Your responsibilities as a maker

When someone buys from you on Luma, the sale is between you and them. We run the marketplace and the checkout, and step in when something goes wrong, but we’re not the retailer and we’re not selling your work on your behalf.

That means some things are yours, and it’s much better read now than found out later.

We’re not accountants or lawyers, and nothing here is advice. It’s the list of things worth looking into, with pointers to the people who can actually tell you.

Tax

Selling as a hobby still counts. HMRC gives you a trading allowance of £1,000 a year of income from self-employment. Under that and there’s usually nothing to file. Over it and you’ll need to register as a sole trader and do a self-assessment return.

VAT only applies once your turnover passes the registration threshold. If you think you might be close, the current threshold is on gov.uk and it moves.

Your Finances page has every payout broken down, and your closed-shop records stay available if you ever stop selling.

If you’re VAT-registered

Every price you set on Luma is what the shopper pays, so it includes your VAT. That goes for postage and personalisation extras as well as the item.

If a VAT-registered business buys from you and asks for a VAT invoice, it’s yours to issue. HMRC gives you 30 days, counted from the date of supply rather than from the day they ask, and on a Luma sale that’s normally the day the shopper paid.

Your order page has the date of sale, what was bought, the prices and the shopper’s name and address. You add the rest:

• your name, address and VAT number
• an invoice number of your own, following on from your last one
• the VAT rate and amount for each item

HMRC’s guide to VAT invoices has the full list, and a shorter version for sales of £250 or less.

The receipt from our payment provider (Stripe) isn’t a VAT invoice, because it has no VAT number and no VAT breakdown.

What we report to HMRC

Online marketplaces have to tell HMRC about the people who sell on them. It’s a reporting rule, not a tax, and it doesn’t change what you owe. HMRC uses it to check what’s on a tax return against what a marketplace actually paid out.

It only applies to you if, in a calendar year, you make 30 or more sales or are paid more than €2,000 (about £1,700). Below both, we don’t report anything about you.

If you do cross one, we’ll email you for a few details we don’t already have:

• your date of birth
• your National Insurance number. A limited company or LLP gives its company registration number instead, and an ordinary partnership its Unique Taxpayer Reference
• the address you live at, or a company’s registered office

We need them before the end of that year, because we can’t file the report without them.

Then, by the end of January, we send HMRC your name and those details, along with your VAT number if you’ve given us one and the sort code and last four digits of the account we pay you into. With them goes your trading for the year, quarter by quarter: how many sales you made and what you were paid for them after our commission, with the commission shown separately.

You get a copy of exactly what we sent, so there’s nothing in it you haven’t seen.

We use the details for the report and nothing else, and keep them only as long as tax law says. The rule itself is on gov.uk.

Product safety

You’re the manufacturer, which carries real obligations. What applies depends on what you make:

• Toys for children aged 3 to 14. UKCA marking, a technical file, and age marking. Anything a child under 14 might play with counts, whatever you call it, and so does a child’s dressing-up costume, wherever you list it. Toys for under-3s can’t be sold on Luma, soft toys aside.
• Soft toys. This one catches people out: the rules judge a soft, stuffed toy as one a baby will get hold of, whatever age you label it for. So it has to pass the under-3s tests, with eyes and noses that can’t be pulled off, seams that hold, and nothing small inside that could come loose.
• Pieces with a bought-in battery unit. A clock movement or an LED tealight, for example. Keep the unit sealed as it came, and never a button battery. Anything mains-powered, or that you’ve wired yourself, can’t be sold on Luma.
• Soap and cosmetics. A safety assessment from a qualified assessor, a Product Information File, labelling with the INCI ingredients and a named responsible person, and a notification on the government’s SCPN portal, all before anything goes on sale.
• Candles, wax melts and diffusers. Not regulated the way cosmetics are, but there are labelling conventions, and CLP hazard labelling wherever there’s fragrance.
• Filled cushions and upholstered furniture. Fire-resistant filling and covers, and the permanent label the furniture fire safety rules ask for. A cushion cover sold on its own isn’t caught.
• Children’s nightwear. The nightwear flammability rules, and the “keep away from fire” label where they apply.
• Anything that touches food. Food-safe glazes, finishes and resins. Glazed ceramics carry lead and cadmium limits, and a painted rim on a glass or mug is where they usually fail.
• Jewellery worn against the skin. Limits on the nickel it releases, stricter for piercing jewellery, and on lead and cadmium.
• Jewellery in precious metal. UK hallmarking is required above certain weights, and it’s the Assay Office you’d talk to.

