True Haven: Online Business Expansion Proposal
Western Governor’s University
E-Business QRT2: Task 2
February 19, 2014
Erika Maschino

The type of shopping cart used, whether customers can use it easily and it suits the needs of the business, will determine how successful the business is with their e-commerce sales. Being a service oriented business, True Haven will not have much of a stocked inventory for purchase. However, they may sell logo branded items or books. There are many options available for shopping cart software or programming. Open source shopping carts, which can be free, or a low cost paid service, are more customizable than others but have little or sometimes costly support service. Hosted shopping cart are easier to use, can be flexible in the design and come with support services due to the fact this is a paid service. A mix of open source and hosted shopping cart would fit True Haven, the organization not being a high product seller and a non-profit organization, therefore does not have the technical support staff on hand to support any option that would require such a need. The shopping cart chosen should be visually appealing, non visually appealing ones can deter people from making purchases on the site. The shopping cart should be user friendly as well, each button can easily be determined to what it does, and which to click for what. The shopping cart also needs to be secure. Customers will not want to input their credit/debit card information without knowing that there are measures being taken to keep their financial information safe.
Fat.Free.Cart is a free shopping cart service that works with Paypal and Google Wallet (formerly Google Checkout). This option would be an easy and still affordable for the organization. The only cost incurred for the organization would be the business membership/service fees of Paypal and of Google Wallet. Each rate about the same cost for a low transaction rate such as True Haven would have which is 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction. The organization's profit from the transaction will be placed into their Paypal account. Fat.Free.Cart's shopping cart code can be imbedded within the programming of the website, they provide a copy/paste code, for no cost. This shopping cart is customizable to the products for example, shirt sizes offered and/or colors offered. There is also options within the cart view to remove items, change quantity, or continue shopping. The cart view also calculates the tax and total of the items for the customer and even lists international currency conversions when appropriate. Paypal fast checkout is also available (Fat.Free.Cart 2014). Google Wallet and Paypal are well known and process many financial transactions for a multitude of other sites as well. Name branding and dependable processing from the well known companies will help place customers minds at ease about transaction security. A search feature should also be added to the site for easier navigation to and around the products and services.
To optimize the find-ability of True Haven's site, keywords should be used that are common in general searches that would target things such as True Haven. For example, Non-profit, not for profit, outreach programs, etc. There are programs that assist in this determination and compare your keywords/organization to others that would be similar. Stringing words together, usually two to five, or using key phrases helps in making the organization stand out from the rest. Keywords can also be used in the form of Meta tags. Meta tags can highlight relevance of your site for a search. If someone searches "help" although it is not in the name of the organization, and not necessarily a keyword set, it can be set as a Meta tag so that persons looking for an outreach program type of help will see the site in their search. Search engines also can pull keywords out of a site's page content. Therefore ensuring that the content of the page is of a higher