Originally posted by Ceresin. S>2 Unusuals.:

I've lost 120 keys due to paypal scams, urgh. So I think I know how to be extra wary now.

There are a lot of things to look for, and as you know by now it's real easy to get scammed. It's late at night and there are too many for me to enumerate right now. I'd recommend just avoiding cashing trades entirely until you get a better grasp on identifying people who will scam you.

I've had a peculiar way of dealing with unusuals over the past year, in that I'm really picky and seldom even so much as express interest unless I really want it, but then end up keeping it forever instead of reselling if I manage to get it. Hence I haven't had as much exposure as I'd have liked, which I'm working on changing as of recent.

Originally posted by Ceresin. S>2 Unusuals.:

Btw, how do I check if an item is duped or not?

Check the item history on multiple item trackers. TF2OP and backpack.tf are the main ones. To find a dupe, check the inventory of each person in the history; if 2 or more people have that item with the same original ID, it's duped. Note backpack.tf often has backpacks cached, so it can falsely flag items as dupes if it sees something move without refreshing the previous owner's backpack.

Originally posted by Ceresin. S>2 Unusuals.:

Do you mind if I add you to seek more answers? You seem mighty established.

I guess you can add me for a little while. I'm about to head to bed, and I have a long busy day tomorrow, and I feel like there are better sources you can learn from than me, plus I usually keep my friends list to mostly people I either have business with or I know in person so don't be offended if I eventually remove you. There's a course that will probably open up again in the next few weeks called Mann Co University[manncotrading.com] where you can get some pointers for identifying scammer alts. Save you another 120 keys...

You just publicly admitted you're new, which makes you a prime target to be taken advantage of. Unless you know the person beforehand, you could easily end up getting sharked by someone claiming to help you with prices. I'd recommend quietly looking for someone trustworthy and friendly to newbies, and politely asking them for help privately.

Also, I don't know if I can be especially helpful - I still don't have a decent grasp on prices myself - but here are a few pointers:

• Unusual trading is a lot slower than regular trading, and requires patience. If you're impatient, you'll lose money with every trade you make. If someone tries to rush you, they're probably ripping you off.
  
• You mentioned cash trading. Avoid that until you're comfortable with unusual trading. Not only do you have to worry about prices, but you have to be especially careful not to get scammed. If someone offers you cash, tell them to buy keys with it.
  
• There are no set prices or unified spreadsheets for unusuals. Anyone using backpack.tf or an equivalent to price them is either a newbie or trying to take advantage of you.
  
• Only do unusual trading if you can afford it. Unusuals are expensive, and each one you get is a significant portion of your backpack value that will be hard to liquidate for a long time. Plus, it could end up being a dud, and if you invest everything in one hat you could lose a lot.
  
• High-tier hats with low-tier effects, or low-tier hats with high-tier effects are usually the easiest to sell, as well as themed hats. Avoid Nuts & Bolts, no matter what hat. Low tier hat/effects are usually only popular with other resellers or people looking for their first unusual (who will inevitably end up stuck with it for a long time then asking for unusual advice) but Nuts & Bolts is always hard to sell. Gifted is hard to sell too.
  
• If a hat isn't a high/low tier as described above, try and find a theme; invest in a name/description tag. There may not be a theme, but if there is it may not be obvious, so be creative.
  
• Gifted unusuals are always worth less. Some will refuse to buy them, others will devalue them. Duped unusuals are usually worth a little less, but that depends on the buyer. From what I hear, it's mostly just people who will use it as leverage to lowball you, but you reallyy can use being non-duped as a selling point. There are also some sellers (myself included) who do not buy dupes.
  
• This is one a LOT of people miss. Be polite, friendly approachable, and non-threatening; both in Steam chat and any trades/ads you post. If someone looks like they abandoned their outpost trades, has a bunch of multi-colored CAPS LOCK WARNINGS, talks about other traders (truthfully or not) in an insulting/condenscending way, or otherwise acts impatient or rude, I will skip over their trade or ignore their server chat comments entirely. Even if it's something I'm looking for and they have the only one on the market. If they're rude in chat, I block them and if I ever go to add them at a future date, I see they're blocked and remember to skip over them. A lot of other traders do the same, since it's really the only way to keep your sanity.
  
