Make money with CSGO

How to make profit selling your cs:go items?

Now for the big buck item: How to make profit?

The secret to profit is high volume, small profit trades. I will outline how my strategy works below, but it is not necessary to read to make profit, skimming the paragraphs and reading the TL;DR at the bottom should be sufficient. The classic 'buy low, sell high' advice is only partially true. I see so many people trying to sell high and never getting any trades. It really should be 'buy low, sell market'.

Buying items:

It is important to understand a sellers' psychology, in order to understand how to get good deals. First of all you have to buy an item. You do this by exposing yourself to the market as long as possible to find good deals. Post on multiple cs:go/reddit trades, frequently browsing the new section. If you are to offer on a trade, if you are paying pure keys, feel free to offer a little bit less than market price or their buyout (yet still reasonable), so there is a profit margin for you. If you do it in the right manner, more often than not, people are often flexible enough to accept their price, since a reasonable guy with a reasonable price is a good person to trade with. If you offer skins, people more often than not will not value skin offers as highly as keys (though there are exceptions).

Selling items for a profit:

Note that this is more of an explanation of maximum profit, and is a little bit unnecessary to actually profit.

When selling an item you need to understand buyer's psychology and some basic statistics (OH NO THE HORROR!). They want to do either of two things with the item: Use it it or sell it, roughly I'd say the proportions respectively of these people are 1:4. When I say they want to use the item, I mean usually they want to play with it. Thus they are willing to pay full price (FP) or a little bit more (FP + 1 arbitrary unit). The arbitrary unit (AU) can be anything; a dollar, a key, etc and is tied to the value of the item, often around 5%. It is basically your profit margin for most items. Occasionally users will be willing to pay slightly higher than full price, but it isn't enough to rely on the small proportion who do for most of your profits.

Then there are those looking for a profit. Thus they will often be paying a low price (FP - 2 ~ FP - 1). If you have bought it for fairly cheap (=< FP - 2) then you can easily flip it to these people for FP - 1 for at least an AU profit. What price you bought it for may determine whether or not you sell to a specific type of buyer. If you paid full price (FP) then you price your item at > FP + 1 and search for the small proportion of people who are willing to pay more. I have found that the mean price of items if you pay keys is FP - 1, with a standard deviation of 1 AU. I found it optimal to focus on buying items at the price of FP - 1 ~ FP - 2. Thus at the highest range of your buying, you make a profit from 20% of the population, and at the lower end you make it from almost 100% of the population. Of course these numbers are highly speculative.