Ebay Business accounts and digital reporting.

CheesePizza

There has been lots of articles about ebay forcing personal accounts to move to business. With the upcoming HMRC reporting, when can we expect to get notified from ebay about these changes?

soolin

CheesePizza said:

There has been lots of articles about ebay forcing personal accounts to move to business. With the upcoming HMRC reporting, when can we expect to get notified from ebay about these changes?

The first round of forced upgrades happened about 4 months ago, if I can find the thread I’ll link it here. However it’s nothing to do with HMRC reporting as nothing has changed tax wise.

if you buy with an intention to resell or make things to sell then you are a business and should always have had a business account and declare to HMRC , with the usual caveats about trading allowance. The issue is and has always been the amount of business sellers selling on private accounts and this may or may not be being addressed by eBay, although ultimately once all the declarations are made to HMRC sellers mis registered may find themselves getting automatic enquiry letters from HMRC long before eBay force them to change to the correct account.

ebay seem to be approaching things slightly differently by making subtle changes between business and private accounts. Just in the past couple of months for instance private sellers have been stopped from selling toys for under 3 year olds, and at some point in January MVL discounts are also being withdrawn. I suspect there will be a steady roll out of these changes going forward to ensure that business sellers are rightly treated as businesses and given advantages that assist them over the truly private seller.

RFW

soolin said:

ebay seem to be approaching things slightly differently by making subtle changes between business and private accounts. Just in the past couple of months for instance private sellers have been stopped from selling toys for under 3 year olds, and at some point in January MVL discounts are also being withdrawn. I suspect there will be a steady roll out of these changes going forward to ensure that business sellers are rightly treated as businesses and given advantages that assist them over the truly private seller.

I tend to only look at things that affect me but I have noticed there are loads of new laws and regulations cropping up for online selling, especially cross border. I have a vague memory of something related to toys so I'd guess Ebay are covering themselves for that.
There will likely come a point where Ebay, and other marketplaces, will be held responsible for any business sellers not paying the correct taxes, so I can see why they'd want to be proactive at this point.

daddyelf

eBay may well be taking advantage of the recently published reporting extension for sellers that have had active selling accounts prior to the 1st January 2024.

Thus they may well only be doing their initial due dilligence on those accounts registered on or after the 1st of January and catch up with the rest later. I would imagine other platforms may do the same.

soolin

Ebay definitely don't seem to be worrying unduly about forcing people to upgrade. I've just found a 'private' seller with 4800 listings, around 80% of which are brand new and with multiples available. 

I don't know what criteria ebay used at the last round of forced upgrades, but there were certainly some poster son the community boards that had to move to a business account, yet nothing obviously 'business like' stuck out on their listings at all. Obviously ebay may well have linked them to other accounts at the same address and forced upgrades on them all, but just on the accounts shown nothing looked worth worrying about. 

daddyelf

As far as I am aware there was only the one round of upgrades, and many of them looked GPSR related. 

They probably don't want to alienate even more users by forcing them to upgrade. The worst I have found months ago was a seller with 28k items listed!

soolin said

I don't know what criteria ebay used at the last round of forced upgrades,