Amen!

Sadly, for me, I gave up selling on eBay this year due to that new rule because I knew that there'd be no way in hell I'd be able to prove that I'm taking a net loss on those items I wanted to sell. If I had known they were going to postpone it to next year, I would've sold off as much as possible, as fast as possible. There's no telling at this point either if they're going to delay it again next year, or use this first delay as a kind of "warning", or better yet, hopefully ditch it all together. Who am I kidding, they're gonna keep it in. Lately, it seems the government's job is to take as much of our money as possible.

So true! I have been doing everything I can to not be on food stamps...

Your last sentence is true, but only because we as voters are too stupid, or apathetic to elect normal people to congress! There are plenty of good folks that run also, they just never get traction, because of the general malaise, of the voting public!

All items I sell on Ebay are something I already bought and paid taxes on originally. So now when I go to sell items I have to pay Ebay fees, PayPal fee's, and now federal income tax on any total "profit" over $600? Insane. I bet the $600 "profit" threshold is before all of those Ebay and PayPal fees. Profit is in quotes as I'm not making any money on used items that I already originally paid sales tax on to begin with.

Might as well just give the stuff away.

Kinda funny how these new rules are part of a bill called the "American Rescue Act"...

Trust me, it's not due to confusion about the new rule, we all know it's a blatant money grab on items and money that has already been taxed numerous times. It's about outrage. Tons of companies that do their own online payment processing, including eBay, have been petitioning non-stop to delay and/or completely remove this new rule. Plus, I don't think the Biden Administration wants to be seen even more as the bad guys during such a hard financial time as we're in by coming down on everyone with an additional income tax that is really hard to fight and/or prove you don't have to pay.

My understanding is that the $600 amount is just the threshold at which the services (Venmo, PayPal, eBay) would be required to report your financial transactions to the IRS. It then effectively puts the burden of proof on you to show what transactions were actually taxable / profitable.

So.. hope you kept your purchase receipts for absolutely everything you sell, in order to show that what was reported to the IRS as “profit” from selling was in fact a loss.

Also, probably a good idea to keep personal transfers ( splitting a meal, sending money to a partner for rent, etc) in a separate account than than one you use for receiving payments for selling things/ services. Any transactions not earmarked “goods and services” should not count towards the threshold that triggers reported to the IRS. So you could probably use an account that only uses “friends and family” transactions, and not have it submitted to the IRS.

Folks acting like it's the end of the world and closing their businesses and uses of paypal left and right is pretty laughable. The 1099k reporting tax collection was not going to affect majority of people, and in most cases even those who did do business online, the amount that they would have to pay was going to be pretty pathetic.

Random Etsy shop owner, unless your hitting 6 figure sales numbers, you weren't gonna be paying much under these threshold changes. The whole thing is out to get the big money dealers using online third party sales services to avoid sales taxes or setting up legitimate businesses.

If it's such an insignificant amount, then why the change? If it's really to go after the "big money guys", again, why the change to such a low threshold? The original $20,000 threshold is way more than the overwhelming majority of people who sell on eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Depop, etc. will ever do in a calendar year. So, again, why the change to such a low amount?

I don't care how you slice it, it was an outright money grab that was designed to affect, and collect from, anyone and everyone who did almost ANY kind of buying and selling online; from the antique store owner trying to sell their client's stuff on eBay, to the rare guitars collector selling one or two guitars per year on Reverb.com. No, this lowering of the threshold was designed to affect everyone. Sorry.

I even remember all the chatter before they passed that bill that included this lowering of the online transaction threshold, too. Back then, the chatter was that if you had more than $600 in your bank account, or if there was more than $600 going into and out of your bank account per month, your bank was going to be reporting everything about your account to the IRS/Federal Government. Whether that was true at the time or not and then they just pivoted to the online transaction thing, or just outright fear mongering by the media overstating what was actually in the bill, we may never know. But they sure got that $600 number dead on. I even remember local news interviewing bank managers saying that they have no idea how they're going to be able to keep up with all that information/paperwork that the government was going to require.