The Tampa Soap Brand That Outgrew Etsy and eBay — A WooCommerce Migration Story

Published by Bastion Prime | WooCommerce Migration Specialists

Somewhere between her third year on Etsy and her fourth year on eBay, Jessica Harmon started doing math she’d been avoiding.

Not the surface math — revenue, cost of goods, shipping. She’d been doing that math obsessively since day one. The math she’d been avoiding was the other kind. The kind where you add up everything the platforms were taking and ask yourself what the business would look like if that money stayed with you instead.

The answer, when she finally sat down with a spreadsheet and a strong cup of coffee on a Tuesday night in her Tampa home, was uncomfortable.

Jessica had built something real. Pure Coast was a private label soap brand — natural ingredients, botanical scents, clean packaging — manufactured by a contracted factory in Guangzhou that had been producing her exact formulations under her brand name for three years. She wasn’t reselling someone else’s product. She had developed her own scent profiles, chosen her own packaging, built her own brand identity. The factory made what she designed.

By mid-2024 she was moving 800 to 1,200 units per month across Etsy and eBay combined, at an average sale price of $14 to $22 per bar or set. Monthly revenue sitting comfortably between $11,000 and $16,000, depending on the season.

And yet the number she kept coming back to, that Tuesday night, was $2,100.

That was roughly what she was paying Etsy and eBay every month in combined fees. Not an estimate — she’d actually added it up for the first time, line by line, and that was the number.

$2,100 per month. $25,200 per year. To platforms that put her competitors on her own product pages and owned every customer relationship she’d spent four years building.

She called us the next morning.

Understanding Jessica’s Business Model

Before getting into what we built, it’s worth explaining why private label sellers have a specific relationship with marketplaces that’s different from handmade sellers or resellers.

Jessica wasn’t making soap in her bathroom. She had a manufacturing partner — a Guangzhou factory she’d been working with since 2021, which produced her formulations at scale, applied her branding, and shipped inventory directly to her Tampa fulfillment address. This is called contract manufacturing or private label — entirely legitimate, increasingly common among independent consumer goods brands, and the foundation of thousands of successful small businesses.

The model works like this: Jessica designs the product and the brand. The factory makes it. Jessica owns the inventory, controls the pricing, manages the customer relationships. The factory produces what she orders, nothing more.

On paper it’s a strong model. Good margins, scalable production, brand ownership from day one. In practice, that brand ownership was theoretical as long as the customer relationship lived inside Etsy and eBay’s ecosystems.

Her Guangzhou factory didn’t care whether she sold on Etsy or her own store. But her business did.

The Fee Reality

Let me show you exactly what Jessica was paying across both platforms, because the numbers are instructive for any seller in a similar position.

Etsy — monthly at $8,500 average revenue:

eBay — monthly at $5,500 average revenue:

Combined monthly platform fees: $2,357 Combined annual platform fees: $28,284

That’s not a rounding error. That’s close to $30,000 per year going to two platforms that were simultaneously showing her customers competitor listings and refusing to give her a single customer email address.

The math was clear. The question was whether she could migrate without losing the momentum she’d spent four years building.

What She Was Actually Worried About

Jessica wasn’t naive about the risks of migration. She’d seen other sellers try to launch their own stores and lose their footing — spending money on a website that generated no traffic while their marketplace rankings decayed from neglect.

She had three specific concerns she laid out in our first call.

First: organic traffic. Her Etsy and eBay listings ranked well in their respective search algorithms. She’d invested years in optimizing titles, tags, photos, and pricing. Her own store would start with zero search engine authority and zero existing traffic. How long before the store generated meaningful revenue on its own?

Second: customer trust. Pure Coast had 847 Etsy reviews averaging 4.8 stars and 312 eBay feedback ratings at 99.7% positive. First-time visitors to an independent website wouldn’t see any of that. How do you transfer four years of social proof to a new domain?

