Selling Teaching Resources

thegirlintheattic

Need to up my income (want a new car) and am considering selling teaching resources as I'm a teacher who has a large collection of these made - mostly in my own time. I've seen people selling them on ebay and there are a few dedicated websites and whilst it's not a lot of money it would be a start.

I'm considering using my own website with a paypal checkout and using e-mail to deliver the resources to cut down on costs but have no idea about the legalities.

Do I need to register as self-employed with HMRC? before I earn or after?
Do I need a business bank account?
Do I need to register as a company?
Do I need to have any kind of insurance?

It's just an idea for now but seems like a good way to earn a bit of money.

lucky_me_2

Hello whilst I can't comment very much on the business side of things I just wanted to give you my input on your idea.

I think it's a great idea but you would need to consider how you will get traffic to your own personal website, maybe it is best to start up on Ebay and see if you can get some regular customers who you can direct to your website and then start to layout and design your own website once you are sure you will be able to get traffic.

I only say this because I used to work on 2 teacher magazines (that have now unfortunately stopped being published in print) this was for a major global publisher - you may know who they are but I won't post on here, I unfortunately lost my job due to the magazines going out of print. The publisher is very well known for their teacher resources and they do still have the online presence which they had when the magazines were in print, we used to design resources to go online when the magazine was in print, I have to say we really didn't get very much traffic and we struggled with subscribers - bearing in mind that the vast majority of the resources online were completely free.

I think it's a great idea but I am sure as a teacher yourself you are aware that there is not much budget for teachers to play around with and you may find it a struggle to sell these resources, or even if you did sell them you would probably be selling them at very little profit to yourself and once you have taken in to consideration the cost of getting a website built, ebay fees etc you may not make any profit.

I also know there are lots of big companies including publishers who are giving away resources for free every day online and it's such a competitive market within the publishing industry that they do often give things away for nothing.

I don't want to sound negative about it but I just wanted to give you my advice based on my experiences.

All that aside though I really enjoyed working on the resources and it is a lot of fun so if you see it as a nice hobby with the chance of making a little profit then go for it, as you said you design your own resources anyway :-)

If you need any other advice feel free to message me.

soolin

Yes you would need to register with HMRC and pay any appropriate tax and NI.

EBay would not be suitable as you can't sell emailed items there (well you can try but your account wouldn't last long). As the poster above has said your own website would need some sort of advertising to attract people, and that can be very expensive.

Would there be any professional magazines or journals you could advertise in?