eBay

releasethekrak · ‎13-01-2024

I play different trading card games and have accumulated 1000s of cards In my collection, I always sell the bulk cards / duplicate cards I don't want , with the new hmrc rules, if I make over £1000 a year do I know have to pay tax? My sales are way more than 30 items as some cards are only worth a few pence and I sell them all individually. I'm not a business or a sole trader? No idea what I need to do now can someone help me

*vyolla* · ‎13-01-2024

The rules haven't changed.

The £1000 is a Trading Allowance, and it's for small/hobby business sellers.

A private seller selling their own personal items isn't subject to this, it's nothing to do with their tax allowance. See here:

https://www.gov.uk/check-additional-income-tax

If all you're doing is selling goods online, eBay and the other online platforms (such as Vinted, Depop, Etsy) will ONLY pass on data to HMRC automatically if you're selling 30 or more items a year OR have total earnings over the equivalent of £1,770. eBay will automatically share this information with HMRC by 31 January 2025.

Even though the above data is being shared, it doesn't mean that you will owe tax if you're a private seller. For the volume that you're selling it's likely that HMRC will send you a nudge letter asking you to confirm that you are indeed a private seller listing their own personal items.

rjwilmsi · ‎13-01-2024

Rules haven't changed: you need to declare profits and pay any taxes due if you are trading items for profit. If you are buying and selling items as part of a hobby i.e. not for overall profit then you have nothing to declare and no taxes to pay.

vinylscot · ‎13-01-2024

This seems to be a grey area with selling collectibles. If your intention is to buy packs or collections of cards, keep all the ones you want, and sell the rest, then you may well be trading, as the "bulk cards/duplicates", as you refer to them, were never part of your collection.

It would be an easy loophole to exploit. You could then buy a collection of, say 1,000 cards, and only keep 50 of them. selling the other 950. If it was as easy as that, I reckon many "private" sellers would just say that's what they're doing.

papso22 · ‎13-01-2024

@rjwilmsi wrote:

Rules haven't changed: you need to declare profits and pay any taxes due if you are trading items for profit. If you are buying and selling items as part of a hobby i.e. not for overall profit then you have nothing to declare and no taxes to pay.

That is potentially misleading. A profit motive is just one of the many badges of trade. Buying and selling as a hobby could well be seen by HMRC as trading, depending on what the other badges of trade look like for the ebay member.