This guide is all about getting you started with new ideas on how to trade and make a profit with CS2, it’s easy to get stuck in a certain way of thinking and when it comes to trading I often find myself doing the same types of trades over and over again, sometimes that work and sometimes you just get stuck doing something that just isn’t working, well in this post I will hopefully give you some new ideas on how to make a profit in CS2, I won’t go into too much depth of each method and I won’t be spoon feeding you everything you need to do, you’ll need to use your brain for this one. This guide will instead be filled with a lot of different ideas on how to do CS2 trading and how you can get started with some new ways of trading.
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Buy items on the Steam Community Market during big sales
Buy skins during the big sales like the Summer/Winter sales, during the sales people tend to sell their skins on the market to be able to buy the games they want, a lot of people are doing this during the sales which makes most of the items all over the market to drop in price. So buy items during sales and sell them after the sale when the price has gone up again, this is best done for skins and items with a high demand, so you don’t sit on a bunch of items nobody wants to buy.
Buy some CS2 keys for real money
To get you started with trading you can buy some keys (you can find our guide on how to find cheap keys here). Then start trading with those keys, this way you skip the grind of trading with low-valued items that generally make very little profit.
Finding good deals
Head over to BitSkins and head over to their Deals page (found in the tab up top), just choose your budget and then you’ll find a bunch of skins at low prices. You can find items ranging from 20-50% below market value. This is pretty much a general rule when it comes to trading with real money in CS2, people tend to want to cash out and prefer cash, so when paying with cash you can most of the time get a better deal simply because people prefer real money. So this can be applied to other places where real money trading is taking place, not only Bitskins, though their deals page can be a good start if you’re looking for a good deal.
Trading between shops
There are a bunch of CS2 skins shops where you can buy items for real money, all these shops have different prices for the same item and sometimes that price can differ quite a lot. What you can do is head over to these shops and compare the prices between the different marketplaces, and if you are lucky you can find a bargain at one shop and then resell that item for a higher price on another shop site. (just keep in mind all these shops take a sales % fee on each sale) I made a guide about this some time ago that you can check out over here.
CS2 & TF2 key exchanging
Trade your CS2 case keys for Team Fortress 2 keys. CS2 keys are worth more than TF2 keys so try to find a good deal where someone wants to trade your keys. You can also do that the other way around, of course, find some cheap TF2 keys then trade them for the CS2 keys that you want. (preferably at a higher ratio, for example, 10 TF2 keys for 9 CS2 keys, do some research before starting to trade and see what other people are paying for keys) The Backpack.tf forum could be a good place to start looking for buyers/sellers.
Knife Trading
Start trading with knives. Something I know absolutely nothing about. Here’s a trading guide that covers the basics of trading including knife trading. Knife trading requires a lot of keys/money investment so it’s nothing I would recommend any new traders to start doing.
Upgrading & downgrading your skins
This is a method of trading several low-valued skins for one item that’s medium/high value, the high valued item will be easier to trade and will be more desired than a bunch of low-valued items, so you usually need to overpay to get a higher valued skin for a bunch of low valued skins. This can go the other way around, you can trade your medium/high-valued skin for several low-valued skins with an overpay from the other seller, just remember that these low-valued skins might be hard to sell (because people don’t want them) I hope I haven’t confused you to much, if you want to know more about this way of trading I suggest checking out this guide where he talks about this in the Upgrading & downgrading section of the guide.
Buying people’s entire inventories for cash
Some people are just looking to cash out from the game or just don’t care about their skins anymore and want to get some cash fast. It’s a method with great profit margins but has its risks, There’s always a risk of scams when trading money directly with another trader, and it can be quite time-consuming to sell all the items from someone’s inventory. This forum could be a good start if you’re looking to buy some inventories.
Spy and steal other people’s way of making a profit
This might sound harsh but it really isn’t, just head over to any of the big trading sites and start looking at what other people are doing to make a profit, a lot of people are just setting up ridiculous trades that will never happen, just ignore them. Instead, try and find successful traders who are trading skins/items that have sort of the same value as you’re dealing with. Then look what they’re doing and do the same, you might even consider undercutting them a bit and doing the same trade but cheaper. This isn’t a method of trading is more of a way of finding new ideas on how to make a profit.
I think it’s always worth mentioning that you always should be on your toes for scammers, the internet is a shitty place and the trading community can be the freaking worst. So if you’re a new trader I would suggest you check out the Common Scams guide over at the CS2 subreddit and read up on some of the things you should be careful about, it’s a great read for more veteran traders also.
This guide will be an ongoing project and will be updated with new ways of making a profit in the future, if you have any suggestions of your own or have any thoughts about the guide feel free to leave a comment down below.
