You list spare wardrobe pieces on Vinted, flip job-lot bundles on eBay, and sell curated vintage on Depop. To you it feels like three separate apps. To HMRC, if you're buying to sell at a profit across all three, it's usually one thing: a single trade.
That matters, because your tax-free allowances, your registration deadline, and the way you report income all work at the level of the trade, not the platform. Splitting your figures app by app is one of the most common mistakes we see new resellers make.
This guide explains when reselling becomes a taxable trade, how the £1,000 trading allowance works across several platforms, what the new digital-platform reporting rules mean for you, and how to file it all as one set of figures. There's a full illustrative worked example with 2025/26 figures further down.
It's written for UK-based sole-trader resellers (England, Wales and Northern Ireland). Scotland sets some of its own Income Tax rates, so a few numbers differ there.
Is selling on Vinted, eBay and Depop taxable?
It depends on whether you're selling your own used belongings or buying and making things to sell at a profit. Clearing out your own wardrobe is not trading and is not taxable income. Buying stock to resell is a trade, and the profit is taxable once it passes the £1,000 trading allowance for the tax year.
HMRC puts it plainly: you're "unlikely to pay tax if you sell personal items from your home, like contents of a loft or garage," but if you "buy or make goods to sell at a profit, you're likely to be trading and will have to pay tax."
So the test isn't the app you use or how much you make. It's your intention. Selling the coat you no longer wear is a personal disposal. Buying ten coats at a car boot sale to flip on Depop is trading from the very first sale.
A quick word on the £6,000 figure you may have seen. That's a Capital Gains Tax rule for selling a single personal possession, like a piece of jewellery or a painting, for £6,000 or more. It applies to high-value personal items, not to a reselling trade. We come back to it below.
Why do three apps count as one trade?
HMRC decides whether an activity is a trade using a long-established set of tests called the "badges of trade." These aren't about which website you use. They look at the substance of what you're doing.
The badges of trade, as HMRC summarises them, are:
| Badge | What HMRC looks at |
|---|---|
| Profit-seeking motive | Did you intend to make a profit? |
| Number of transactions | Are sales systematic and repeated? |
| Nature of the asset | Is it only useful by reselling it? |
| Similar trading transactions | Do you already do something like this? |
| Changes to the asset | Did you repair, clean or repackage to sell? |
| Way the sale was carried out | Did you sell in a business-like way? |
| Source of finance | Did you borrow to buy the stock? |
| Interval between purchase and sale | Did you sell quickly after buying? |
| Method of acquisition | Did you buy it, or inherit or receive it? |
No single badge decides it. HMRC and the courts weigh up the overall picture.
Here's the key point for multi-platform sellers. If you buy stock with the intention of reselling, then list the same kind of items across Vinted, eBay and Depop, the badges point the same way on every platform. You have one profit-seeking activity carried on through three sales channels. That's one trade.
You don't register three times, you don't get three separate trading allowances, and you don't file three sets of accounts. You add the channels together.
How does the £1,000 trading allowance work across platforms?
The trading allowance is a flat £1,000 of tax-free gross trading income per person, per tax year. HMRC is explicit that it applies to your combined income "from one or more trades," so it is not multiplied by the number of apps you sell on.
There are two ways it can help you.
Full relief. If your total gross trading income for the tax year is £1,000 or less, you don't have to tell HMRC about it or file a return for it. This is the get-out for genuinely small side hustles.
Partial relief. If your gross income is more than £1,000, you can choose to deduct the £1,000 allowance instead of your actual expenses. You can deduct up to £1,000, but no more than your income. The catch is that you cannot then deduct any other expenses or allowances.
That last rule is where multi-platform resellers need to think carefully. Reselling usually carries real costs: the stock itself, postage, packaging, and platform or payment fees. If those costs add up to more than £1,000, you'll almost always be better off claiming your actual expenses rather than the flat allowance.
The £1,000 is a gross-income test, by the way. You measure it against your total sales across all three apps before you take off any costs, not against your profit.
In practice, the mistake we see most often is a reseller assuming each app gets its own £1,000. It doesn't. One person, one £1,000, across the lot.
If you're weighing up the allowance against your real costs, our self-employed tax calculator is a quick way to sense-check the difference before you file.
What are the new digital platform reporting rules?
Since 1 January 2024, selling platforms operating in the UK have had to collect information about their sellers and report it to HMRC each year. This comes from international (OECD) rules and covers Vinted, eBay, Depop, Etsy, Airbnb and similar sites.
The platforms collect details such as your name, address, date of birth, and the income and fees on your account, then send the figures to HMRC. Reports run on the calendar year and are due to HMRC by the following January. So data for the 2024 calendar year was reportable by 31 January 2025.
There is a de minimis exemption for occasional sellers. A platform does not have to report you if, in the year, you both:
- make fewer than 30 sales of goods, and
- receive less than 2,000 euros (about £1,700).
You have to be below both limits to be left out. Cross either one, on a single platform, and that platform can report you.
Two things matter here for multi-platform sellers.
First, the de minimis is applied by each platform separately. Three apps that each keep you just under the limits could still add up to a sizeable trade that you must declare. Being below the reporting threshold on each app is not the same as being below the tax threshold overall.
Second, and this is the reassuring part, HMRC is clear that "a platform reporting your details to HMRC does not automatically mean you owe tax." The report is information. Whether you owe anything depends on the rules above: are you trading, and is your profit over your allowances? The rules themselves haven't changed. HMRC simply has better visibility now.
How do I file Vinted, eBay and Depop as a single trade?
