Selling online

The hardest channel for this product and the one every maker moves into, so it is worth being clear about what is difficult.

Selling a smell in photographs

The single biggest advantage of handmade soap cannot be transmitted online.

Which means the listing has to do it with words: name the notes, describe the character, compare it to things people know.

Sample sets are the standard answer and they work: a small multi-scent set is a cheap way to let someone smell the range, and it converts into full bars.

And photographs have to carry the making: the cut face, the texture, the loaf.

Shipping a heavy product

Soap is dense, so shipping is a large fraction of a small order value.

Which pushes towards a free-shipping threshold set at a multiple of one bar, so the basket grows to meet it.

Fully cured stock only, packed tight in a small box.

And heat is the transit risk, not breakage.

What the listing has to carry

Everything the label carries, because the listing is a representation too: identity, net quantity, and your business name and location.

Ingredients where the product is a cosmetic.

And the same claim discipline as the label. A product description saying moisturizing takes the exemption away just as the wrapper would.

Which is the failure mode here: a maker labels the bar carefully and then writes freely on the website.

The channels

Your own site, where you keep the margin and the customer and pay for the traffic.

A marketplace, where the traffic exists and the margin and the customer do not.

Wholesale via your site, which is the quietly effective one: a simple trade page turns a shop owner who found you into an order.

References