If a shopper or Trading Standards raises a concern, we’ll ask you for the paperwork the rules say you keep, so keep it to hand. If you’re not sure whether something applies to you, your local Trading Standards service advises businesses as well as shoppers.

Prohibited items

Some things can’t be sold on Luma however they’re made. Weapons, knives and other blades head the list, along with replicas of any of them: if something could be used or presented as a weapon, assume we won’t allow it. The full list, and the categories that are allowed with extra duties on you, is in our prohibited items policy. If you’re not sure, ask us before you list it.

Other people’s designs

Making something yourself doesn’t give you the right to the character, logo or slogan on it. What counts as handmade covers what that rules out, and intellectual property and copying covers what happens if someone reports your work.

Consumer law

Both of the laws below apply to every order, whatever your setup. When you open a shop you confirm you’ll accept returns and refunds on the terms below. Selling regularly to the public normally makes you a trader in law anyway, so for most makers that’s saying out loud what already applies, and your shoppers are covered either way. It’s a separate question from tax: the trading allowance above is HMRC’s, and this isn’t.

Two pieces of law govern every online sale to a consumer in the UK, and both are already built into how Luma works:

• Consumer Rights Act 2015. What you sell must be as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality.
• Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. A shopper gets 14 days from delivery to change their mind, except on items made to their specification.

We make the required disclosures on every listing, run the returns process and record what each shopper was shown at the point they bought. What you can’t do is contract out of any of it. No shop policy overrides a statutory right.

Telling shoppers who you are

The same law asks every business selling online to give its name and the address it trades from before a shopper is bound. So we ask for both when you open your shop, and we show them to a shopper who is buying from you: at checkout, on their order confirmation and on their order page afterwards. Nobody browsing your shop sees them, and they never go into a search engine’s copy of your page.

It has to be a real address you can be reached at, but it doesn’t have to be your kitchen table. A studio, a registered office or a business address you already use is fine. If you’re a limited company, use the registered name and address rather than the name on the shop.

One thing that stays yours: your own invoices and receipts. A sole trader trading under a name that isn’t their own has to put their real name on those, and a company has to put its registered name and number. That’s your paperwork rather than anything Luma prints.

Reviews

You can ask a shopper for a review, but you can’t attach anything to it, and that includes offering something to get a review changed or taken down. It’s banned on Luma and in UK law. So when a one-star review arrives, don’t offer a refund to make it go away. Reply to it instead, and if you think it’s fake, report it and we’ll look. Our reviews policy has the whole rule.

Keeping the sale on Luma

An order that starts here is placed, paid for and fulfilled here. Don’t invite a shopper to pay you directly, don’t move a conversation to email or Instagram, and don’t use their details for anything but their order. It isn’t only a rule: our dispute process, our refunds and everything else in the terms only reach a sale that went through Luma. A payment taken off the platform has none of that behind it, for you or for them.

Your shoppers’ details

You’ll see a name and address on every order. Use it to send the parcel and nothing else. Adding someone to a mailing list because they bought from you isn’t allowed, here or under UK law.

Insurance

Not required, and worth thinking about anyway, particularly if you sell at markets or make anything that goes near a child. Public liability and product liability are the two kinds of cover to look at.

Where to look

• gov.uk for tax, VAT, UKCA marking and business setup
• Your local Trading Standards for product safety and labelling
• The Assay Office for hallmarking
• HMRC’s helpline for questions about your own tax