Where UK Sellers Are Actually Going After Leaving eBay.

Search "why are sellers leaving eBay" and you'll find no shortage of answers. Fees, policy changes, a private-seller experience that increasingly crowds out anyone running real volume. What's harder to find is the second half of that story: where those sellers actually go next. This is that piece.

Private sellers on eBay UK have had it relatively easy since October 2024, when eBay dropped the final value fee to 0% in most general categories and shifted the cost to a buyer protection fee instead. That's not who this article is for, and it's not who's leaving.

The sellers actually moving are the ones eBay classifies as business sellers, whether they think of themselves that way or not. HMRC's trading rules, not a checkbox on a profile, decide that. And business sellers are paying a final value fee of roughly 10.9% to 13.6% depending on category, plus a per-order fee that rose to 40p on orders over £10 in February 2026, plus a 0.32–0.43% regulatory operating fee, plus 20% VAT on top of all of it. Put together, most business sellers are handing over somewhere between 13% and 17% of every sale before postage and packaging costs are even accounted for.

For anyone moving PC hardware specifically, that fee sits on top of a category where margins are already thin. A GPU or motherboard that sells for £250 loses £30-£40 to eBay before a single postage label gets printed. That's the number sellers are doing in their heads when they start searching for somewhere else to list.

• General marketplaces (Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree):free to list, but no buyer protection, no integrated payment on Facebook, and a scam rate on popular listings that's high enough to make experienced sellers cautious. Fine for local collection-only sales, weak for shipped, higher-value electronics.
• Specialist PC hardware marketplaces (Computey and similar):built around one category instead of trying to be everything to everyone. Buyer trust is category-specific rather than generic, and fee structures tend to undercut eBay's business-seller rate significantly because there's no cross-subsidy for unrelated categories.
• Direct-to-community channels (Discord server sales, subreddit marketplaces):zero platform fee, but zero payment protection and zero shipping infrastructure. Works for enthusiasts trading within a trusted community, doesn't scale past a handful of sales a month.
• Staying on eBay but restructuring as a private seller where legally possible:a smaller group, and one that only works below HMRC's trading thresholds.

The pattern across all of it: sellers aren't looking for "no fees," they're looking for fees that make sense for what they're actually selling. A platform charging 13-17% to sell a graphics card makes less sense than one built specifically around graphics cards, motherboards and RAM, where the fee structure doesn't have to subsidise every other category on the site.

Computey charges 6% commission for individual sellers and 10% for business sellers, taken at payout through Stripe Connect rather than upfront. On that same £250 GPU, a business seller keeps roughly £25 more than they would on eBay, without changing anything about how they package, describe, or ship the item. The listing categories are built for hardware specifically, so a graphics card listing asks for the fields a hardware buyer actually wants to see: chipset, VRAM, warranty status, whether it's still under manufacturer cover, rather than generic category fields borrowed from a marketplace that also sells trainers and vintage teacups.

None of this requires abandoning eBay entirely, and for casual, low-volume private sellers it may not be worth the switch at all given the 0% private seller fee. But for anyone selling PC hardware regularly enough that HMRC calls it a business, the fee gap between a generalist marketplace and a specialist one is no longer small enough to ignore.

The "why are sellers leaving eBay" search volume isn't going away, because the underlying fee structure that's driving it hasn't changed. What's changed is that there's now a clearer answer to the obvious follow-up question. Sellers aren't leaving resale behind, they're relocating to platforms built around what they actually sell.