From £5 to £1000: eBay Selling Experiment

This is going to be a fun little experiment.

I’ve spent many years working in marketing and ecommerce, and I’ve sold bits and pieces on eBay, Amazon, and Etsy before. Not recently though. It’s been a long, long time since I properly listed things, packed orders, watched prices, and tried to make a small margin.

So I’ve been wondering something.

From virtually a standing start, how easy would it be to make £1,000 on eBay, starting with as little as £5?

That’s the experiment.

The idea is simple enough. I buy something cheaply, sell it for more, then reinvest the money back into the next purchase. No big stock buy. No pretending this is a business empire. Just a small rolling pot, a few sensible buys, and a bit of patience.

There is one extra wrinkle, though. I’m not doing this with a brand new eBay account, but I’m not exactly starting with a fully active seller account either.

The account I’ll be using has been dormant since October 2021, so eBay is treating it cautiously and at the moment, I’m restricted to 18 items and no more than £190 in sales each month. In practical terms, that means I’m pretty much starting from scratch.

I’ve already slightly broken the £5 rule because I spent £6.50 in Tesco this morning on some hosepipe connectors. They feel like the sort of product that could work well on eBay: useful, small enough to post, not too fragile, and the kind of thing someone might search for when they need one rather than when they’re just browsing.

From previous experience, there are a few things worth remembering about eBay. It isn’t Amazon. The buyer mindset is different.

eBay buyers are often looking for value, something specific, something a bit unusual, or a replacement part they can’t easily find elsewhere. They’re also more aware of the individual seller. Feedback matters. Photos matter. A clear description matters. And I think interaction matters too. A quick, human reply can still make a difference.

Another key thing for me is postage. I’ll be offering free postage wherever possible because, rightly or wrongly, listings with free postage often feel simpler and more attractive to buyers.

Of course, free postage isn’t really free. It has to be built into the selling price, along with packaging, tape, envelopes, fees if they apply, and the original cost of the item.

That’s the part I want to track properly.

If I spend £6.50 and sell the items for £10, that doesn’t mean I’ve made £3.50. I need to take off postage, packing materials, and any selling costs. Only then do I know the real profit.

The challenge is to see whether I can grow a tiny starting pot into £1,000 by buying carefully, selling clearly, and reinvesting the profit rather than taking it out.

It might work. It might crawl along painfully slowly. I might discover that hosepipe connectors are the new Bitcoin, although probably not.

Either way, I’ll keep track of what I buy, what I sell, what I spend, and what the running pot looks like each month.

How I’ll Track It

I don’t want this to become a vague “I think I made a bit of money” sort of challenge. If I’m going to do it, I might as well track it properly.

The important number isn’t sales. It’s the running pot after all costs.

That means recording the original item cost, postage, packing materials, envelopes, tape, any selling fees, and what’s left after everything has been paid for.

For each item, I’ll try to track:

• Date bought
• Item bought
• Where I bought it from
• How much I paid
• How much I listed it for
• How much it sold for
• Postage cost
• Packaging cost
• Any fees or promoted listing costs
• Actual profit
• Amount reinvested
• Running pot

Because the account is restricted to 18 items and £190 of sales a month, I’ll also need to keep an eye on how much of that monthly limit I’ve used in the first month or two. That makes each listing more important. I can’t afford to waste too many slots on products that sit there doing nothing.

Now let’s see what happens.

Monthly Tally

Month	Opening Pot	Stock Bought	Sales	Costs	Profit	Closing Pot	Notes
June 2026	£6.50	£6.50	£0.00	£0.00	£0.00	£0.00	First stock bought: hosepipe connectors from Tesco. Account currently limited to 18 items and £190 monthly sales.

Lessons Learnt

Small, light, useful, non-breakable, easy-to-post items feel like the best place to start.

In eBay postage, exclude the following areas as they increase postage costs (Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, Scottish Highlands / North Scotland, Scottish Islands / West coast, Isle of Wight and the Isles of Scilly

Should Age Checks Start With the Phone?

