.

“We have to figure out how to keep people [interested in] us, because when they go shopping it might not be the first thing they think of,” Zey said.

Dotseth and Zey hope to have a solid business up and running by the time they graduate this May and will continue with the business from there.

“It has a ton of potential and I think we could grow this business for five to ten years at least,” Dotseth said. “Once you’re exposed to the online business world you realize how much potential is out there, and it’s kind of captivating."