eBay Zero Selling Fees until 15 April - WOW !

soolin

22laptops said:

Hmm, yeah that's the page I think I might have seen once before but never seen it properly explained like that since. Evidently the agents at eBay couldn't even find it themselves when I asked them.

Personally I don't want to participate in it next year and think the government are asking for too much private information as they say they will be making actual judgements on your possessions and the way you sold it.
However I doubt they can, or will be able to even make those judgements properly so I find it suspicious why they set the levels so low at 30 items to obtain reports on everyone.
It's really none of their business if I buy and sell a lot of ladies underwear (only joking, of course!).

So according to that article I'm still entitled to make £7000 from capital gains and trading this year if I want without them even delving into my ladies underwear collection. 
God knows what I'm going to do next year?

If you are selling off your own personal collection of items , whatever they may be 😀 there was and still is no liability to Income tax. Should you decide to buy with the intention to resell then once your total takings exceed £1000 in any tax year you would need to declare yourself as a trader to HMRC. Again that has not changed.

At the moment HMRC can request details of any person or group of people that they want from any site, or they can use informants. I am out of date now but informants used to be the main way that unregistered commercial sellers  were caught , and it used to be DWP that caught them first, although I am aware of a number of people who got the dreaded ‘would you like to reconsider your tax declaration’ letter from HMRC. 

EBay used to be quite hot on unregistered business sellers, insisting they ‘upgrade’ their account from personal to business. However in the last couple of years they seem to have stopped bothering. If I put my tin hat on I do wonder if these free listings may have an ulterior motive to make unregistered business sellers more obvious by getting them to list more and more items for free  and therefore assisting HMRC .

Vinted have also started cracking down on unregistered businesses. Every day on the various Vinted groups there are people complaining their accounts have been shut down for commercial selling, which at the moment is not allowed on Vinted. Some are obviously businesses, stating clearly they are making things to sell, or reselling from charity shops, others borderline but possibly reported by other users for various reasons. 

22laptops

You may well still be able to do the same next year as what is currently set out but you will have lost you rights of privacy automatically above those new disconnected thresholds (yes, I know they can snoop randomly already but that's different, and the matter of privacy is a different issue too).

Private sellers are called private for a reason, some don't want ANYONE to know what they're selling for what could be any legitimate reason that they don't have to even give, as long as they're allowed to sell whatever it is and you have to respect it. I personally don't want to innocently give away my anonymity and secondly be judged on everything by going over those limits so will be at a huge disadvantage next year having to stop at a pathetic 29 listings and probably not managing to even reach £1700 either.

The new reporting settings bizarrely seem to have no connection with HMRC's current rules, for instance why 30 items? Incidentally eBay has always said private sellers can list 1000 items or more a month. And HMRC's old adverts made no sense either when they tried to say you might be a trader if you sell a few new things for a profit when at the same time they say you're allowed £1000 trading. Hence, I don't trust their inconsistencies.

To be honest I don't think they really know what they're doing which might be why they've given in to getting Europe to govern us yet again, because the other £1740 threshold actually refers to the equivalent that's been set of 2000 euros because it seems the government has sold all our souls or data to a European organisation called the OECD which is what has caused this digital sales reporting.

As far as I'm aware we're not supposed to be living in a big brother communist /nanny state and still in the EU... but that's a bit like the way they question if you're a trader or not... they would say we think you might be a little bit, but perhaps you're not declaring it, so what do they think they might be? Hmm.

What can I say? At least some other countries are what they say they are, then at least you know where you stand.
I'm completely lost in this country. It won't be long before it all backfires for them and eBay just come up with a credit voucher system like CEX, probably with some connection to Sainsbury's or Nectar points, which I don't collect either because I don't like them spying on everything I buy on eBay.

Anyhow, it's time to get cracking if I want to PRIVATELY sell what I'm entitled to of my £6999.99 worth on eBay as a PRIVATE SELLER.

ballisticbrian

It's feasible that they could be dead worried about the impact of new tax reporting rules affecting small sellers or some individuals who would rather not bother anymore.

edited to add, yeah, it looks like I didn't read all the thread...

22laptops

Ah, I've just realised it's near impossible to sell anything anymore on eBay anyway 
No one genuinely seems to have any money anymore and they wont be making any to spend. It's worryingly becoming like a downhill spiral everywhere.Too many people are too lazy to sell too which creates a problem when they send things off to companies who give them a few pence for everything, then those companies completely destroy the value of everything like books and media because they can sell it so cheap and don't seem to have to pay anything for postage like everyone else.

soolin

22laptops said:

Ah, I've just realised it's near impossible to sell anything anymore on eBay anyway 
No one genuinely seems to have any money anymore and they wont be making any to spend. It's worryingly becoming like a downhill spiral everywhere.Too many people are too lazy to sell too which creates a problem when they send things off to companies who give them a few pence for everything, then those companies completely destroy the value of everything like books and media because they can sell it so cheap and don't seem to have to pay anything for postage like everyone else.

I agree that things are perhaps slower due to financial issues - but for me I am having my best ever period on ebay (talking from a private seller POV and ignoring my business account) . I am selling loads every day , I am having to drive to the mail centre rather than walk to the PO as I cannot transport my packages due to weight every day (I can't always wait in for a collection).

Yes I know once this promotion finishes I will go back to a gentle and lesser stream of sales as I shan't be listing as much as I am now- but I am enjoying this spell while it lasts. 

