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Since you have not sold in a long time, you are not enrolled in eBay Managed Payments and no longer have a valid seller account. To start the process, you do have to start a listing. When you attempt to publish that listing, eBay will store it as a draft and will redirect you to the seller onboarding process.
The are two stages.
1) The first stage surrounds your identity and requires you to decide whether you are selling as an individual or as a legal business entity. You will be asked to provide a full legal name, physical address, date of birth, and tax id number (required by federal law). You may be asked to upload a picture of your driver license or other government document.
2) The enrollment process allows you to skip this second stage until you actually have a sale, but it is best to get it out of the way now because there can be delays. The second stage is to link a checking account that will accept both ACH credits and debits. The name on that account must match the name on your eBay account. eBay will verify the checking account by asking you to log into your online account through a third-party portal. Alternatively, you can request microdeposits be sent to your checking account. Upon receipt, those values must be reported back to eBay's acknowledgement screen.
eBay now processes all buyer payments and will withhold payout to you until your checking account has been linked. There are also other types of holds for new sellers and high value sales.
Back to your sale. If the buyer asks that you cancel the sale, you can do so at buyer request and receive a full refund. However, the sale will still be reported on an IRS 1099-K at the end of the year if the total amount the eBay collects from buyers on your behalf exceeds $600 for the year (required by federal law). It would be up to you to counter the income on your tax return with your selling expenses and cost of goods.
There is no monthly charge for a business account. You might be confusing that with a store subscription, which can be attached to either a personal or business eBay account. I don't have an eBay store subscription on any of my business or personal accounts.
Whether a business account or personal account, the only thing that actually matters is that your identity info must match your federal id and your banking account. eBay defines a personal and business account based on your legal standing as an entity.
For instance, I have a corporation, so two of my accounts operate under that corporation and federal tax id, and I then had to provide stakeholder information (with personal identity docs) as a principle in the corporation (no different than on my corp tax return) in order to sell. I linked the same corporate checking account to both eBay business accounts. On my personal accounts, I had to provide personal identity info and had to link a personal checking account in order to sell.
I also have a couple of accounts that don't sell, so they remain in the same state as your older account. Thus far, no identity info is required for a buying account, and all I need is to provide a payment method at checkout.
You may have originally opened your eBay account as a business, back when it didn't matter and it was easy to change back and forth.
If you have a legal business entity and file a tax return as a business, then do register as a business. Otherwise, you should be able to change to a personal account during the onboarding process when it asks you to choose (as long as your contact info and bank are both personal).
This is the screen I saw two years ago to make that choice:
A personal account can still file as a schedule C business on the tax return to take full advantage of deductions available to a home business.
Once you choose to be a business, there is no going back, as the enrollment has many more requirements of a business. However, it appears that if you enroll with a personal account, it might be possible to upgrade to a business account later.
