For someone cataloging a collection they own and want to value. No selling. Plan on an evening for the first pass if you are typing books in by hand, or about ten minutes if you have a spreadsheet to import. The free plan holds 500 comics.
1. Get the books in
Two ways. Add one at a time from Inventory → Add Item, where only the title is required. Or bring a whole list at once through Import, which takes a CSV or XLSX up to 50 MB and walks you through matching your columns to ours.
Fill in issue number, publisher, and release date where you know them. Those three are what we match against the catalog, so they decide how much of the rest fills itself in later.
Detail: Inventory and CSV import. Coming from another app, start with Switching from another app instead.
2. Record what you paid
Acquired price plus shipping cost is your cost basis. Every profit and loss number in Stash is built on it, and it is the one thing the catalog cannot fill in for you. If you are guessing on old books, guess low and fix it later.
Detail: Inventory.
3. Let the metadata fill itself
Open an item and click Enrich to pull creators, release date, description, and a cover from the catalog. A confident match applies on its own. A near-match waits for you to approve it.
For a whole collection at once, go to Settings → Data and click Run Bulk Enrich. It handles 200 items a run and you can run it twice an hour, so a 1,000-book collection is a few runs.
Detail: Inventory.
4. Check the values
Prices resolve overnight against the catalog. In the morning most books carry a Market value, and the ones we have no market data for fall back to an estimate from era, key status, and condition.
Detail: Price checking setup covers where each number comes from and what to do about the ones that look wrong.
5. Read the dashboard
Dashboard gives you four numbers: how many books you have, what you have put in, what the unsold ones are worth now, and realized profit on anything you have marked sold. Total value counts in-stock and listed books, not sold ones.
Detail: Dashboard.
Then what
- Hunting the gaps in a run, or waiting for a key to hit your price: Completing runs.
- Need a total for insurance or an estate: Valuing a collection.
- Ready to sell: eBay seller setup is the usual first channel. Selling needs a Seller plan.
Gotchas
- The free plan stops at 500 comics. A CSV import past that point brings in what fits and tells you how many rows it skipped.
- Enrich never overwrites a price you typed. A manual price stays until you clear it.
- Quantity beats duplicate rows. Three copies of the same book in the same grade is one row with quantity 3.