How To Trade Csgo Skins For Real Money

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's weapon skins turned the game into a collector's heaven, but what are the great methods for players to trade and sell CSGO skins outside of Steam's marketplace?

Internet sites such as cs.money have become leaders in skin trading outside of Valve Steam Platform and have come a long way since CSGO skin rise in 2015 and 2016. Scams are more uncommon, especially if users check out a few key things while they're going through the sales process.

How players can trade their CSGO skins outside Steam

The first step in the process is to use a trusted CSGO website. Cs.money and skins.cash are two popular choices. Trusted sites will ask players to log in via Steam, and as frightening as that sounds, it's the safest way to do business. Here's what to look for and what to anticipate when trying to trade and sell CSGO skins outside of Steam.

We used cs.money for instance, but the steps are similar for most third-party sites.

1. Sell your skins by logging in with Steam

Scammers can fake Steam's login page look, but it's a lot harder to fake a secure connection. Players should always search for a lock beside the steamcommunity.com login URL. It should be locked and "Valve" should be read on the certificate.

2: Choose the skins you want in exchange for the ones you don't

Cs.money uses a system that works a bit like a scale, with players placing their CSGO skin on one side of the website and adding items from the inventory of cs.money on the other side. Players would like to aim for a trade that ends with a few cents owed to them by cs.money.

There's an option to do that if players want to directly add funds to cs.money to compensate for a price difference. While selecting items from cs.money, add your items and click 'Trade.'

3. Double check and confirm the trading offer on Steam Guard

The vast majority of sites use bots to send trade offers through Steam, no matter what site a user is on. As players will have to check the trade in their mobile app and have plenty of time to say no to the trade offer, it is actually safer this way.

The extra moments are always worth taking to make sure that what the bot requested is what you originally put up for trade on the site. The other side is also true, so make sure you're the one you selected for the item the bot offers you.

If everything looks right, players can click "trade." They will probably get a screen warning them of a "suspicious trade." This is normal, as we have done here, particularly when trading multiple items for a single one.

4. Confirm the trade through the Steam app and Steam Guard

We've talked before about how essential Steam Guard and two-factor authentication are when it comes to Steam accounts for players, and here it's no different. It's just a good habit to double and triple check that what you anticipated was the trade. Once players in the Steam Client click "trade" they will get an alert on their mobile authenticator.

Why is the Steam Marketplace ?

The issue is that from each single deal involving CS:GO, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 items, Valve takes a giant 15 percent cut. The Steam Marketplace has two more issues that could make users move to third party sites, in addition to offering players less money for their products.

On Steam, users can't sell an item for more than $2,000. It makes a great difference for players with big-ticket items that can easily be worth five times that amount.

At times, the process used to be quite shady, but for the most part, today's CSGO skin sites are reliable and trustworthy. They still take the total price cut, but often it's a lot less than the Valve. For example, cs.money takes only 9 percent as a commission fee, but by placing "cs.money" in their Steam handle, players can reduce that to 7 percent.

It's much safer than it used to be, as long as players are cautious when selling skins from CSGO.