Listing a graded comic on eBay: the label, the title, the photographs and the box
A graded comic, a slab, is a comic sealed in a hard plastic holder by a grading company, with a label on top that carries its grade. Listing one is easier than listing a raw comic in one way: the grade is printed, not argued over. It is harder in another. The buyer is paying for what is on that label, so every fact on it has to reach the listing, and the listing has to prove the slab is the one described.
Said up front. This store sells raw comics, and no upload of a graded comic from Point and Sell to eBay has been recorded yet. What follows is how a slab listing is put together, and then, separately, exactly what the product does with one today and what it has not been shown to do.
What the label tells you, and where it goes
The label carries the grading company, the title and issue, the publisher and year, the grade on the ten point scale from 0.5 to 10.0, and a certification number that belongs to that one holder. A CGC label also states the page quality, "White Pages" for example, and CGC's label colour says what kind of grade it is: the blue Universal label is the ordinary one, a yellow Signature Series label means a witnessed signature, and a purple label means the comic has been restored.
Where each of those goes:
- The grader and the grade go in the title, right after the issue number. "CGC 9.8" is what a graded buyer types into the search box. Titled that way, a CGC 9.8 Amazing Spider-Man #300 reads Amazing Spider-Man #300 CGC 9.8 1st Venom Comic Book Marvel Comics 1988.
- A restored comic says so in the title. A purple label sells at a different price from a blue one of the same grade, and a buyer who finds out from the photographs will not be pleased.
- The certification number goes in the listing, so a buyer can look it up for themselves.
- eBay's comic book category has item specifics for Grade, Professional Grader and Certification Number, and the first two are among the filters down the side of a search. Fill them. As with every comic item specific, the column name in a bulk file has to match eBay's exactly, or the value lands in a custom field that no filter reads.
Check the certification number before you list
CGC publishes a free certificate lookup on its website: type in the number from the label and it shows what that holder should contain. Check it against the slab in your hand before the listing goes up, and do the same with any other grader's own lookup. It takes a minute, it catches a mistyped digit before a buyer does, and if the record does not match the slab, you want to know that before anyone pays for it.
Photograph the holder, the label and the back
A slab needs fewer photographs than a raw comic and each one matters more: the front of the holder, the back, and the label close enough that the grade and the certification number can be read. Tilt the slab or the light until the glare is off the plastic; a label nobody can read is a question in your inbox. Show any scuff or crack in the holder too. The holder is not the grade, but it is what the buyer receives.
Price it by grade and by grader
A 9.8 and a 9.6 of the same book are two different items at two different prices, and so are the same grade from two different companies. Search for the book with the grader and the grade, "Amazing Spider-Man 300 CGC 9.8", and filter to sold listings, the way the pricing guide describes. Do not price a CBCS copy from CGC sales, or the other way round, until you have seen what that company's copies actually sold for.
Ship it in a box
A slab is a comic in a rigid holder, and it goes out in a box with padding, not in a bubble mailer. It is heavier and larger than the raw comic inside it, so the weight and package on the listing have to be the slab's, or the postage the buyer paid will not cover it. Weigh one packed the way you pack them. The comic shipping weight calculator shows the weight and box this product writes for a slab next to a raw comic's. And comics are not on the Media Mail list whether they are slabbed or not; the Media Mail guide quotes the rules.
How Point and Sell handles a graded comic
You say it is graded. A slab is a row you tick graded on the review screen, the same way you tick signed. The product never decides that a comic is graded from a photograph, and it never estimates a grade.
You type the label. A graded row needs three boxes on the row's second line filled in from the label: Grader, Slab grade and Cert #. A graded row with any of the three empty is refused, and so is a graded row with an empty price box or one still at the batch's starting price: type the slab's own price over it. A row ticked both graded and lot is refused too, because each slab has its own grade and certification number.
What it writes. The grader and the grade in the title,
right after the issue number, as in the example above. Three extra columns, C:Grade, C:Professional
Grader and C:Certification Number, holding what you typed.
They are added to the file only when the batch has a graded comic in it, so a
batch of raw comics gets exactly the file it always did, and a row that fills
some of the three and not the others is refused. The weight and package are
1 lb 8 oz in a 13 x 10 x 3 inch box, an estimate from a CGC holder's
published size plus a graded-comic mailer, and a weight or package you type on
the row wins. A setting, Graded comics ship by, sends every slab on
your parcel policy, or wherever a raw comic of the same kind would go.
Duplicates. The duplicate check never matches a slab against a raw listing of the same issue, and it never offers a slab as more quantity on a live listing: a slab is its own listing.
What it does not do, as of today. No slab listing from here has been through a recorded eBay upload, so none of the above has been confirmed by an eBay upload report: the three column names are eBay's published item specific names, not ones a real upload has accepted, and whether eBay's Grade and Professional Grader filters place the listing using what you typed has not been seen. Nor does it fill eBay's separate Graded item specific, and if that is what the graded filter reads, the listing is not placed by it. It does not read the label from the photograph and it does not look up the certification number; you type the three facts and check them. A slab takes the same eBay condition setting as your raw comics. The camera counts the same number of shots as for a raw comic, so press Next comic after the label. And there is no store category for slabs: a graded single goes to a single-comic store category by its price, as any single does, unless one of your own store rules sends it elsewhere.
Sources
CGC's own website, for its certificate lookup and its label types. The three eBay item specific names are the ones this product's decision log records reading from eBay's comic book category filters, and no upload from here has confirmed them, which is why the page says so twice. The example title is generated by the product's own title builder on the day this page is served, and everything else about the product is its code on the day this was published. How to photograph, price and ship a slab is general practice among comic sellers, not a rule.