'I earn £100,000 a year selling bits and bobs on eBay': Mother ditches her NHS job to make six-figure salary from online trading

Cathy Hayes used to earn £28,000 as an NHS administrator

Now sells a variety of items on eBay and is a registered business seller

Makes over £100,000 a year and once made £5 profit on IKEA saucepan



Works from her dining room table and says household items are top sellers



Mother Cathy Hayes, who is making around £100,000 selling goods through Ebay

My dining room had long ceased resembling a place to eat. It looked more like a junkshop than the centre of the family home.

From the sideboard to the table, every spare surface was covered with gadgets and packaging.



Toasters and Teasmaids jostled for space with camping mats, plastic armbands and bubble wrap.

It was chaos — yet I felt nothing but excitement. For it was evidence that my crazy business idea was finally working, and was turning me — an ordinary mother-of-three — into a budding entrepreneur.

Four years later, I’m easily turning over £100,000 a year — far more than the £28,000 I earned as an NHS administrator — and I do it all working family-friendly hours that allow me to spend time with my sons, Jamie, 14, Kane, ten, and six-year-old Ned.

I’m living every working mother’s dream. And I’ve done it using a tool at every woman’s disposal: the online auction site eBay.

The same site exhausted working mothers cruise in the evenings after the children have gone to bed, looking for cut-price designer clothes and bargains.

I’m proof that, with hard work and research, a female’s instinctive bargain-hunting skills can be turned into a profitable business. Within a year, I was earning enough to give up my job and concentrate on my new enterprise. And now I’ve written a book explaining how you too can use eBay to earn a living.

Looking back, I suppose I’d always had an entrepreneurial streak. Growing up the youngest of two in London, I remember dabbling in money-making schemes; selling on some of my childhood toys to friends.

But I wasn’t academic, and after leaving school at 16 I started an admin job on the grand salary of £6,000 before being promoted to medical secretary in my 20s.

I always felt I was capable of more, but didn’t know how to go about it, especially as I then had Jamie, with my first partner. It was only after meeting my current partner John, 41, in 2002 that I found the courage to branch out. And yes, I’ve known the taste of failure.

In 2006, we re-mortgaged our home in North London and opened a soft play centre for children. I had done endless research and was convinced I could make money — yet just over a year later we had to close it down.

We faced ruin: our debts were in excess of £100,000. Meanwhile, I’d just given birth to my third son Ned, meaning my earning potential was low. John and I had to sell our beautiful house and move into a one-bedroom flat where we slept on a sofa bed in the living room, Ned in a Moses basket at our side and Jamie and Kane in the only bedroom.

But I refused to be defeated. Together, scrimping and saving, John and I renovated our flat, creating two extra bedrooms in the cellar, before selling it on and using the money we’d made to fund the purchase of another rundown property we could do up. We’d dug ourselves out of the nightmare.



Mrs Hayes with her sons Jamie, 14, Kane, 10, and Ned, 6 - who remain her priority despite her success

With Ned now a toddler, I found a £28,000 clerical job at my local hospital. The only problem was that it wasn’t permanent. When the year was up, I was moved to temporary work on an hourly rate, and my earnings plummeted to £200 a week.

Try as I might, I couldn’t manage to secure a full-time, permanent position. John and I were still managing to make ends meet — his job in property maintenance covered our basics — but as he was self-employed, his work could be sporadic. Every month was a struggle.

It was against this backdrop that, in March 2010, looking at job adverts in the newspaper, I came across an article about a couple who had made a fortune trading on eBay. An £8 million fortune to be precise.

Profit: The author sold a Dualit filter coffee machine similar to the one on the left for £52 after buying it for £2 and doubled her money by selling Magimix goods, right



Double the money: Cathy Hayes also made a profit on camping equipment



I was fascinated. If this seemingly ordinary couple could achieve such riches, then surely I could make a few extra pounds to help ease the financial strain? That was all I wanted — a way to bump up my income. I certainly wasn’t contemplating a permanent career.

