Seller Spotlight | Clean & Pure
One every minute: The million dollar idea that found its place on eBay
Mark Chapman and his wife Melanie set up Clean and Pure on eBay in 2010 after living in Greece, where Melanie treated her eczema with natural and local products. After moving back to Queensland they were unable to find the same local and natural ingredients and saw an opportunity to come up with their own fix.
They started creating their own skincare products with local and natural ingredients with their popular lip balms containing six or fewer ingredients.
With 70% of his sales coming from eBay and other online channels, Mark credits eBay for growing his business and making it as successful as it is today. He has found the platform’s unrivalled reach to be instrumental in getting their products and brand into the market, and believes that the user-friendly model is ideal for small businesses such as his.
When considering the return from listing on eBay, Mark compares the experience to the difficulty that can be encountered when trying to sell products on other online marketplaces. These sites ask for large security deposits and require significant investment of time and money to set up a storefront, only to produce direct search results tens of thousands of pages from the top listing. He notes the use of Promoted Listings on eBay as a significant point of difference, as with this sponsorship his listings will quickly appear in the top of search for the category - the cost of which is only incurred after a successful sale.
“It’s very simple, we just put the product on there, sponsor it, it sells. We actually use the fact that we come up in number one or two positions as a marketing tool for our other offline shops.”
Clean and Pure now sells a lip balm every minute and have made more than $1 million in sales on eBay to date, with the company exporting to 8 countries.
“When we started our store on eBay we never thought that we’d be able to grow our customer base both here and overseas. eBay has been a huge help to our business giving us the tools and confidence to take our sales to the world.”