Guides

Custom labels for comics on eBay: a label on every comic that finds it in the box

By Winston, Comic Collector Enthusiast. 26 September 2026.

An order comes in for an issue of Nova. It is somewhere in one of forty long boxes in the garage. The Custom label on the listing is the only thing eBay keeps that can tell you which box and where in it, and only if you put that there when you listed it. This is a labelling system that does: what the field is, the shape of a label that finds the comic, and what the label does for you after the sale.

What the Custom label is, to eBay

Every eBay listing has a field called Custom label, marked SKU. It is your reference: you set it, eBay stores it, and it comes back to you beside the listing on your active listings in Seller Hub, beside the sale on your orders, and as a column in the reports you download from there.

In a File Exchange bulk upload file the column is named Custom label (SKU), parenthesis and all. CustomLabel is not the name in that template, and this site's file check refuses a header with that name in it. The File Exchange guide has the rest of the file.

eBay does not make you give each listing a different label. This store's older listings carried the box number as the label, one number on every comic in the box, a dozen listings sharing it, and eBay took them all. That freedom is the first thing to decide what to do with.

A label per comic, not one per box

A box number on every comic in the box is quick to type, and it does half the job: it tells you which box to pull down. It stops there.

• The order does not say which comic. Box 30 has a hundred and fifty comics in it. You find the one that sold by reading covers against the order's title.
• Nothing downstream can tell the comics apart either. A sale on another site names a label, and a label that is on twelve eBay listings cannot say which of the twelve to end. Any tool that ends listings by label either ends all twelve or none of them.
• Your own history blurs. A relisted listing gets a new eBay item number, so the item number is a poor way to follow one comic over months. A label that belongs to one comic follows it through every relist. On this store's own exports, counted by item number, 61% of the listings under $5 looked gone within three months; counted by label, the same rows read 30%. The difference was relisting, not selling.

A label per comic costs one extra number per listing, and every one of those three problems goes away.

The shape: the box, a dash, the slot

The shape that works is the box, then a dash, then the comic's place in the box, counted from the front: 76TR-001 is the first comic in box 76 TR, 76TR-002 the second. Four habits make it hold up for years:

• The box part is letters and digits and nothing else. No spaces, no slashes, no # sign. A label with a space in it gets torn in two by the first tool that reads a pasted list of labels as words, and M2 CC-004 becomes M2 and CC-004, which are two different things.
• The slot is three digits, zero padded. 76TR-009 and not 76TR-9, so that sorting the labels as text puts them in shelf order, and so every label in a box is the same length.
• The number is the box. If you add letters after the box number, as this store does to mark which batch a comic came in with (44W, 44TR), keep the number the physical box, so every label that starts with 44 is in box 44.
• A slot is never reused. When a comic sells, its slot stays empty. The next comic into the box takes the next number after the highest one used. A number that has been on a listing has a sale history, and a second comic under it inherits the first one's.

Put the label on the comic as well as on the listing: on a sticker on the bag, or in pencil on the back of the board. A comic pulled for photographs, or knocked out of order, then goes back in its slot by reading it, not by guessing, and the slot order in the box stays the order on eBay. The free custom label sheet prints a box's worth of these on Avery labels.

Case is the other thing to settle. 76tr-001 and 76TR-001 look like two labels to some software and like one to you. Pick upper case and keep to it, and treat any tool that tells the two apart with suspicion.

A pick list from the orders

Once every order carries a box and a slot, the morning's orders are a route. Download the orders from Seller Hub, sort them by the label, and you have the walk: every order in box 44 together and in slot order, then the next box. Pull, tick, move on, rather than reading one order, walking to a box, walking back, and reading the next.

One catch in the sort: as text, box 100 sorts before box 44. Sort on the box number, or pad box numbers to the same width from the start.

Ending a listing when the comic sells somewhere else

A comic that sells at a show, on Whatnot or in a shop has to come off eBay the same day, or the next eBay buyer pays for a comic you no longer have. A File Exchange file can end listings in bulk: an End row names the eBay item number and a reason, and for a comic sold elsewhere the reason is NotAvailable. The item number is what the file needs, and the label is how you get to it: the other site's sale names 44W-014, your active listings report says which item number wears 44W-014, and that is the row. With a box label, that lookup comes back with twelve item numbers and no way to choose. The same label on the other site is what makes this work, which is why the Whatnot guide calls its SKU column the one never to leave blank.

