Printing eBay shipping labels on a Mac

eBay will give you a label sized for a 4x6 roll. The option just is not where you would look for it, and the version you get by default is laid out in a way that guarantees a bad print on a thermal printer.

Find the 4x6 option before anything else

On the create-label screen, the format selector sits towards the lower right, near the print button rather than with the service and package settings where you would expect a format choice to live.

Pick 4x6 there and the file arrives already the size of your roll. Everything below this section becomes unnecessary.

What the Letter version actually looks like

This is worth understanding because it explains a symptom people misdiagnose constantly.

The default Letter label is an 8.5 × 11 in page with the postage label placed sideways, near the top. It is designed to be printed on office paper and cut out with scissors.

Send that page to a 4x6 roll and the printer does exactly what it is told: it fits the whole Letter page onto one 4x6 label. The result is a label that is tiny, rotated, and often clipped — all three at once, which is why it looks like a hardware fault rather than a page-size mismatch.

No print setting fixes this. The page really is that shape.

If you are stuck with the Letter version

Sometimes the 4x6 option is not offered for the service you chose, or you have already bought the label. Then the page has to be cut down before printing, so the printer receives a 4x6 document instead of a Letter one.

Preview does it for free: select the label with the rectangular selection tool, press Cmd+K to crop, rotate with Cmd+R if it is sideways, then print at 100% on a 4x6 paper size. The full walkthrough is in how to print 4x6 labels on a Mac.

It works. It is also six actions per order, done freehand, on a layout that never changes — which is the part worth noticing. eBay generates the same geometry every time, so the crop only needs working out once.

For the Letter version you already have, our free browser tool handles both halves of the problem: it crops the label out, and turns it upright when eBay laid it sideways across the page.

Bulk labels

Buying postage in bulk gives you one PDF with many labels, and eBay has changed that file's layout more than once — sellers who had thermal printing working have had it stop after a bulk run.

Two things follow. Check the format selector again after using bulk rather than assuming it stuck, and check the page size of the file with Cmd+I before concluding the printer is at fault.

The other bulk problem is failure handling. macOS prints a multi-page PDF as one job, so when the printer jams or runs out halfway you cannot tell which label failed, and reprinting means sending the whole batch again.

Print settings, once the file is right

1. Download the PDF rather than printing from the browser window.
2. File → Print, then Show Details.
3. Select the thermal printer.
4. Set Paper Size to 4 × 6 or 100 × 150 mm.
5. Set Scale to 100% and Margins to none.

If 4 × 6 is not in the paper size list, the thermal printer probably is not the selected printer — macOS only lists sizes the current printer reports.