Listing a crate of records on eBay: what a photograph can tell you, and what it cannot
A record is an easier listing than a comic in one way and a harder one in three. Easier, because the sleeve is twelve inches of flat cardboard with the artist and the title printed on it in large type. Harder, because almost everything a buyer is paying for is somewhere the camera is not: the disc inside the sleeve, the matrix scratched in the run-out groove, and the difference between a 1971 pressing and a 1977 one that looks identical from the front.
This is what that means in practice, written from the code that lists a crate here and from the one measurement we have run on it.
What eBay's Records category actually asks for
Vinyl sits in category 176985, Music > Records. The aspects
it offers, and the ones worth filling, are these: Artist, Release Title, Record
Label, Catalog Number, Format, Type, Speed, Record Size, Release Year, Genre,
Style, Edition, Material, Color, Features, Country of Origin, Record Grading,
Sleeve Grading, Language and Composer. The category also offers Producer, which
this product leaves empty.
Four of them are the ones a listing here fails without: Artist, Release Title, Record Grading and Sleeve Grading. The first two are what a buyer searches. The two grades are what sellers leave blank and then answer twenty times in messages, and the disc grade is the one that sets the price. A sealed record is the exception: there is no disc to grade, so it needs only the sleeve.
Two of the aspects are not really questions. Format is always
Record and Material is always Vinyl: they exist so
the category's filters work. We have not measured what eBay does with a blank
one, and the reason to fill them is that a filter you are missing from is a
quieter failure than a wrong price.
Color is worth a sentence of its own. eBay's Records category has a Color filter and coloured vinyl is one of the things buyers filter on, so a listing that leaves it blank on a red pressing is invisible to the people most likely to pay a premium for it. The default is Black, and the default is right far more often than it is wrong, which is exactly why the wrong one is easy to miss.
Grading: two axes, and neither one can come off a photograph
Records grade on the Goldmine scale, and they grade twice: once for the disc, once for the sleeve. M, NM, VG+, VG, G+, G, F, P. eBay's own spellings are the long ones, Near Mint (NM or M-) and so on, and its Records category carries both aspects separately for the good reason that a near mint record in a split sleeve and a beaten record in a clean one are different objects at different prices.
The disc grade cannot be read from a photograph of a sleeve, because the disc is inside the sleeve. That is not a limitation of any particular software; it is a fact about cardboard. Even out of the sleeve, the light scuffs that separate VG+ from VG show at an angle under a bright light and not in a flat overhead frame.
So the grade is yours to state, it is worth stating conservatively, and the place it costs you is returns rather than sales. The one thing worth doing mechanically: pick your two default grades once, for the crate you actually have, and let the exceptions be the rows you touch.
A sealed record is its own case. Sealed means Brand New to eBay, it means there is no disc grade to give, and it means a buyer who opens it and finds a warped record has bought a sealed record, which is a thing experienced vinyl buyers understand and new ones do not. Say factory sealed and let the photographs of the shrink wrap do the arguing.
The year on the sleeve is not the year of the album
This is the single most reliable way to write a wrong listing, and it is worth understanding before you type anything.
A 1977 reissue of a 1971 album usually carries the 1971 copyright line, because the copyright belongs to the recording. The catalogue number, the label logo and the run-out etchings are what date the PRESSING, and the printed year on the back is a fact about the recording. Both are defensible answers to "Release Year" and buyers search for both.
We measured this. Across 56 records read from other sellers' listing photographs, the year printed on the sleeve matched the year those sellers had typed into their own listings on 9 of 45. That gap is not an error rate. It is two different questions, answered honestly, disagreeing four times out of five.
Pick one and be consistent. If you sell mostly reissues, the printed year is the one you can defend from the photograph in the listing. If you sell mostly originals, the two answers are the same number anyway.
Catalogue numbers have no check digit
A catalogue number is the thing a serious buyer searches on: SD
7208 finds a specific pressing in a way "Led Zeppelin IV" never will. It
is printed on the spine, the back cover and the centre label, usually in three
slightly different forms.