Third: operational complexity. Running two marketplace storefronts was already work. Adding a third channel — with its own inventory management, its own payment processing, its own customer service — felt like it could break something. She wanted to simplify, not complicate.

These were legitimate concerns. We had answers to all three.

What We Built — Premium Package

Jessica’s catalog was extensive — 160 active SKUs across individual bars, gift sets, subscription boxes, and seasonal collections — and her brand was sophisticated enough to justify a fully custom design. Premium Package was the right fit.

The store design:

Pure Coast needed to look like a premium beauty brand, not a marketplace listing. We designed around a palette of warm cream, sage green, terracotta, and soft gold. Clean white space, generous product photography, the kind of layout that makes a $22 soap bar feel like a considered purchase rather than a commodity.

Key design decisions:

• Homepage hero with a full-width lifestyle photo of the product range — botanical ingredients, finished bars, Florida coastal aesthetic
• Ingredient transparency page — every botanical ingredient listed with its sourcing and benefit. This is the content that justifies a premium price and that Etsy’s listing format can never adequately support
• Subscription box builder — customers select their preferred scents and receive a monthly box. This didn’t exist on Etsy. It generates predictable recurring revenue that completely changes the financial profile of the business
• Gift finder: “Who are you shopping for?” quiz that recommends products based on answers — increases average order value and makes the purchase decision easier
• Trust bar: Over 1,100 Five-Star Reviews · Natural Ingredients · Tampa Made Brand · Free Shipping over $45

Migrating social proof:

This was Jessica’s biggest concern — transferring four years of reviews to a site that had none. We handled it in two ways.

First, we curated her 80 strongest Etsy reviews — the ones with photos, specific product mentions, and detailed descriptions of results — and formatted them as testimonials displayed throughout the store. Product pages, homepage, checkout page. Wherever a customer might hesitate, there was a real review from a real person who’d bought that specific product.

Second, we built out a dedicated Reviews page that displayed these testimonials organized by product category, with a note explaining that Pure Coast had been selling since 2020 with over 1,100 combined reviews across platforms. Transparency about the brand’s history built credibility without misrepresenting the new store’s history.

Email automation — the piece that changed everything:

Jessica had zero customer emails from four years of marketplace selling. Building that list from zero was the most urgent priority.

We configured Klaviyo with:

Welcome series (4 emails)

• Email 1: 15% off first order, brand story, ingredient philosophy
• Email 2 (Day 3): “Meet the botanicals” — educational content about key ingredients, builds connection with the brand
• Email 3 (Day 7): Customer favorites with direct links, social proof
• Email 4 (Day 14): Subscription box introduction — the product with the highest LTV

Abandoned cart (3 emails)

• Email 1 (1 hour): Gentle reminder with product photo
• Email 2 (24 hours): Ingredient focus — what makes this soap different from what they’d find elsewhere
• Email 3 (72 hours): 10% off, expires in 48 hours

Post-purchase (4 emails)

• Email 1: Order confirmation with care instructions (how to store natural soap, how long it lasts)
• Email 2 (delivery day): “Your Pure Coast order has arrived” with usage tips
• Email 3 (Day 14): Review request — direct link, one click
• Email 4 (Day 35): Refill reminder — “Your bar should be getting low” with reorder link

Subscription management: Active subscribers received a sequence that reduced churn — a monthly “what’s in your box” preview email, an easy pause option that reduced cancellations versus hard cancellations, and a win-back sequence for lapsed subscribers.

Inventory and operations:

We integrated WooCommerce with a simple inventory management system that synced her stock levels across the store and her fulfillment process. When Jessica received a container from Guangzhou, she updated inventory once. The store reflected accurate stock automatically.

For her marketplace channels — which we advised her to keep running during the transition — she maintained those manually with a simple weekly reconciliation. The goal wasn’t to eliminate Etsy and eBay immediately but to gradually shift revenue toward the channel she controlled.