If you're trading and your combined gross income is over £1,000, you report through Self Assessment as a self-employed sole trader. You treat the three apps as one business.
Here's the practical sequence.
Do I need to register, and by when?
Register for Self Assessment by 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you started trading. So if your reselling trade started in 2025/26, you register by 5 October 2026. You file online and pay any tax due by midnight on 31 January after the tax year ends.
How do I combine the figures?
Add up all your sales across Vinted, eBay and Depop for the tax year to get one turnover figure. Then total your allowable business costs across all three. The difference is your trading profit, and that single profit figure goes on the self-employment pages of your tax return.
Typical allowable costs for a reseller include:
- the cost of the stock you bought to sell
- postage and delivery you pay
- packaging materials
- platform selling fees and payment-processing fees
- mileage or travel to source stock
Cash basis or traditional accounting?
Most sole-trader resellers use the cash basis, where you record income when the money arrives and expenses when you pay them. Since 6 April 2024 the cash basis is the default method for sole traders, so you'd actively opt out only if traditional (accruals) accounting suited you better. For a simple buy-and-sell operation, cash basis usually keeps the bookkeeping lighter.
Keeping one clean record across all three platforms is the whole game here. If your books are a mess of three separate exports, our bookkeeping services can pull them into a single set of figures that's ready to file.
Illustrative example: one reseller, three apps
Illustrative example. Priya resells pre-loved clothing as a side business alongside a £30,000 PAYE job. In 2025/26 she sells across all three apps and her gross sales come to £18,400. Her allowable costs (stock, postage, packaging and platform fees) total £9,650.
Her trade is one trade, so she combines everything:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Gross sales (Vinted + eBay + Depop) | £18,400 |
| Less allowable costs | (£9,650) |
| Trading profit | £8,750 |
Because her costs (£9,650) are far more than the £1,000 trading allowance, she claims her actual expenses, not the allowance. Claiming the flat £1,000 would have left a £17,400 "profit" and a much bigger bill, so actual costs clearly win here.
Now the tax on her £8,750 profit, on top of her £30,000 salary:
- Her personal allowance and basic-rate band are already partly used by the day job, so the whole £8,750 of trading profit falls in the basic-rate band. Income Tax at 20% is £8,750 x 20% = £1,750.
- Class 4 National Insurance for the self-employed only starts once profits pass the Lower Profits Limit of £12,570 for 2025/26. Her £8,750 profit is below that, so Class 4 NIC is £0.
So Priya's reselling trade adds £1,750 of tax for 2025/26, all payable through Self Assessment by 31 January 2027.
These figures are illustrative. Your own position depends on your other income, which is why it's worth modelling before the deadline rather than after.
What about VAT, Capital Gains Tax and Making Tax Digital?
A few bigger thresholds sit above the day-to-day reselling rules. Most small resellers won't hit them, but you should know where the lines are.
VAT. You must register for VAT once your VAT-taxable turnover goes over £90,000 in any rolling 12-month period (the threshold from 1 April 2024). That's turnover, not profit, and it's measured across the whole trade, so all three apps count together. Very few clothing resellers reach this, but a high-volume operation can, and the combined-turnover point catches people who think per-app.
Capital Gains Tax. This is the £6,000 figure from earlier. If you sell a single personal possession (not trading stock) for £6,000 or more, CGT can apply to the gain. For ordinary reselling, your items are trading stock and fall under Income Tax, not CGT, so the £6,000 chattels rule generally isn't your concern. It's there for the occasional high-value personal item, like jewellery or art.
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. From 6 April 2026, MTD for Income Tax applies to sole traders and landlords whose qualifying income (turnover) is over £50,000, based on the 2024/25 tax year. If your combined reselling turnover is in that bracket, you'll need to keep digital records and send quarterly updates. The threshold then steps down to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028. Again, it's measured across your whole trade, not per platform.
If you're an established seller, our page for Vinted sellers goes deeper on the practical side, and our wider ecommerce accounting support covers multi-channel sellers running stock at scale.
FAQs
Do I get a separate £1,000 allowance for each selling app?
No. The trading allowance is £1,000 per person, per tax year, and it applies to your combined income from one or more trades. Selling on three apps still gives you a single £1,000 allowance across all of them.
Does it matter that I sell on three different platforms?
Not for the tax. If you're buying to sell at a profit, HMRC treats the activity as one trade regardless of how many apps you list on. You register once, combine the figures, and file one set of self-employment pages.
My platform sent my data to HMRC. Does that mean I owe tax?
Not automatically. HMRC is clear that a platform reporting your details does not by itself mean tax is due. Whether you owe anything depends on whether you're trading and whether your profit is over your allowances. The report just gives HMRC the information.
When do I need to register for Self Assessment as a reseller?
By 5 October following the end of the tax year you started trading in. You then file online and pay any tax due by 31 January after the tax year ends.
Can I claim expenses instead of the £1,000 trading allowance?
Yes, and for most resellers it's the better choice. If your stock, postage, packaging and fees add up to more than £1,000, claim your actual allowable expenses. You can use the flat £1,000 allowance instead, but not both, so pick whichever gives the lower taxable profit.
Is selling my own old clothes on Vinted taxable?
Generally no. Selling your own used belongings is not trading and isn't taxable income. The tax only bites when you're buying or making goods to sell at a profit.
Talk to an e-commerce accountant →
Get your reselling income filed as one clean trade
Three apps, one trade, one return. If you'd rather not untangle Vinted, eBay and Depop exports yourself, Zmartly can combine your sales into a single set of figures and file your Self Assessment correctly. Book a free 20-minute call with a Zmartly accountant via our Vinted seller page.