It is also the one field with nothing to catch a mistake. An ISBN has a
check digit. A UPC has a check digit. A catalogue number is a string a label
chose in 1971, and a misread digit produces a number that looks exactly as
plausible as the right one. In our own measurement, a number read off a small
45 label came back 1494 MF when the label said 1694
MF, and nothing about that read looked wrong.
The practical answer: photograph the centre label, not just the back cover. The number is printed largest there, and the one misread we found was on a number read from the back of the sleeve rather than from the label. Whether the label shot lifts the read rate is not something we have measured yet.
What to photograph, in what order
Four shots a record, every record, in this order.
- The front of the sleeve. This is the listing's first photograph and the frame that identifies the record.
- The back of the sleeve. The catalogue number, the label, the barcode if there is one, the country, and the track listing a buyer will zoom into.
- The centre label. The catalogue number again, larger, plus the pressing plant marks that tell a collector what they are looking at.
- Whatever the record makes you want to show. The disc out of its sleeve, a gatefold open, an insert, the seam that is starting to split.
Give every record the same number of shots. That is a rule about counting, not about photography: whatever sorts a crate's photographs into records does it by the count, and a record shot five times when the rest got four pushes every record after it out by one.
Do not turn a landscape sleeve upright to look tidy. A record sleeve is square, and software written to stand a portrait comic up turns square sleeves the wrong way round: a rule of ours, written for comics, turned 30 of the 112 sleeve photographs in the first set we tested. It is switched off for records here, so send the frames as shot.
Postage: a record is media, and that surprises people
USPS Media Mail eligibility is a list in the Domestic Mail Manual, and sound recordings are on it. Books are on it. Comic books and magazines are not. Most of the confusion about records comes from sellers who learned the comic rule first and assumed it generalised.
What a record needs more than a cheap service is a mailer that does not crush. The convention that survives contact with the post: a stiffened record mailer, disc taken out of the sleeve and slid in beside it rather than left inside, which is what stops the disc's edge splitting the sleeve seam when the parcel is dropped. If you have not got the scale out yet, this product's defaults are 1 lb 4 oz for a single LP in a mailer with pads, 14 oz for a 10 inch and 6 oz for a 7 inch single in a small mailer. They are defaults, not a weighing of your crate.
Your shipping policy is your business, and a seller who ships everything Ground Advantage for speed is making a defensible choice. The point of this section is that nobody should ship a record the expensive way because they believed a rule that does not apply to it.
What Point and Sell does with a crate, and what it does not
Point and Sell reads a crate from your photographs: four shots a record by default, and whatever number you set instead, front, back, labels. It fills the identity and pressing aspects from what is printed, then builds the eBay file. It is deliberately timid about the things above. It copies the catalogue number and never guesses one. It asks for the printed year and says so. It refuses to grade anything, and it will not let a batch out of the door until the record and sleeve grades are yours.
What it does not do, as of today. Records go to eBay only; Whatnot and Shopify refuse them, because neither category has been through a real import here. Nothing checks the identification against a release database, so the artist, title and catalogue number on every row are yours to confirm against the sleeve. There are no lots: a crate of fifty records is fifty listings. There is no phone camera page for records, so a crate is photographed and then uploaded. Every row needs a price from you. There is no price guide for records, because the one this product uses has no music category. The barcode is transcribed off the back cover and nothing validates it, unlike a game's UPC. And no record listed from here has been through a live eBay upload yet, so the first crate you send is worth checking one listing at a time before you send the rest.
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Sources
The eBay aspect names and the category id were read off the Records category's own browse filters and live listings on 12 September 2026, and are not yet confirmed by an upload from this product. The measurement quoted throughout is 56 records read from other sellers' eBay listing photographs, front and back only, listed through this product on 12 September 2026: artist and title both right on 46 of 56, and on 50 of 51 once five multi-record lots that had slipped into the set were taken out; catalogue numbers read on 30 of 56 and agreeing with the seller's own on 10 of 10 where one was typed; labels matching loosely on 33 of 52; the printed year agreeing on 9 of 45; and 30 of those 112 photographs turned the wrong way by the comic rule that has since been switched off for records. The three weights are this product's shipping defaults rather than a measurement. Goldmine is the record trade's own scale, not ours. Media Mail eligibility is Domestic Mail Manual 173. All of it is in this product's decision log.