CSGO Marketplaces are services that provide a platform for buying, selling and trading Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skins and lootable items. They all stem from the Steam Community Marketplace but are concerned with expanding the range of possibilities found in the core trade mechanism, for example making the item descriptions more accurate and transparent.
The marketplaces dealing with CSGO items seem to thrive well. There are some unavoidable fluctuations to the global skin market, but the constant push and pull of supply and demand keep the whole endeavour up. New operations and collection updates provide novelties to keep players interested, whereas the legacy commodities with increasing rarity make for valuable collectible possessions.
Especially with online services, it’s good to have some sort of backup in terms of a process guideline that you can refer to, either at the beginning, when you’re still learning, or to look it up if you feel like you’re stuck. That’s why we make this online guide to the CSGO marketplace scene available to our readers.
The CSGO Marketplaces and the economy behind them
To conduct a proper guide to CSGO marketplace trade, we need to briefly get back to the source of all this beautiful mess - Steam. If you want to look at it that way, all trade happens via Steam, even if it's mediated by third-party sites. The items never leave the Steam system and trade mechanics go down to some sort of automatisation of user-to-user trade within Steam Community Market. However, Steam interface has its limitations that other websites try to mitigate.
Having tested the solution on other games before, Valve introduced droppable and tradable skins to Counter-Strike: Global offensive and kickstarted a whole economy around them. To simplify the whole thing, let’s determine two factors at play when it comes to market value. On one hand, you have the rarity - some skins drop ever so, and others barely ever. Usually, the rarer ones are more expensive, but that’s not a golden rule. On the other hand, there’s the aesthetic and ludic aspect. Some weapon and knife skins hold up their value quite well because of their uniqueness, but might not just hit the spot for players. If a skin is rare and renowned, or to put it simply - seen well during plays - this is what makes a skin a true treasure.
We could specify more detailed factors that influence the price, but this is the bare minimum. Now, let’s get to the process itself.
CSGO Marketplaces - The Essential Guide
To put it in the simplest form, I’ve redacted the process into a step-by-step CSGO skins marketplace guide that will help you get going with your skin trade.
Step One - Get your account and inventory ready for trading
To trade with any CSGO marketplace, you need your Steam Account to be ready to trade within Steam Community Marketplace. To do this, you will need to install Steam Guard on your mobile phone and set your inventory to public even if your main profile is private. You’ll find short know-how about this here. Remember that initiating Steam Guard will send you on a two-week hold period, so you need to save time for that.
Step Two - Searching and Filtering
Whether you want to sell or buy, you need to know how to browse offers that are available in the market - either to recognize what is the price range of your desired items or what would be a reasonable offer to post. In Steam, you always need to search with the set language of your application. Most third-party markets allow you to search with original, English names. Most markets will allow easy filtering in terms of game, weapon type, rarity and so on.
Step Three - Compare prices
What might seem to be a curse of too much choice at first can be very easily turned into a blessing. Different marketplaces can hold offers for the same type of items with slight differences in price. For example, the same item might be available in different volumes on CS.Money or Dmarket, differentiating the price rivalry within the same service. If a certain market holds offers with prices more beneficial to your transaction, it might be a good idea to switch platforms.
Step Four - Pay attention to details
If you’ve taken interest in skins some time ago, by now you should know the different aspects of skins that influence their value and popularity. If not, take notice to those:
- Wear level. Weapon and knife skins can have a different quality level, which influences their prices greatly. It’s expressed in wear levels as consecutive tiers and in float value, as an exact parameter of that. We’ve described checking skin wear in detail in this previous release.
- Stickers. Some of them raise the value of a skin, some don’t. Usually, it does bring it up a little and only certain community-praised combinations multiply it significantly.
- StatTrak and Souvenir status. Every skin dropped or looted has a small chance of being a StatTrak skin, which means it will count the kills you perform with it. Souvenir skins are non-StatTrak skins, which are distributed on the occasion of big events like worldwide majors.
Making money through CSGO Marketplaces
With a proper set of items, you can let any CS GO marketplace guide you through a simple process of selling your items away and making a dime on acquired equipment. Even if the items you find are not the rarest and most valuable, parsing an arrange of a dozen or even a couple of dozen items might get you some funds that you will be able to pay out instead of just using it within Steam Store and Community Marketplace. Also, taking some extra time to wage the most value out of your rarer items will be very much worth the deal, but advanced trading is a whole other topic.
Avoid getting scammed
Be very careful to watch your account from being compromised. Although Steam Guard gives your very strong defensive tool against scams, it’s still possible for your computer and mobile phone to be broken into. This allows for very patient hackers to wait for you to attempt a transaction, impose as your trader and offer you a fake deal, for example stealing your items. You can read more about protecting yourself from API scams in this article.
Summary
This concise CSGO skin marketplace guide shows you the basic procedure to follow when using various marketplaces facilitating the weapon skin trade. Following basic rules and taking proper safety measures will allow you to monetize on the skins you drop while playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Check out the rest of our blog for detailed descriptions of specific topics, like overviews of skins coming from certain operations or more varied CS GO trading guide articles.