There’s been a lot written in the popular press about children accessing social media platforms and pornography, and about the need for these platforms to carry out some form of age verification.

There’s also the wider question of whether underage children should have certain features throttled back on their smartphones, or whether they should be allowed to use these devices in exactly the same way as adults.

I do agree that social media platforms and websites have a responsibility to be more vigilant when it comes to protecting children. That feels obvious enough.

But I do wonder if we’re missing a trick with the devices themselves.

Surely it can’t be too difficult for age verification to happen on the phone itself, tied to the device and the person using it. The phone could then carry that age status with it and decide which sites, apps, and platforms it is allowed to connect to, or which features should be restricted.

That wouldn’t mean social media companies, adult sites, app stores, or messaging platforms get to wash their hands of the issue. They still have a role to play in keeping children safe.

But device-level age verification could add another layer of protection around the content children see, the messages they receive, and the platforms they can access.

I’m sure there are privacy, security, and practical issues I haven’t thought through yet. There probably always are with this kind of thing.

But as a seed of an idea, I think it’s worth looking into.

We;; this turned into a very timely post, within about four hours of me putting this post live, the BBC News reported that "Starmer tells Apple and Google to ban nude images on children's phones".

The article was a little bit interesting, as before I read it (and not being a fan of Apple products), I didn't realised that Apple has already age-verified its UK users and even offers a blocking service for several of its own apps including iMessage; so the technology is out there, we do just need the tech companies to step up to the plate and help protect the youngest in society.

Doom Scrolling and the Slot Machine Effect

There are a lot of people talking about the addictive nature of social media platforms, especially the idea of doom scrolling.

That endless feed is a geat design for these platforms, you never really get to the end of it. There’s always another post, another video, another opinion, another tiny hit of something. Good, bad, funny, annoying, useful, pointless. It just keeps coming. Very good engineering design that does make these platforms "addictive", not sure if addictive is the right term, or whether they are just designed to make it hard to stop!

I had a thought earlier about whether social media platforms are built with some of the same ideas as slot machines.

Slot machines can be addictive because they offer the possibility of a “win”. You pull the lever, or press the button, and maybe this time something good happens. Maybe this time you get the reward.

And I wonder whether doom scrolling works in a similar way.

You keep scrolling because the next great piece of content might be just one swipe away. Most of what you see might be rubbish, irritating, repetitive, or forgettable, but every now and then you find something that makes you laugh, teaches you something, shocks you, or gives you that little feeling of reward, that little hit of endorphins, which is probably the same as that slot machine win.

This is only a seed post for now, because I need to read more about it properly, but I do think there’s something interesting here. The endless scroll might not just be convenient design. It might be one of the reasons these platforms are so hard to put down.

We Basically Invented Google (kinda)

In the mid-1990s, I worked in the Marketing Department at BT in Leeds.

We were based at Butts Court at the time, and one of my mates there was Jason, better known as “Caratacus”.

For some reason, the two of us had got into the habit of thinking up questions during the morning. Not useful questions, necessarily, just odd little things we suddenly wanted answers to.

Who was that actor in that film? Where did a certain phrase come from? Who sang a particular song? What was the capital of somewhere obscure? The sort of thing that would now be settled in about four seconds on your phone, before anyone had even finished arguing about it.

But this was the mid-90s. The internet existed, technically, but not in any useful way for two lads sat in an office in Leeds trying to settle a lunchtime curiosity.

So we had our own system.

At lunchtime, we’d nip round the corner to Waterstones and start looking through the books until we found the answer.

Reference books, film books, dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedias, whatever looked like it might do the job. We didn’t buy them, obviously. We just used Waterstones as a sort of analogue search engine with nice carpets.

And the thing is, it worked.

Ask a question. Search the available information. Find the most likely source. Check the answer. Report back with entirely unearned confidence.