Relabelling

Comics move. A box gets split, a run gets pulled into its own box, a dollar box gets merged into another. When a comic moves, change its label to the new box and that box's next free slot, on the live listing, the same day. The listing keeps its item number; only your reference changes. Change it anywhere else the comic is listed too, or a sale there names a label your eBay listings no longer carry. If you are moving a whole store from box labels to per-comic labels, do it a box at a time, as you go through the box, so each new label is written while the comic is in your hand.

How Point and Sell labels a comic

You name the box; it numbers the comics. The box label is typed once, on the New batch form or on the camera page. Spaces are taken out and the slot is added: a box typed as 76 TR gives 76TR-001, 76TR-002 and on, one label per row, lots included, in the order the rows sit on the review screen. There is no box on the review screen for typing a row's own label.

The numbering carries on. The first slot of a batch is the highest of three numbers: one past the highest slot under that exact box label in the last active listings report you gave the site, one past the last slot this box's earlier approved batches used, and 1. Use the same label next month and it picks up where it stopped. The review screen says where the batch starts, and a Start number on the New batch form overrides all three when you need it to. That comparison is case-blind: with 76TR-005 in your report, a batch for 76 tr starts at 76tr-006, slot 6 and not slot 1, though the label keeps the case you typed.

Wrong box? Until the batch is approved, the review screen can change its box label, and the numbering is worked out again for the new label from the same three sources, because the old label's numbers belong to the old box. After approval it is refused: the labels are in a file you may already have uploaded.

What the file will not carry. Before a file is offered, a label that is not letters and digits, a dash and three digits is refused, and so is a label that appears twice in the file. A box therefore runs to slot 999; slot 1000 would be 76TR-1000, which is refused, so a box that full gets a new label.

Your older labels. The site reads the labels you already have. A label that is up to ten letters and digits, a dash, three digits and an optional letter is one comic. A label that is not that shape and sits on two or more live listings is read as a box: the Inventory page shows each listing under it as its own comic in that box, with no warning that they are duplicates. A label a batch here issued is one comic whatever its length. And because the letters after a box number mark a batch, not a box, the pick list, the show page and Inventory put 44W-001 and 44TR-012 in the same box, box 44.

The pick list. The Pick list page takes the orders download from Seller Hub, or reads your unshipped orders straight from eBay if your eBay account is connected here, or takes a pasted list of labels from a Whatnot report. It sorts by box number, then slot, with the buyer and order number beside each line. Four labels pasted in come out as:

A label on two order lines is flagged, because it is either two copies or two comics under one label, and an order with no label at all is listed at the end to find by hand. The sheet is paper: nothing is marked shipped.

The End file. On the show page, paste the labels that sold elsewhere. The site looks each one up, whole and case-blind, never as the start of a longer label, in its latest copy of your active listings, and writes an End row per listing with NotAvailable as the reason. You download it, or, with your eBay account connected and allowed to upload, the site sends it. A per-comic label on two live listings ends both, with a warning, since either could take the next order. A box label on two or more live listings is left out and named, because the file cannot tell which comic sold: end that one by hand, or run the box audit, which lays a fresh set of photographs of the box against its live listings and hands the End file the item numbers of the listings whose comics it did not find. A listing holding more than one copy is left out too, because ending it would end the unsold copies with it. A pasted M2 CC-004 stays one label when that is a label you have live, unless M2 and CC-004 are live labels too: then nothing is ended for it, and the page says so.

Relabelled listings. When you change a live listing's label on eBay, the next active listings report you give the site matches it by item number, so its history carries over instead of the old label reading as gone.

What it does not do, as of today. It does not let you type one row's label by hand; every label in a batch is the box plus the next slot. It does not relabel live listings: moving a comic to another box means changing the label on eBay yourself, and after a batch is approved its labels are settled. It does not reuse the empty slots a sale leaves. It cannot end the right listing under a box label that is on several live listings, and it says so rather than guessing. The pick list does not mark orders shipped, and the End file only knows about the listings in the latest copy of your active listings, so a listing newer than that is not in it.

Try it on a box · Store categories for a comic store · More guides

Sources

The Custom label (SKU) column name is the one this store's own File Exchange uploads use; the box label on a dozen listings is this store's own listings from before it used per-comic labels, and the 61% and 30% are its own exports, counted on 26 August 2026. What eBay shows where is how Seller Hub presents the field. The labels and the pick walk above are generated by the product's own code on the day this page is served, and everything else about the product is its code on the day this was published. The box and slot shape is one working comic seller's practice, not a rule.