The Launch and the First 90 Days

Pure Coast launched in September 2024 — intentionally timed for the run-up to the holiday gifting season. We recommended this timing because Jessica’s product is gift-driven: natural soap sets are one of the most popular gift categories in the November-December window, and launching in September gave her time to build her email list before the peak.

The 90-day results broke down into three distinct phases.

September (Month 1) — Building the foundation:

Traffic was low, as expected. Jessica focused on executing the package insert strategy — every Etsy and eBay order shipped with a card: “Thank you for your Pure Coast order. Visit us directly at purecoasttampa.com for exclusive bundles and our new monthly subscription box. Use code DIRECT15 for 15% off your first order.” Email list grew to 340 subscribers by end of month.

Direct store revenue: $2,100. Modest, but the email list was the real asset being built.

October (Month 2) — The list starts working:

First email campaign to the growing subscriber list — a Halloween-themed gift guide featuring fall scents. 58% open rate. 24% click-through rate. $3,800 in direct store revenue from the campaign alone. Abandoned cart sequence began generating consistent daily revenue. Email list reached 680 subscribers.

November-December (Months 3-4) — Holiday season:

This is where the investment paid off dramatically. Jessica ran a Black Friday campaign to 890 subscribers — her first real list campaign — and generated $8,400 in a single weekend from her own store. Subscription box sold out its initial run of 120 units in 11 days. Holiday gift set bundles — only available on her own store, not on Etsy or eBay — drove an average order value of $67 versus her marketplace average of $19.

The 90-Day Numbers

Monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions alone: $1,407

That last number deserves attention. Before launching her own store, Jessica had no recurring revenue. Every month started at zero — she had to earn every dollar fresh. Sixty-seven subscription box subscribers at $21 per month is $1,407 in guaranteed revenue before she processes a single one-off order. That number grows every month as new subscribers join and is largely immune to algorithm changes and platform policy updates.

Where Pure Coast Is Now

Six months after launch, Jessica’s own store generates more revenue than her Etsy and eBay channels combined. She’s kept both marketplace presences active — they still bring in new customers who then convert to direct buyers — but they’re no longer the center of gravity for the business.

She’s in conversations with two US-based specialty retailers about wholesale supply — conversations that would never have happened if Pure Coast was just an Etsy shop rather than a brand with a professional standalone presence. The store’s design, the ingredient transparency page, the subscription model — these signal to potential wholesale partners that they’re dealing with a real brand, not a marketplace seller.

Her Guangzhou factory relationship is stronger than ever. With predictable subscription revenue, she can forecast production needs months in advance and negotiate better pricing on larger orders. The margin improvement from better factory pricing compounds on top of the fee savings from direct selling.

“The store didn’t just save me money,” Jessica told us recently. “It changed what kind of business I was running. On Etsy I was a seller. Now I’m a brand.”

Could This Work for Your Private Label Brand?

If you’re running a private label or contract manufacturing business — beauty, personal care, home goods, food products, anything with a brand identity that lives on marketplace listings — the economics of direct-to-consumer selling are compelling.

The fee savings are real. The customer ownership is real. The subscription revenue potential is real for any product with a natural repurchase cycle.

What’s also real is that it requires a properly built store — not a basic template, not a DIY experiment, but infrastructure that handles your specific products, your specific customers, and your specific operational requirements.

If you want to understand what that would look like for your brand, book a free consultation. We’ll look at your current marketplace setup, calculate your real fee rate, and tell you honestly whether the timing and economics make sense.

Book a Free Consultation →

Related reading:

• Owning Your Brand — Why Marketplaces Limit Your Growth
• Etsy vs Your Own Website — The Real Cost Comparison
• Our WooCommerce Migration Packages

Client details have been adjusted at the client’s request. Business outcomes reflect real project results.

Bastion Prime is a e-commerce agency specializing in WooCommerce migration for Etsy, Amazon, and eBay sellers in the USA.