Basically, Jason “Caratacus” and myself invented Google a couple of years before Google officially existed.

Admittedly, our version involved walking around the corner, manually browsing shelves, and trying not to look like we were treating a bookshop as a free research department.

But the core concept was there.

So yes, I’m not saying Larry Page and Sergey Brin stole our idea.

I’m just saying that if they’d been in Waterstones in Leeds in about 1996, they might have seen the future.

The Palms of Ocracoke (Mild Horror)

This story started while I was on holiday in Spain, staring at the palm trees opposite the Bali beds we had by the pool.

Right at the top, where the fan-shaped leaves meet the trunk, the crowns looked strangely dark. For a second I thought I saw movement up there. It was probably a bird. Probably.

But then I started wondering ...  what if something lived up there? Something humanoid, but not quite human. A spirit, maybe. Someone lost. Something waiting.

That tiny thought became The Palms of Ocracoke.

Nobody on Ocracoke liked being near the palm grove after dark.

The strange thing was that even on still evenings, when the sea air had completely died away, the fronds at the very tops of the trees still seemed to move.

The villagers had plenty of explanations for it. None of them good.

Some said a demon lived among the crowns of the trees. Others claimed to have seen something small and human-shaped moving through the darkness above them.

Whatever the truth, most people gave the grove a wide berth.

Maeve never paid much attention to the stories.

Fear had lost most of its meaning 15 years ago.

During a violent autumn storm, a sudden flood had torn through the island’s low gullies. Her 7-year-old son, a bright, spirited boy with a shock of red hair, had vanished in the deluge.

His body was never found.

The village assumed the current had swept him out to sea. Maeve had spent the years since waiting for a knock on the door that would never come.

On the 15th anniversary of the storm, Maeve walked into the palm grove for the first time.

The mud sucked at her boots. The air was thick with damp earth, salt, and rotting vegetation. Above her, the palm crowns shifted in the dark, even though the air was still.

She kept walking.

At the end of a narrow gully, the trees seemed to gather closer together. Their trunks leaned inward, as though they were listening.

Then something moved above her.

Maeve looked up.

In the crowded crown of the nearest palm, the shadows twisted. A small figure stepped out from behind the trunk and stared down at her.

Maeve didn’t scream. She didn’t run.

She looked at the figure and felt a strange, sudden ache in her chest.

“Please,” she whispered into the dark. “Don’t be afraid.”

The figure froze.

Then a sudden rush of wind swept down from the fronds.

It struck Maeve.

There was no violence in it. Instead, a flood of memory, fear, and grief burst through her mind.

The spirit entered her and was instantly overwhelmed by the weight of her sorrow. For 15 years, he had been a lost and lonely thing in the dark, acting out only because he wanted to be seen. Now, through her, he understood the hole he had left behind.

He felt her sleepless nights. Her refusal to leave the island. Her fierce, stubborn love that had never faded.

And Maeve felt him.

She saw his final moments on the day of the storm. The roar of floodwater tearing through the gully. His small hands gripping the slick bark of a palm tree as the water rose around him. The awful snap of wood. The suffocating rush of mud and debris that buried him before he could cry out for her.

He hadn’t been washed out to sea.

He had been here all along.

Trapped between worlds. Terrified. Homesick.

Maeve wrapped her arms tightly around herself, holding the spirit within her as though she were holding him as a child again.

Tears streamed down her face, but she smiled through them.

“I’ve got you,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t your fault, my sweet boy. It was just the storm. You can rest now. Momma’s here.”

She gave him everything she had left. Every ounce of love, forgiveness, and peace she had carried through all those years.

And at last, the boy stopped fighting the pull of the afterlife.

The cold fear that had gripped his soul for over a decade began to thaw.

He let go.

By morning, the fog had lifted from the grove.

The villagers found Maeve on her knees in the mud at the end of the gully, calm and tear-streaked, staring at the earth between her hands.

