How to print eBay labels on a 4 × 6 thermal printer

The eBay label is already 4 × 6

When you buy postage on eBay and download the label, the PDF you get is a page measuring 288 by 432 points. That is exactly 4 inches by 6 inches at full size. Unlike most marketplaces, eBay does not park a small label in the corner of a Letter sheet.

So if your eBay label prints small, off centre, or with a barcode that will not scan, the file is not the problem. The print settings are.

The setting that causes almost every eBay label problem

Page scaling. If your print dialog is set to "fit to page", "shrink oversized pages", or anything other than actual size, the label gets resized on its way to the printer. Even a small reduction narrows the bars of the barcode, and once the ratio between wide and narrow bars drifts far enough from what the scanner expects, the read fails.

A thermal printer lays down 203 dots per inch. A bar that should be about thirteen thousandths of an inch wide is only around three dots to begin with. Take 30 percent off and it becomes two. That is the whole story behind labels that look fine to the eye and refuse to scan at the counter.

What to set

1. Set the paper size to 4 × 6 in your printer driver, before you open the label.
2. In the print dialog choose Actual size, and set page scaling to None.
3. Turn off any "auto rotate and centre" option if your printer offers one.

Why eBay labels sometimes will not open in other tools

eBay ships its label PDFs encrypted. It is not a password you need to type, it is a permissions layer applied to the file. Plenty of PDF tools open it and then fail when they try to read the page contents, which is why some label utilities throw an error on eBay files specifically.

Relabely handles this by rendering the page at 300 dots per inch instead of copying it directly. That is well above the 203 dpi a thermal head can actually print, so nothing visible is lost, and the barcode comes through at full fidelity.

What Relabely does with an eBay label

It recognises that the page is already the correct size and passes it through untouched. No cropping, no rotation, no rescaling. Re-cropping a label that is already right would only introduce error.

The useful part for eBay sellers is batching. Drop in twenty label PDFs at once and you get a single file with twenty 4 by 6 pages, in order, which is one print job instead of twenty.

Printing on a regular printer instead

If you do not have a thermal printer, choose Letter, label centered in the print size menu on the converter. You get the 4 by 6 label in the middle of a Letter sheet with room to cut around it. Print at 100 percent here too, then cut along the label edge and tape it to the parcel.

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