4 Best Ways to Sell CS:GO Skins: How to Choose Your Skins Marketplace
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“Which is the best place to sell CS GO skins?”. “What is the best way to sell skins for cash?”. “Help, I got new skins and want to sell them for a good profit.” Despite dozens of such discussions already present on all major forums and social media, new people ask the same question almost daily.
So, what is the best way to sell CSGO skins? Well, it depends on what you want to gain. In this article will go through 4 main ways in which you can sell your unwanted digital goods and where to sell CSGO skins 2020 AD exactly, let’s do a short run-down of how you can get new CSGO skins.
Where do new CSGO skins come from?
There are basically two ways in which you can get new skins. The easiest but time-consuming way is just to play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. You just have to play on any server that is VAC enabled with at least one other player. Then, you are entitled to skin drops. You can get at most 4 drops per week, among which one is for a level up and three are just random and are usually cased, so you will have to buy a key. Once you open a couple of those cases, you can end up with a pile of skins that you can use to trade.
4 best places to sell CSGO skins
Below you’ll find what we consider to be the best ways to sell skins. Each has their own pros and cons, but ultimately they “best one” depends on how much time and knowledge you have and what is your final goal. Is it to monetize your assets outside the Steam environment? Or trade for more skins? See your options below.
Steam Market
Steam Community Market is the official Steam market, so you could assume it’s the best site to sell CSGO skins. What’s alluring is that it has high prices and high amount of offers for the same item. It is also one of the safest places to sell your CSGO skins. However, there’s no way cash out the funds from skins sold in that way. The money will remain at your Steam Wallet and you can only use it to buy digital goods from their platform. For example, you can buy a new game, a card pack to level up your Steam account or a gift card. Still, if you want to use the cash from skins outside Steam environment, you’ll have to look for other ways to sell your skins, for example, another marketplace.
Private offers
Another way to get a deal is to manually find someone interested in the skins you want to sell. You can do that through Reddit subreddits, dedicated forums, Discord servers, and, quite surprisingly, in the comments sections/discussion boards on at least one privately owned CSGO marketplace. By selling skins is such a way, you have a bigger chance to talk the deal through and ensure both sides get what they want at the prices they want.
There are many websites, forums, and Steam groups that allow you to list your offer. The downside is that selling skins that way may be very time-consuming and the money, in many cases, will still be held at your Steam Wallet. Additionally, Steam adds its fee to the equation. The current Steam Trade fee is 5% and the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive fee is 10%. That gives you 15% more for the buyer to pay which in turn can lower your own profit considerably.
Also, there are scams, a lot of them. Even though the Steam trading system is very restrictive and they place trade holds if they catch even a glimpse of something fishy, they still can’t eradicate scams completely. The best piece of advice we can give you is to always double or triple check every transaction and every item in the trade. It is always good to verify the other trader – if he or she is active in the trading community you can check their references. Otherwise, stay very cautious.
Third-party marketplaces
If you want to sell your CS:GO skins in a way similar to Steam Market but want to enjoy your money outside the Steam environment, or example by paying out the money to a Paypal account, you would need to visit a privately owned marketplace. These work similarly to Steam Community, except they aren’t as safe, as restrictive and as expensive. As the prices will be generally lower than those at Steam Market it is often easier to find a buyer for your skin. You can think about those lower prices as a Steam Wallet payout fee. After all, you’ll be able to enjoy that money in much more ways.
The other downside to this is that such markets are often vulnerable to price dumping or speculations, so you have to be extremely careful and know a lot about the market state while listing-out your offers. Moreover, selling your items this way can become very time-consuming and there’s no way to be sure that you’ll find a buyer for your skin. Checking for opinions on an individual marketplace or third-party skin market before listing your skins may be a good idea.
Third-party mass deposit sites
Unlike marketplaces, these sites will buy skins that fit their criteria from you. The price will be lower than those on mutual trade market, but an instant cashout site is the best place to sell CSGO skins for real money fast. There are multiple sites that offer such services and Skinwallet is one of them. What differentiates us from other sites is that we simply pay the highest prices for your Redlines, Asiimovs and Marble Fades. Try it out for yourself, and just maybe we’ll become your best website to sell CSGO skins.
I’ve also heard about auctions and bot trading. Are they better for selling CSGO skins?
These two are two different types of mechanisms used to conduct a more-or-less automated trade on skin marketplaces. Let’s briefly examine both of those in terms of pros and cons.
Auctions allow users to post bids for an item and compete for the item by lifting the price. Sites like CS.Money allow their traders to post offers with bits. This is a high-risk-high-gain method of selling, as bids might just not reach a satisfactory price, but they might as well skyrocket if you have something exceedingly rare.
Marketplaces that use bots do so to speed up the process of trading skins. Instead of two parties needing to agree on the same terms to agree, bots take over the storage role and forward skins to trading players. This helps with automated listings, but also has its disadvantages. You can learn more about trade bots in our dedicated blogpost from a while back.
Which sites promise the maximum profit?
This depends on your definition of profit and how much do you value your time. Among marketplaces, Dmarket and Bitskins seem to rival in terms of the lowest fee per skin transaction with 5% fee. This comes with a fee of a chosen payment method (because there are always some) and the time you need to finalize a decent trade. But sometimes time is of the essence, and then mass deposit storages turn out to be worth their commission. Most of those cut roughly more than a half of skin’s value. On the contrary, Skinwallet will pay over 60% of your average haul’s worth, quickly, and with real cash.
Can you buy new CSGO skins?
If you have some funds you can put into skin trading you may want to buy skins from Steam Community Market. However, there are three things to bear in mind. Firstly, you have to have funds in your Steam Wallet. Secondly, as of 2020 people learned how to trade and it may be impossible to attain skins for real bargain prices. Lastly, your account has to have a number of features to allow you to trade at the Community Market. We wrote about the market restrictions in the past, so check it if you’re interested in more details about it.
Yet, you may want to decide to buy skins at the Community Market regardless of their high price in one case – when you want to cash out your Steam Wallet. Steam doesn’t allow any payouts, therefore buying some skins on market and selling them at Skinwallet is one of the best ways to cash out your Steam Wallet funds.
If you wish to pay out your funds at will, you will have to go for another marketplace that is unaffiliated with Valve. We also happen to provide a marketplace service – just go to Skinwallet Market and check it out! Many of such third parties are trustworthy, each with their own quirks and distinguishable features. In the end, you will have a wide choice from which you will be able to pick a marketplace that suits you the most… but we’re pretty sure you’ll find what you need in square one!
Final Verdict
These are the different ways you can sell CSGO skins depending on whether you want to turn your loot into something more useful or you just need to get cash quickly.
Steam Community Market is the bedrock of all the trade, but the ease of use comes at a price of flexibility. Marketplaces take a while to master, but learn to go around them and you’ll benefit in the long run, especially if you drop some rare skins. Mass deposits are good if you’re quick to know how to sell CSGO skins for real money.
With that knowledge, you’ll be able to use whatever suits you best. It will take time to find best sites to sell CSGO skins with regard to your needs, but there’s no doubt you eventually will.
