Blog176 posts, no filler
176 plain-English posts from actually doing it, grouped by what you are trying to get right. Search for a word, pick a topic, or start with a reading path below.
All 176 posts, in 9 topics
Showing the posts for eBay UK sellers, and the ones that apply to both.
Start here
The four guides cover the whole route in order, from choosing a supplier to fulfilling your first order. The reading paths under them are the posts to read next, picked and ordered for the three questions people arrive with.
The whole route in order, with the software that does most of it: account, suppliers, listings, pricing, orders, and what goes wrong.
Read the guide →What eBay allows, what it does not, and how to check a supplier before you rely on it.
Read the guide →Return on spend instead of markup, every cost that comes off a sale, and worked examples.
Read the guide →Why listings drift from your supplier, what a sell-out costs you, and how to stop it safely.
Read the guide →The five to read first, in this order. About an hour in total.
The rules that end shops, and the habits that keep yours out of trouble.
What you actually keep, what HMRC expects, and the fee nobody tells you about.
Every post
Grouped by what you are trying to get right. Each topic shows its newest six; open the rest, or search above to cut across all of them at once.
Your first weeks: what a real shop looks like, the numbers that matter early, and the mistakes everyone makes once.
Getting started
No certificate makes you a sole trader. This guide covers when HMRC registration is needed, how to get your UTR, what eBay checks, and the dates that decide your first tax bill.
Getting started
108 posts of research and honest reflection distilled into the handful of things worth knowing before the first listing goes live - not a highlight reel, the specific, unglamorous advice that actually would have saved the most time.
Getting started
Month three has a specific, recognisable shape: the initial novelty has worn off, but the compounding advantages of a settled listing haven't shown up yet. That gap is exactly where most people who quit, quit.
Getting started
Not whether it could technically count as one - whether it has actually started being treated as one, in the small decisions nobody announces out loud.
Getting started
It isn't the amount of money involved, and it isn't how many hours go into it each week. The real line sits somewhere quieter, and most people cross it long before they'd admit to it.
Getting started
Calling it a side hustle is usually true and usually fine. The trouble starts when the phrase gets used to avoid doing the one sum that actually matters: what the shop pays per hour it genuinely takes, not per month it happens to run alongside everything else.
Category guides - furniture, garden, beds, rugs, lighting and more - and what makes a product worth listing at all.
What to sell
"Refurbished" is not one condition on eBay - it's several, each with a specific, different meaning, and each carrying a real change in what a buyer is honestly entitled to expect.
What to sell
Not a product that sold well for a fortnight. A genuine winner holds up on four things at once, sustained over months - and the honest work is watching a shop's own data, not finding a better list.
What to sell
Gross sales on a persistently high-return category can look perfectly healthy. The real margin, once every genuine return is actually costed in, is often a different, much quieter story.
What to sell
Christmas gets all the attention, and it deserves some of it. But a furniture shop that only plans around December is missing several smaller, real seasonal swings that happen every single year.
What to sell
It looks like luck from the outside - a listing that just works, with barely any effort. Almost always, a genuine, unglamorous reason is sitting underneath it.
What to sell
Not "what's trending this month" - a small, honest set of questions that actually predicts whether a category is workable for a genuinely small, single-supplier shop.
Finding, checking and managing the shops you buy from, and what to do when one goes quiet.
Suppliers
Most supplier relationships are, and should stay, straightforwardly transactional. A genuine few become something else - and knowing the difference changes what's actually reasonable to ask of each.
Suppliers
A price and stock log catches numeric drift. It says nothing about a supplier who still has the right price and the right stock, but has quietly started replying slower and shipping later than they used to.
Suppliers
Most small dropshipping relationships run on an email thread and a handshake, not a signed agreement. That is fine, right up until something genuinely goes wrong and there is nothing written down to point back to.
Suppliers
Each supplier on its own is manageable. Three of them, each with its own prices, its own stock quirks and its own rhythm, quietly becomes a genuinely different kind of job.
Suppliers
The instinct is to ask for a discount. The actual leverage a small, genuine dropshipper has looks nothing like the leverage a large account has, and asking as if it does usually backfires.
Suppliers
How to find genuine UK wholesalers for eBay, the ten checks to run before the first order, the red flags that should end the conversation, and how to know whether their prices can make a profit.
What eBay charges, pricing after every fee, VAT, bookkeeping, Self Assessment and getting paid.
Fees, pricing and tax
Cash basis has been the default for eligible sole traders since April 2024. See how it differs from traditional accounting on stock, equipment and switching, with a worked example.
Fees, pricing and tax
Sole traders keep business records for at least five years after the 31 January deadline, VAT records for six. Here are the dates, the exceptions, what to download from eBay and when to delete.
Fees, pricing and tax
What HMRC says you can and cannot deduct as a self-employed online seller, from stock and postage to software and working from home, with the gaps in its guidance named plainly.
Fees, pricing and tax
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started on 6 April 2026 and widens in April 2027 and April 2028. Here are the dates, the turnover test, the quarterly routine and the penalties, checked against HMRC.
Fees, pricing and tax
How HMRC's £90,000 VAT test really works: the month-end rolling 12-month check, the 30-day look-ahead, deadlines, voluntary registration, the Flat Rate Scheme, and what registering does to eBay pricing.
Fees, pricing and tax
A walkthrough of eBay UK's Transaction report, Earnings report, statements and invoices: what each column means, how to tie payouts to your bank, and how to keep HMRC-ready records.
Titles, photos, item specifics, Best Match and everything that decides whether a listing sells.
Listings and getting found
eBay's own guidance points its Multi-buy feature toward cheap, frequently-bought items - not furniture. Used deliberately anyway, on the right products, it still has a genuine place in a furniture shop.
