The eBay marketplace in Australia
Evening!
Thought I would kick off with a few thoughts about the eBay marketplace in Australia. Recently news that a number of powersellers with revenues of $50,000 AUD per annum had some of their details passed on to the Australian Tax Office. There are some interesting comments in this article :
“It is understood, however, that up to half the local eBay sellers registered for GST have claimed input credits from the ATO, believing invoices from eBay had included GST. ”
One of my accounts received the same email stating that account details and sales revenues had been passed on as well. It is interesting because there will be a number of eBayers that will face some difficult times ahead should the ATO decide to do some audits.
I already know one seller who has been audited but I believe this was because of some previous GST ‘flags’ that had been raised. My business was contacted around the same time but we seemed to have gotten through unscathed. Which is good. We do everything by the book.
What will be the effect of these sellers being audited though? ebay.com.au will still continue to mature as a marketplace, there will still be the same influx of new sellers, and eventually I think it will end up in a similar situation to the grand-dad of all the eBay sites.
I know from experience (50,000 eBay sales and growing fast) that it can be hard to make a dollar on eBay, and cheating the system would only increase your odds. Whether that be cheating the buyer by overcharging shipping, marketing a crap product as a brilliant one, or by maybe by avoiding taxes.
It is all too easy to start selling on eBay, and with eBay receiving a fair amount of promotion over the past year or two as a great way to make income there has been a lot of sellers enter the marketplace, saturating some categories. (hey, it even worked for me!)
I may have only been around for a few years on eBay, but I (and my partners) have built some solid accounts with some impressive sales numbers, and seen pretty much every type of seller out there. Maybe the attention from the ATO will clean up some of these categories and force sellers to do things right. Might make it a better place for everyone…
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