Replacement touch screens for smartphones and tablets are big business. Almost everyone who has owned a smartphone has, at some point, broken its screen. The technical word for a touch screen is “digitizer”

400+ sellers sold over 130,000 digitizers with combined sales of over £2.5million in one month on eBay.

Top Twenty Digitizer eBay Sellers

Rank User ID Monthly Sales Seller Location Stock Location VAT Number
#1 mechanic_warehouse £299,023 UK UK None
#2 phone_screen_warehouse (was) beautician_boutique £262,800 UK UK 15373042 Fake (now removed)
#3 kamani-uk £140,870 UK UK None
#4 adornsource £119,626 China UK None
#5 da.bizzle £88,340 China UK None
#6 stoneage1984 £86,216 China UK None
#7 myphonefixed £58,414 UK UK None
#8 silverelectron £41,057 China UK None
#9 phone_screen_warehouse £37,322 USA UK None
#10 kyky7654321 £34,649 China UK None
#11 cellular-funs £34,121 China UK None
#12 ornahouse £34,121 China UK Yes
#13 ruohong_store £28,203 China UK None
#14 worldphoneparts £25,367 China UK None
#15 fonejoy £22,388 UK UK Yes
#16 nyk802 £21,851 UK UK Yes
#17 xtechonline £21,768 UK UK None
#18 happylemon_ltd £21,515 UK UK Yes
#19 phil_biggs_deals £20,689 Canada UK None
#20 royalbestbuy13 £19,826 China UK None

LL Trading Ltd

Chinese owned UK company; “LL Trading Ltd” run three eBay accounts and have a total market share of 23.86% of all replacement screens sold on eBay.co.uk.

  1. mechanic_warehouse;  when approached for a VAT invoice they said “prices didn’t include VAT”.
  2. beautician_boutique; is displaying a fake VAT number.
  3. phone_screen_warehouse; state they are USA based and have no VAT number.

These three accounts generate estimated sales of £7,189,740 which equates to £1,198,290 in VAT (View separate case study on LL Trading Ltd here).

Market share

Market share of Replacement Touch Screens on eBay.co.uk in December 2014:

Total Sales £2,510,363 100%
Top Twenty Sellers £1,418,166 56%
LL Trading Ltd £599,145 23.86%
Chinese sellers with no VAT numbers £511,526 20.38%
UK Sellers with no VAT numbers £265,291 10.57%
UK Sellers with VAT Numbers £65,754 2.61%

The statistics speak for themselves. VAT Evading LL Trading Ltd & 10 other Chinese sellers account for 44.24% of the total market….