There, pushing through the damp soil, was a tiny palm sapling.

It was unlike any other tree in the grove.

While the rest of the palms were deep green, the very top of this young plant, where the fan leaves were just beginning to form, carried a bright, unmistakable shock of crimson.

Maeve gently touched the red frond.

“He’s home,” she whispered to the quiet forest. “He’s finally home.”

The village never feared the palm grove again.

In the years that followed, the old stories changed. People no longer spoke of demons in the crowns of the trees. Instead, they spoke of the boy who was lost, the mother who found him, and the strange little red-crowned palm that grew in the place where love had finally reached through the dark.

The People of the Airport Baggage Carousel

Got to love an airport baggage carousel, everyone stands there pretending to be relaxed, while quietly scanning a conveyor belt with the intensity of a police stakeout. I’ve started naming the different groups of people you always seem to find there, mainly for my own entertainment.

The Gatekeepers
They stake out their claim at the start of the conveyor belt like guards. For them, the holiday hasn’t properly started, or ended, until they are the very first person to touch a handle.

The Commando
He turns a routine task into a mission. Sharp elbows, intense eye contact, and absolutely no regard for the social contract of personal space, and definately no manners as he (yeah it's usually a 'he') pushes he way to the front and takes you out as he manhandles his luggae from the belt.

The Over Packers
Sweet, over-packed, and physically outmatched by their own belongings. They are usually a frail older couple who rely entirely on the unspoken airport rule that someone stronger will eventually step in to do the heavy lifting for you.

The Second-Guessers
They suffer from temporary luggage amnesia. Every ruddy suitcase that rolls past sparks a full marital debate about whether they bought a new bag before departure. Come on, you only said goodbye to it in Manchester a couple of hours ago, surely you can remember what it looked like!

The Snipers
They hang back perfectly calm. They don’t move until they spot the target, then they step in, execute a clean retrieval, and vanish towards the exit before anyone else has even noticed them.

I think I’m probably a Sniper. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

The Autograph I Never Asked For

Back in the mid-90s, I was stood on a train platform in Leeds waiting for a train down to London for a meeting, when I suddenly spotted :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}. As a massive football fan and lifelong Manchester United supporter, it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. To this day, I still think he was the greatest player ever to play in England. Effortless, unpredictable, flawed, brilliant... football’s first real rock star.

I desperately wanted to go over and ask for an autograph, but he was with a young woman and I convinced myself I shouldn’t interrupt him. It felt like his private time, and I didn’t want to become another overexcited fan shoving a scrap of paper under his nose. So I stayed quiet, watched him from a distance for a few moments, then got on my train.

And honestly... I still regret it.

Since then, I’ve gone out of my way to speak to people I admire when the opportunity appears. Not in an intrusive way, but just enough to say hello, shake a hand, or share a quick word. Life moves far too quickly to spend it worrying about looking daft for thirty seconds. Sometimes the moments you don’t take stay with you far longer than the ones you do.

In fact, writing this has reminded me to finally reach out and contact Dick Van Dyke. Funny how old regrets can still give you a little push years later.

I'm sad about dying

I don't think I'm afraid of dying.

My personal belief system tells me that life doesn't simply end, and I believe I'll be reborn in some form, somewhere.

But I do sometimes feel sad at the thought of my final days.

I honestly believe that I'll know the very last time I see the people I love; my beautiful wife and my amazing daughters. When my mind wanders in that direction, I find it very sad and painful. Even just writing this brings a ruddy tear to my eye!

I think, particularly as a parent, these thoughts hit harder than the very thought of death itself.

Not because I'll be gone. Not because I know they'll carry on without me. Simply because I'll know that I'll never see them again.

I think it's strange that I can make peace with my own ending far more easily than I can make peace with leaving the people I love behind.

I am always hopeful that:

1. I am a long way from my final days.

2. I'll learn to come to terms with the end, and not find it quite as sad as I do now.