Complete Guide to buying CSGO skins on Steam Marketplace

With games like CSGO, Steam Community Marketplace has showed its ability to hold a market of digital goods among players worldwide. Enabling a regulated distribution of items from user to user helped to build a trade network that is constantly growing. Even though the main method of acquiring skins in CSGO is to play the game and loot the cases,  
buying CS GO skins on Steam marketplace is a valid option for expanding your loadout. Also, it can be operated through third-party sites, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

What is Steam Marketplace?

Steam Community Market is a general trading service that allows users to buy and sell items that drop while playing games. This should not be confused with the main store, which is used to buy games and DLCs from the producers, and with Steam Workshop, which is a repository of fan-made modifications that are downloadable for free. You will find a wide array of items here, starting from common cases and unpopular skins costing just a couple of cents, through music kits and more likeable weapon skins with a price of couple dollars, up to ultra-rare knives and gloves, which can costs hundreds or even thousand of dollars.

Things you should know before you buy

Before you jump the gun and haunt Steam marketplace buying CSGO skins, there’s a procedure you need to follow that will require you to have a functioning mobile phone. To proceed with trading, you need to download Steam Mobile App and enable the Steam Guard. It’s a mechanism that will generate five-character security codes every 30 seconds, and from the moment of activating Steam Guard you’ll need to type in your current code every time you log in. After using this service for the first time, you’re held under a market hold for fifteen days. This has been added as an anti-spam and anti-theft system.

It’s extremely important to remember that newly acquired items have a trade hold of seven days. At first glance, it’s more of a concert to sellers of items, but this also leads to important safety conclusions that will help you while buying skins from others. Let’s say that you don’t use the offer catalogue and contact someone directly. The person tries to convince you that he or she has an item, but it’s not visible in the inventory. What is more, the person has it on a different account and will transfer that only when you initiate the deal or pay in some deposit. This is a red light for you, as you know that items are held untradeable for seven days and such a scenario is not possible.

Other than that, if Valve moderators will come to a conclusion that you’re breaking or trespassing the terms of agreement and community standards of Steam application, your account might be permanently blocked from trading. This means that any skins that are in this accounts inventory at the time of trade ban, they will be stuck to it forever with no exceptions. Make sure to read the rules and stick to them to avoid losing all your precious acquisitions.

How do you buy skins from Steam Marketplace?

Now, let’s try to streamline the process of buying sking from steam marketplace within Steam Community.

First of all, you need to log in to your Steam account. You can do it either in the desktop application or via store.steampowered.com. Either way, after you type in the username and password, it will require your Steam Guard key. If it’s correct, you will be successfully logged in and redirected to Steam Store’s main site. This would be your destiny if you wanted to buy some new games, but since we’re talking skins here, you need to go to the marketplace. To do this, hover over Community in the top menu and choose Market from the submenu. You will see an apparent change in the layout, as the market catalogue will now be displayed on in the main frame below a green banner.

This is the place you should start your browsing from. The main view will show you three tabs – popular items from all games, newest offers and newest trades. As your goal is buying CSGO skins on Steam marketplace, the best thing to do would be to go to the “Browse by game” window on the right and choose Counter-Strike: Global Offensive straight away. This will change the view again, to a simpler one. At first, it will display a list, which is sortable by name, quantity and price. This, however, leaves the pool of displayed items quite big. At this stage, filters come in handy. Again, go to the right and in the “Search for items” there’s “Show advanced options”, which will display a context window which will allow you to filter catalogue results by literally any parameter – its rarity, weapon type, sticker group et cetera. Thanks to this you’ll be able to find the exact group of items you’re interested in. Later sorting by price will help you with choosing the best offer.

Clicking an item will bring up its dedicated site, where you can hit the big green “Buy” button to acquire it. Afterwards, what’s left is just to confirm the transaction and – if you’re short on funds in Steam Wallet – choose the method with which you’ll charge.

What payment methods can you use on Steam Marketplace?

Currently, when paying for products or charging your Steam Wallet in Steam, the following methods are available: 

• PayPal
• Paysafecard
• Visa
• MasterCard
• American Express
• Skrill

There are also locally configured methods available for specific countries. For Germany, its  Sofortuberweisung, whereas in Poland you can pay with Przelewy24.

Fees are set individually for every service and still can vary depending on many factors. For example, PayPal has different fees for different countries. Usually, if you’re just charging your Steam Wallet, this transaction should not be burdened with fees in any way. For details, consult each method’s terms of service separately.

Ups and downs of Steam Marketplace

Buying csgo skins from Steam marketplace is a default method of getting them for money. The best thing about it is safety, as all the protective measures introduced minimise the chance of being scammed or stolen from. Additionally, although the skin trade goes beyond Steam, it’s the Community Marketplace that has the most stable prices and serves as a relative point to prices anywhere else. Nevertheless, it’s not a perfect solution.

Third-party marketplaces like Skinwallet Market took UI to the next level and enable you to find items more easily than in the Steam Marketplace. It’s also able to perform mass buy / mass sell actions, which aren’t available in now-dated Steam interface. As a buyer, the biggest change you’ll experience is the price range.

Summary

When it comes to CSGO skins buying Steam marketplace is a stable, safe and regulated solution that will allow any nubile users to buy the skins of choice with no hustle. It’s understandable that many safety gates and the interface might not be the most comfortable option; however, the process is easy to realize and guarantees you probably best access to non-specific collectible items. You’re, of course, welcome to share any thoughts about Steam Marketplace usability in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer meaningfully.

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