Listings and getting found
Five designs, up to 24 photo slots, and delivery wording that follows a seller's own policies - but not everything about a template is actually adjustable. Knowing which parts are fixed matters before assuming full control.
Listings and getting found
Nothing sudden. No warning, no penalty notice. It just quietly stops showing up as often as it used to, for reasons that have nothing to do with its age alone.
Listings and getting found
Same product, same price, same photos, even the same description - and one sells steadily while the other barely moves. The difference almost never lives in the listing itself.
Listings and getting found
The title gets careful attention. The photos get checked twice. Item specifics, sitting quietly below both, get filled in on autopilot in thirty seconds - and it is exactly the field deciding whether a listing shows up when a buyer actually filters their search.
Listings and getting found
Looking at what is already working is not cheating - it is how every seller learns what a category actually expects. Lifting someone else's actual words and photos is a different act entirely, and it carries a real legal risk most people copying casually have never actually weighed.
Messages, dispatch, returns, refunds, disputes and feedback - the part that decides who comes back.
Orders, returns and buyers
Size limits, tracking, included compensation and exclusions for Royal Mail, Evri, DPD and Parcelforce, taken from each courier and from eBay UK, plus a step-by-step way to choose.
Orders, returns and buyers
UK consumers can usually cancel an online order within 14 days without giving a reason. This guide covers the clock, refunds, return costs, deductions, exceptions and how eBay UK compares.
Orders, returns and buyers
Not stiff, and not obviously copy-pasted either. The honest test of a good script is whether the buyer reading it can tell it's one at all.
Orders, returns and buyers
Most buyers never think about a specific seller again the moment their order arrives. The small number who do are worth understanding honestly, rather than hoped for generically.
Orders, returns and buyers
It looks like any other dispute notification. It isn't - a chargeback is a completely separate process, decided by a bank, not by eBay, and the difference genuinely matters.
Orders, returns and buyers
Handled one at a time, each return looks like a small, ordinary cost. Handled without ever stepping back to look at the pattern across all of them, that same small cost quietly adds up to something real.
eBay policy, UK law, account safety and the small print that can end a shop overnight.
Rules and compliance
The DMCC Act 2024 banned fake reviews and drip pricing and let the CMA fine businesses directly. Here is what it says, who it covers, how it is enforced, and how to audit your own eBay listings.
Rules and compliance
What the Consumer Rights Act 2015 actually requires of a business seller on eBay UK: the 30-day right to reject, repairs, the six-month presumption, delivery and risk, and what eBay adds.
Rules and compliance
Since 2024 eBay has reported UK sellers to HMRC above set thresholds. This guide covers what is sent, what happens if you ignore the request, and what the rules do not change.
Rules and compliance
One genuinely confirmed change lands squarely on a large share of dropshippers in April 2027 - a real HMRC threshold, not a rumour. A second, larger reform is still only a consultation, worth watching rather than planning around yet.
Rules and compliance
What eBay VeRO is, who starts a report, what eBay UK says it can do about a reported listing, the habits that cause removals, and what to do step by step if yours is reported.
Rules and compliance
eBay's own definition of "New" is more specific than most sellers assume - and it already accounts for exactly the kind of non-retail, manufacturer-direct packaging a dropshipper's stock usually arrives in.
Reading your numbers, seller levels, slow months, growth and the habits that keep a shop going.
Running the shop
Not talent, not luck, not finding the right product first. The sellers who are still going a year on tend to share one specific, unglamorous habit - and it isn't the one most people expect.
Running the shop
108 posts, written across five weeks rather than a calendar year, cover compliance, platform mechanics, honest reflection and broader business skill. One thread runs through nearly all of them, and it wasn't planned that way from the start.
Running the shop
A genuinely bad month triggers the wrong instinct first - a sweeping sense that nothing is working. A structured, honest review usually finds something much smaller and much more specific than that.
Running the shop
Most dropshippers never plan to sell their shop. Building it as if you might, anyway, tends to produce exactly the kind of business worth having regardless - resilient, documented, and not held together by memory alone.
Running the shop
eBay renamed Top Rated Plus to eBay Premium Service and updated the requirements. Here's what a listing actually needs today, and whether chasing the 10% fee discount is worth it.
Running the shop
It sounds like doubling what already works. Done carelessly, it usually just means running the same shop's own problems twice, at the same time, under two different names.
What tools actually do, what they cost over a year, and honest comparisons including Sellhelm itself.
Software and comparisons
36 posts of honest comparison later, the same underlying decisions keep showing up: local over cloud, reviewed over automatic, narrow over broad. None of it was arbitrary - here's the actual reasoning behind each one.
Software and comparisons
Not vague questions a sales page already answers. Five specific, direct questions worth actually asking a company's own support or sales team - and what a genuinely honest company's answers should sound like.
Software and comparisons
Not just the subscription or the licence price. The genuine, full first-year cost - add-ons, upgrade triggers, and the time spent learning a new system - laid out honestly for every model in this series.
Software and comparisons
A server-hosted tool's own running cost genuinely scales with how much data it stores and processes for each customer - which is exactly why per-listing pricing exists. A locally-run program doesn't carry that same cost structure.
Software and comparisons
Not the hours saved - those are covered elsewhere. The quieter, harder-to-quantify shift in how a working day actually feels once checking suppliers stops being the first, dreaded task of the morning.
Software and comparisons
Not which tool has the best reviews, or the longest feature list. One question, asked honestly, does most of the real work: does this match the shop I actually have, not the one I hope to have in two years.
Nothing matches that. Try one word, like returns or VAT.
From £79.99, once. Fourteen days to change your mind.
