The Steam Community Market is a huge place. You can spend hours just looking at listings for one game. A great thing about the Steam Community Market is it allows you to make money with virtual items. Before reading this guide, you should have basic knowledge on CSGO skins and navigating through Steam. This guide will teach you some tips and tricks when using the marketplace.

Narrowing Your Search

The Steam Community Market is great for finding what you need, but there are a couple ways that can make your process even easier if you are using the market on Google Chrome. On Chrome, you can get extensions to your browser through the Chrome Web Store. A few extensions you can get to help you find CSGO skins easier is "CSGOFloat Market Checker" and "Steam Inventory Helper." These extensions allow you to see features such as its float and the paint seed number (pattern of the skin) without having to individually inspect each skin in game.

It saves a lot of time when looking for skins. Once you get it, you can organize the listings by best float first if that's what you're looking for. There are a lot of other features available that you can take advantage of. You can also use the keyword feature that most browsers have by pressing Ctrl+F. You can type your pattern number in there and it would highlight any matching listings if you have the previous extensions.

Narrowing Your Search (no extension/mobile)

Let's say you are using Steam Mobile or you cannot use these extensions. You won't have all the features like the float/pattern being right on the listing without inspecting, but there still is a few things you can do. When you go to the market's search bar, you can pull up Counter Strike: Global Offensive and you will see a handful of options. You can search by wear, grade, Stattrak and much more. The Steam Community Market is very good at helping you find stickers too. You can select what capsule you want in the menu. You can also look up Esports team stickers through it too.

Instead of having to search for stickers after clicking one item, Valve made an easier way to find stickers on your weapon. After clicking the "Include descriptions in search" button, you can look up a gun and then, in quotes, type the name of a sticker you want. After that, every skin for that specific gun with the sticker you want will show up. You can also search for a specific skin and see how many wears of that one skin has the stickers on. For example, type: Ump "Witchcraft" to find every UMP-45 skin that has the "Witchcraft" sticker. Type Ump Blaze "Witchcraft" and it will show you every UMP-45 with the Blaze skin that has the "Witchcraft" sticker on it. If you want, you can just type "Ump" instead of "UMP-45." The search bar isn't that strict. Many stickers already placed on skins on the Steam Community Market are cheaper than buying the skin with the sticker. It will save you a lot of money if you like them on your guns.

Following Market Trends

Buying skins may be fun and satisfying, but if you want to make a little money to buy more, you should understand average prices and follow trends for skins. When you click on a skin, you should see a graph with the price history of it. Like most ways of making money on the market, it is a risk and you have to be sure you want to do it. Do research on skins and see which ones are going up, or you think will go up. For example: you see that there is less of a certain case being dropped, that means there would be less of those skins on the market. You can check the market and look up those skins, if you see that the more expensive skins in the collection are going up, then that might be a good time to buy some and hang on for a few months and then you can resell it. It doesn't just have to be discontinued cases! If you see more people are interested in buying a certain skin or want a rare pattern or sticker on it, that might be a good chance to make money too.

Stay updated on current events in CSGO and visit discussions or trade communities, and it should be easier to find a skin or sticker that might go up in value. Last Fall, Valve stated that all future keys for unlocking cases would not be tradable, but the current ones out there will still be tradeable. So I thought to myself that there will be a shortage in tradeable keys. I checked the market and saw the prices were starting to go up. I didn't know if it was too late and the rising prices will stop soon, but I took a risk and bought a couple and did in fact go up a little, so I sold my keys and made a small profit. So if you stay up to date in the CSGO community and look at prices, an opportunity might come your way.

Practice

No one becomes an expert trader overnight. It's good to start small and just be a part of community and learn and over time you would be more knowledgeable and make good decisions. Having a small inventory isn't a bad thing. Some people maybe can't afford a big inventory or aren't lucky. If I kept my 250 dollar inventory from when I was big in trading, today it would probably be worth double. But I needed to sell the skins and use the money for other things. Today, my inventory is far from what it was, but small trading and having a small but nice inventory can be very satisfying too.

If you keep focusing, finding chances, and talking to other traders (like me), you are bound to make a profit. An important thing to remember is to be practical with your goals. Know your current budget and make smart decisions. You should not go spending it all at once and losing it. Over time if you stay updated, be an active part of the community and make smart decisions, maybe an opportunity will fall your way and you can get your dream skin.