I’ve sold a lot of unwanted Christmas presents on Ebay and I remember reading something about paying tax on what you make on Ebay. That doesn’t seem fair.
What HMRC say is that if you are trading online using Ebay, you will be liable to tax on your profits. Even if your profits are below the level of personal allowances you should still inform them that you are trading. However, the receipt of unwanted presents and then selling them would not be considered to be a trade and nor would the sale of any other unwanted personal goods if they were not bought with the intention of making a profit. A trade is where you buy the goods with the intention of selling them on at a profit and this occurs no matter the extent of it. So even if you did a bit with just a couple of items in the run up to Christmas to make some more money for Christmas, that is trading. In practice, it’s likely HMRC are only going to go after the more substantial cases.
