The Cheapest Listing Is Seldom the Price You Pay

Any skin marketplace shows each item with one price, the cheapest live listing. That figure helps you, but it leaves out who is selling.

A peer-to-peer market lists items from individual people. The cheapest listing belongs to whoever asks the least today, and a low ask says nothing about whether that person will complete the trade.

Every seller has a completion rate, the share of their trades that finished. When we sampled live listings across several games, the cheapest offer on an item often came from a seller far below a sensible bar. Some sat at 25 percent. Buying from them means a long wait followed by a refund in most cases.

Filter to sellers who complete at least 80 percent of their trades and prices move. On one Huntsman Knife, the cheapest listing on the market asked $148.10. The cheapest listing from a seller above the bar asked $187.69, about 27 percent more.

You could see both prices on the market. Only the second led to a knife in your inventory with good odds.

We could advertise $148.10. It matches the raw feed and looks better in a price comparison.

It would also mean a checkout total that does not match the grid, or an order that fails and refunds days later. We show the cheapest listing from a seller who clears the reliability bar. Some days that matches the market's cheapest price, other days it sits above it, and it is the listing we would buy for you.

1. 1
   Check the completion rate first, and treat anything under 80 percent as a real chance of a refund instead of an item
2. 2
   Check the delivery time, since minutes is common on Dota 2 and days tends to mean a trade hold
3. 3
   Question any listing far below every other one, which often belongs to an inactive seller

Price and reliability measure different things, and the cheapest listing often scores low on reliability. A quote that weighs both looks worse in a comparison and serves you better when you want the item.