That night I searched through the loft to see what I might be able to sell. I came up with a random assortment: Fisher Price toys, children’s clothes, an old boiler, a Seventies telephone and a buggy in mint condition. Onto eBay they went. By the end of the week they had all sold, I was £600 richer — and hooked.

The only trouble was that after that enthusiastic clear-out I had nothing left to sell. I needed to source some more stock, but first I wanted to work out the best investments.

At work, during my lunch hour, I scoured eBay, looking at what sold well and recording the data on a research chart. I quickly realised that household paraphernalia — everything from garden tools and tents to kettles and toasters — were in demand.



Armed with this information, I ventured out to car boot sales and markets, charity shops and fetes, buying up anything along these lines that I thought I could sell at a profit, all purchased with the money I had made during that first week.

That became my business model — I’d use the profits from my sales to fund my next stock purchases.

I was amazed at what I could find, like the Dualit Filter Coffee Machine I picked up at a car boot sale for £2 and which I sold for £52. When a local shop had a range of camping gear for sale at a steal, I bought the lot and sold it on for double what I’d paid for it.

Pretty soon my front room looked like a stockroom, much to the bemusement of my children. I was exhausted as I poured all my energy into growing my fledgling business, holding down my day job and packaging up and posting the goods I had sold.

Somehow, I also had to make time to scurry around sourcing stock —and, of course, my three children remained my priority.

I knew I needed to find a better way to stockpile goods to sell, and when my brother, Matt, mentioned an auction clearance website, I logged on. It had a job lot of Dualit and Magimix goods — all returns, or slightly damaged — for £1,200. It was a lot of money, but I went for it. I used all my profits to date to buy them and within two weeks I’d sold the lot on for more than double the money.

By now, instead of trading as a individual, it made sense to set up an online shop, registering as a business seller and paying a one-off monthly fee rather than a fee for every item I sold. Although I didn’t realise it, I was embarking on a new life as a full-time eBay trader.



By June, just two months after I had placed my first online advert, I had racked up £9,064 in sales. At that point, our costs were still high so we were only making around 20 per cent profit — in this case £2,000 profit. Still, it was enough for me to give up my day job.

I seemed to have an unerring instinct for what would sell, be it children’s toys, or Christmas trees. I realised there was a reason why High Street stores spend a fortune on packaging and presentation, and spent hours working out the best way to photograph everything I put up for sale.

The mother, who works from her dining room table, uses profits to buy more stock

When I sold clothes, I recruited the family as models. That’s not to say I didn’t make mistakes: early on, John and I posted a lot of our goods in black bags and Manila envelopes, roughly taped together.

As our product range expanded, however, we noted that some of our customer feedback was about our poor packaging — and our local postmistress also told us our packages were regualrly splitting after we had left them with her.



From that moment, we stocked up on bubble wrap, clear tape, brown tape and proper mailing bags — all off eBay, of course. We also invested in software that made uploading items on eBay much faster — pretty vital when you are listing dozens of new products a day.

By November 2010, just eight months after I had started, I’d sales of £61,385, which meant an awful lot of goods to dispatch — some days 150 or more. With business booming, John gave up his job to come on board.



It was a relief, although also tricky at times. It was my business, but now there were two of us and sometimes we would argue about the way to do things.

Then there was the space issue: as Christmas approached that first year we were using up every inch we had, from the garden shed to the loft. We were bursting at the seams. So we built a single storey business ‘HQ’ in the garden.

By March 2011, I’d turned over £100,000, around 25 per cent of which was profit — a figure that could have been higher if I had managed my costs better in the first few months.

So that’s what I did — and in my second year of trading I made the same amount of profit from selling a lot less. By then, John and I had learned from our mistakes.

Fast forward two years and I’m still here, with 350-400 product lines in my online shop. It’s a random selection — everything from household goods and garden stuff to umbrellas and yoga mats — and it changes all the time. It has to, to stay ahead of the competition.

I haven’t made it rich yet, but that was never my ambition — I just wanted to stop struggling to make ends meet. Along the way I learned a lot which I hope can help women like me. eBay is a tool that needs to be used precisely, but if you get it right you can take control of your own destiny.