My items are not the sort of thing I can trade in at CEX or similar , I am selling to other enthusiasts in a small field and if it wasn't for ebay and the coverage I doubt I could find a buyer for any of it. I posted just yesterday that one of my items was sold within 2 minutes of listing - so someone obviously had an alert set up for the item - there's no way a casual browser would have spotted it that quick.

soolin

Someone elsewhere is speculating whether those of us with the free listings will not see any other offers for a while once this offer ends in a week or so. It is an interesting thought and all we can do is wait and see. 

Meanwhile list what you can whilst it is free, I'm certainly making the most of it.

22laptops

So here I am, with license to make a mint for 2 more days, I was happily listing like crazy a few days ago but now I've given up, it's such a waste but I'm too depressed to carry on, in a dark corner again rocking back & forth because it's the same old problem again with eBay... everyone gets excited when they see new things, the sales rocketed after a slow start and then you could plot a straight downward angle on my sales chart to the point of a pathetic dribble that comes to a complete stop despite still knocking out the listings for bargains galore.
All they ever buy is newly listed things and a couple of old things that they were waiting to come back. But now the problem is that whatever you freshly list they think is no good and gets tarred with the same brush because all the excitements gone, they collectively think no one wants it, it might all be rubbish and then it all becomes unsellable too unless you wait about another 3 months to try again.
It goes into their memory forever that it's a failure, it's as if it's just the same people out there and no one new ever seems to come along and none of them have a reset switch.
You can take it down the bootsale and it's the same story there, take it to a 2nd hand shop and they don't want it either, and you look at the massive total that the stuff owes you and don't know how you'll ever get the money back, not counting the rest unlisted. It's not as if half of it's even that expensive or not a bargain, you start to wonder what on earth is going on? I can see it's exactly the same with other people's stuff too.
I swear eBay never used to be like this before everyone was given the buy it now function causing the enthusiasm for auctions to fizzle out, in fact that's probably how I've ended up in this situation because I always thought in the past I could depend on eBay to sell all this stuff, half of which I'm buying from them.

soolin

@22laptops I haven’t quoted the post as it worried me a little and I did wonder if you might come back to it and reconsider it and potentially change it. 

Selling unwanted items on eBay shouldn’t cause stress or upset, if you have bought something and enjoyed it and no longer need it then it doesn’t owe you anything. If you start worrying about past spending and trying to recoup anything from purchases that were perhaps impulse buys then it will look bleak, and I fear that’s where you are.

take stock of your items, and I speak as someone who has inherited enough stuff to have needed outside storage units, and continued to buy stuff myself . If just looking at it and seeing wasted money is causing you to feel like this then perhaps do as someone suggested to me, and bundle up as much as you can and charity shop it. No you haven’t recouped any of your money, but it isn’t sitting there worrying you anymore- it’s gone. 

I admit that I have done extremely well out of these listings, far more than I ever imagined I’d get , but in some ways having some space back has helped. I suspect that at the end of the current period I will end up removing a lot of unsold items and charity shopping them, just to free myself of some of it. 

I don’t car boot anymore, seeing people pick over my once cherished items and offering pennies was soul destroying, eBay is easier as people have paid good money for some of it and I hope it has gone to be treasured. Even taking stuff to the charity shop , whilst hard, can be quite freeing. 

Like you I still have countless box loads of stuff unlisted , no doubt it will all sit there for several more years, but I did my best, and that’s better than nothing. 

22laptops

Ha ha, I still have my sense of humour after all the misery selling puts me through... and will still continue to buy more tat because that's what collectors do. Collectors don't necessarily buy things for enjoyment!  a lot of stuff 110% owes you and if you think of the cost of the space it takes up the daft thing is that it ended up costing you a fortune.
Collecting doesn't completely make sense, I've had a load of boxes in the attic for over 20 years full of things I don't even like (don't ask me why I bought it) but you buy it, hold on to it, try to sell it again & again and again till the point that you've put a lot of work into it and its taken up space at fairs & bootsales so its costing money for that, and all the time, effort, travel, sometimes I put some of it into general auctions too and it wont sell, so that's cost another few quid, and it ends up that a box load of junk that originally cost £20 has become like a black hole of expenses and there's maybe 20 other boxes like that... and still you try again... and again to sell it or just leave it in the attic when you need the space it's taking up.
And come to think of it, some of this stuff I would be making a loss on it (if I sold it) because it's never gone up in value. I remember what I paid for some of it and I won't even manage to get my money back which is why I'm determined to get a reasonable amount of money back at least. Postage is adding to the original cost loss too if you bought it online. 
If you gave it to a charity shop or someone else they would have the same problem unless you find the actual person who would want your obscure or boring thingamajig but even then, if they're a cheapskate that won't pay anywhere near what you're asking the chances are they won't look after it either and you think to yourself, I'd rather they don't have it for all the trouble I've gone through keeping it safe over the years.
Eventually you learn not to do silly things but you never realise at the time, so I dare say you start doing other silly things all over again without realising.

24febstarter

I'm assuming this freebie deal is a one-off and have been attempting to sell one year's worth of stuff in the space of a few weeks.

Slightly off tack, I did wonder about the definition of a 'personal possession'. Is it something you have owned for (a) 12 years, (b) 12 months, (c) 12 days or (d) 12 hours? Some other period? Or is it completely irrelevant, given that 'trading' involves profit and loss and many items may sell at their acquisition cost or lower?

For example, thanks to RM pricing changes I now have a folder full of postage stamps. How can anybody prove I wasn't intending to use them for postage at the time of purchase?