A third of eBay sellers are making £10,000 a year!

Only eight credit card busting weeks till Christmas so drastic measures are called for. Charity begins at home, so from now until Christmas all my excess baggage will be ending up not in my fabulous new Oxfam shop down the road, but on the Internet. It’s time to shift some stuff on eBay. Now this may sound like some flighty new whim dreamt up on a Monday morning after a weekend spent largely in my wardrobe trying to force my way through a pile of vintage stilettos to get to my winter boots – not so. This is based on sound financial research by parcel delivery firm Collect+ who have discovered that a third of the 368 “etrepreneurs” they surveyed are making £10,000 a year trading on line. Now that, is an awful lot of bnwt tops from Topshop. And I intend to get in on the act. I have the trusty Vix as my wingwoman – she is, as you might suspect, a vintage eBayer in every sense of the word – and when it comes to spotting a trend she is meticulous. She could produce you a seasonally adjusted spreadsheet tracking the rising price of cake stands from 2008, when they were still available in London charity shops, to this August, when they were officially declared hunted to  extinction by the owner of a junk shop in Caister on the Norfolk coast. This season we will still be mainly in China – sandwich plates and matching tea cups have yet to peak, but we will be dipping our toe into the vintage shoe market (very on trend – see the lovely Amy Hanson’s online celebrity charity shoe auction in aid of children forced to live and work on rubbish dumps on smallstepsproject.org). I’ll let you know how I get on on Twitter, so please keep an eye out, and if anyone has any encouraging stories to share, please post them on the KidStart facebook page.