ebay sellers tax invoice?

[big10p]

Excuse my ignorance, but why have I been sent a tax invoice from ebay? I'm no accountant, but it seems to be saying I owe VAT on some (but not all) of the things I've sold. WTF? I'm not a business seller, and have only sold personal belongings, so what's all this VAT crap about?
big10p2021-04-19 10:41:22

 

[muddymusic]

That's weird. Did you sell to anyone outside the UK?

 

[big10p]

That's weird. Did you sell to anyone outside the UK?

Not recently, no. First time I remember being sent a notification about a tax invoice, but when I click on the link in the email, it takes me to an ebay page that lists invoices going back to June 2020! Most are for £0, though.

 

[dlightbulb]

I got the same..... very strange. Did you recently opt in to the new seller hub?

 

[big10p]

I got the same..... very strange. Did you recently opt in to the new seller hub?

I don't recall opting into the seller hub, but I have opted into the new managed payments. I think my invoices go back to before I opted in, though. All very odd.

 

[namfreak]

Did one of your buyers return an item to you?
I got one of these after a buyer must have used a pre paid returns label to return an item (cost of pre paid label likely added to my fees!)

 

[big10p]

No, haven't had anything returned.

 

[neoretro]

Sure it’s not a scam?

 

[big10p]

Sure it’s not a scam?

As sure as I can be. The URL looks legit and I can access all my personal ebay stuff from the site the invoices are listed on. You're right though, I should have suspected a scam. Can't be too careful these days.

 

[Bensonrad]

Oddly I had my ebay April invoice today, which has charged me £2 VAT on the £10 fees I had to pay from sales. I don't recall them doing this before, maybe I never noticed.

 

[big10p]

Question is, what are we expected to do? Surely we don't have to submit some kind of tax return form to HMRC? I still don't understand what VAT has to do with private ebay sales.

 

[frothmeister]

I would imagine that these ebay invoices you are referring to are showing you the make up of the fees that you have been charged for selling things on ebay.

In Ben's case then presumably the total fees he has incurred came to £12. This is made up of £10 that ebay keep and £2 that they have to pay over to HMRC.

You don't have to do anything. Well unless you are a VAT registered business...in which case you use this VAT invoice to reclaim the VAT on your charges that ebay have charged you.

It is just a VAT invoice that you receive all the time when you buy anything from a VAT registered seller.

I don't know why ebay never provided these invoices as a standard thing before....but it seems they must have started doing so for some reason.

 

[Bensonrad]

They do make it quite hard to see what your fee's costs were during the past month or historically, so can never really check if they are correct or not. Ideally I'd like to see if I did have £10 fee's in the first place. I think it's going to be even more complex now with them taking money directly from bank accounts and there new pay only 80% off fees offer.

Infact just counted up all the things I sold in April, I sold £12 and those were all on the £1 end fee, so £12 sounds correct.

 

[big10p]

Ah, I get it now. Thanks, Danny. I seem to remember you saying you were an accountant.

Looking now at my monthly ebay fee invoice (not the VAT one), it does say 'Includes United Kingdom VAT'. I got a bit muddled and thought I was being charged VAT on sale prices, not just the fees.