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A bearings and industrial supply seller was running sales through eBay and losing roughly 15% to fees on every order. We rebuilt the business as a full e-commerce site — so Central Surplus owns its store, its customers, and its margin.
lost on every order, now avoided
NEW PLATFORM
a store they actually own
“no results” pages, by design
Executive summary
Build & launch
Nov 2025 – Mar 2026
Sales ran through eBay, which meant roughly 15% in fees on every order, no real brand presence, and no direct relationship with the customer. The catalog was deep, but the storefront wasn’t theirs.
A full WooCommerce build with direct checkout, an advanced search system tuned for part numbers, and an inventory sync that pulls product data across automatically — with every eBay reference removed.
Central Surplus launched a modern, trustworthy e-commerce site that presents the brand as a serious industrial source, keeps the margin eBay used to take, and gives them a customer base of their own.
01 / About & challenge
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Central Surplus sells bearings and industrial supplies to buyers who often know the exact part they need. The catalog is deep and technical, and the customers are professionals who value accurate specs, fast search, and a trusted source.
The problem wasn’t the products. It was the platform. Selling through eBay meant handing over roughly 15% of every sale, competing inside a crowded marketplace, and never really owning the customer relationship or the brand experience around it.
SNAPSH0T
Industrial supply · bearings & parts
Moving from eBay to WooCommerce
Full ecommerce build, search, SEO
Signed Dec 2025 · launched March 2026
THE CHALLENGE
Running on eBay capped what the business could be. Fees ate the margin, the brand had nowhere to live, and buyers searching for specific parts deserved a search experience the marketplace couldn’t provide.
About 15% of every order went to eBay.
The storefront belonged to the marketplace, not the business.
Buyers were eBay’s customers, not Central Surplus’s.
Part-number buyers needed better than a generic search.
Any move had to protect existing search equity.
01 / About & challenge — evidence
Before the new site
SALES CHANNEL
The finding was simple : a solid business was giving away roughly 15% of every sale and building someone else's customer base instead of its own.
02 / Strategy & approach
Start with how buyers actually find parts. Map the data sources, design the search experience, and wireframe the homepage, category pages, product pages, search, and checkout before any design begins.
Build a design system that signals a serious, trustworthy industrial source, then stand up WooCommerce with direct checkout, payments, taxes, shipping rules, and customer account
Build search around how part-number buyers work. Autocomplete, partial matches, faceted filters, and fallback results so a shopper never hits a dead-end “no results” page.
Connect the store to the client’s inventory system so product data syncs automatically, clean up the mapped fields, and strip every visible eBay reference from the public site.
Protect the search equity the business already has, then test everything before going live. Technical SEO,
schema, part-number indexing, redirects, full QA, and staff training
02 / Strategy & approach — results
kept, not paid away
PLATFORM
WooCommerce store
LAUNCH
March target hit
About Site Hub
Rochester, NY · 650+ clients
Founded ~2012
Site Hub is a scrappy, senior digital marketing agency built for small and mid-sized B2B businesses with an allocated marketing budget. We do SMARTSites, SEO, paid media, and brand work — and we white-label for other agencies. No tech jargon, no hostage fees, no agency theater
LET’S TALK
Tell us what’s broken, what’s working, and where you want to be in 12 months. We’ll build the plan, no agency theater, no hostage fees.