The final deadline for all sellers to sign up for eBay’s new payment system was yesterday. If you didn’t, all of your listings were pulled down. The new payment system requires the seller to link eBay directly to your bank account, supply eBay with your Social Security # and the generous gift of a 1099 at the end of the year. I can understand this applying to the mass sellers who actually use eBay as a retail store, but to the causal seller this is outright BS. In addition, this is for sure going to start limiting what is offered for sale on eBay. A casual seller is not going to want to give eBay their SS# just so they can sell a set of plastics or a shooter rod. Opinions?

I do have a private account. eBay claims they will not 1099 you unless you surpass their 200 sales/$20,000 mark, but the many issues that arise here are you now have a bank account that literally keeps record of all income from eBay, since this is how you will be paid going forward. If audited, the IRS will not care that you did not reach a $20k threshold, they will be only interested in the additional income that they see in that bank account. Furthermore, I believe this really will effect how much product will be offered on eBay going forward. We have enough problems with identity theft in this world today. Do I really need my SS# and bank information out there on another server that may someday be compromised?

I’m with you on this. I just got 1099 by PayPal last week. Was confused because I was way under the $20k threshold, until PayPal pointed me to the fact that I live in POS Illinois who has a $1,000 cap on sales.
So like you, I’m in the same boat. I sold a family train collection this past summer. After fees and supplies, not including all of my time I spent doing this, I cleared about 6k. Which I split with a family member. Now I have to talk to my accountant to to try and figure out all of my loss vs. profit. The only one thing on my side is I kept all of my receipts and and a detailed spread sheet of all of my sales. I will say this, unless I move to another state, my eBay days are done.

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In most cases, we are not making money, we are just recouping money, and in most sales, at a loss.

For example:
You buy a new Stern for $7,000 in 2018. Decided to sell it in 2020 for $6,500. Are YOU going to tell the IRS that you had an additional $6,500 in income and want to pay your fair share of taxes? Most likely not, because in your mind you’re going to say I paid $7,000 for this two years ago. It is no different than what we are talking about. I know many people who rotate out 2-3 newer machines a year, being kind, that would be an additional income of 15k. Should they be expected to pay taxes on 15k of additional income?

The above examples are no different than if we are selling off an old train collection, furniture in our house or an old stereo system. We paid full price & taxes for it at the time of purchase.