Nearly 180,000 people are now buying and selling for a living on eBay, the auction website.
The home-based entrepreneurs are generating an estimated £2bn - exceeding W.H. Smith eBay said yesterday.
Over the past two years people using eBay as their first or secondary source of income has more than doubled from 68,000. The site has 15m hits a month.
There is a North/South divide of eBay activity with the biggest concentration of new eBay business operating outside London. Our capital does not appear in the top 10 business centres, but Birmingham scrapes in at 10th place.
The East Midlands has been labelled the eBay ‘capital’ with the highest number of new start-ups in the Derby, Nottingham and Leicester area.