• Don't be another idiot with a "buying quicksells" trade. You'll only get one if you're lucky, and you'll probably get a bunch of people adding for things that aren't really quicksells anyway. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll get ripped off there anyway. Relevant link. Plus, most people will lump you in with the rude traders mentioned above if you spam "buying quicksells" anywhere. If you want quicksells, get a grasp on the market and look for good deals proactively. Keep a stock of keys/earbuds for just that purpose.

Originally posted by DJCaseyD:

I can tell you that as was said above, it's becoming less profitable than it used to be. Last year at this time, CS:GO was going for 5-6 keys when not on sale. I bought 3 of them when they were on sale this past Christmas for $3.74 each. I've been trying to sell them for 4 keys and not having any luck. I can't even get 2 keys for Payday: The Heist and that's a $20 game still. I think there are just a ton of copies out there so the market has gotten flooded with people trying the same thing.

That's mostly because (a) all the traders are buying/selling the same games, because everyone else picks those games; and (b) many games drop in price over the years following their release. CS:GO is a fine example, for a couple reasons: $3.75 USD is the lowest it has ever been on sale for; while popular, it is becoming old, which often leads to games dropping in price; and more and more people have it already, with more and more traders stocking up on that same game. I think there is still profit to be made from it, but as everyone trades the same game that profit declines a bit.

This winter, I tried something new that seemed to work well enough. I diversified my assets, and bought one or a couple of many different games I thought would resell. A few ended up not selling so well, and I think one of them ended up in a Humble Bundle for a few weeks, which ended up as bad losses, but overall I made profit from other games and didn't put all my eggs in one basket so to speak. I think I'm already at a little more than I started with, not counting the games still in my inventory, and I actually ended up increasing prices of the last copies of some games (like Skyrim) so I could keep in stock. Obviously I can't tell you which ones sold well and which ones ended horribly because if everyone sells the same thing it won't sell, but the best I can suggest is to look at what's popular, try to meet demand, and above all don't invest heavily in the same 1 or 2 games.

There was a mass-duping of Max Heads some time ago, and Valve wiped the history of all Max Heads, giving them new original IDs. Knowing the duping scandal affected mostly LV 1 and 7, most traders who deal with high tier items will either outright avoid or pay less for a LV 1 or 7 because of this. Technically, at some point in time any given LV 1 or 7 was probably duped at some point, but there is no way to know for absolute certain.

Another thing you can do is limit how many keys someone can buy at once. If you're selling 100 keys, but only let any given trader buy up to a maximum of 10 keys, it'll take longer and be more frustrating, but if one or a couple of them chargeback, you'll be able to cut your losses. Not putting all your eggs in one basket, if you will.

Middlemen are useful, but with PayPal transactions the biggest risk is a chargeback which doesn't happen until a few days/weeks after the trade completes. Using a middleman won't prevent that from happening, which is why it's so important to background check traders before making the trade (which some middleman will do, and refuse to complete the trade if something is fishy).

I report those trades all the time, and not just for keys but other items (a handful of traders would also list the wrong price in their notes so they get picked up by trade.tf's "good deals", then changed it a minute later once indexed because trade.tf doesn't reindex), but I've never once seen a single one of the trades I reported get closed; it's like the icons are completely meaningless. Considering I have to select the "another reason" to report misleading trades, I often wonder if the mods even read my notes...

I would list it on the community market.

Probably the most effective way to combat this (and one of the things I like most about Bazaar) is allowing users to blacklist specific trades or users they feel will not offer a reasonable deal inline, or accepting certain keywords (such as "quicksell") to remove from all searches.

Quickbuyers rely on being the only interested party a given trader can find, whether by spamming on a trade server or relisting a bunch of "quickbuying ___ class" trades. They hope that the seller will get frustrated and reluctantly agree to a bad deal. So when searching for unusual buyers, rather than having to skim past a 3-page wall of text of "QUICKSELL ONLY" every half hour, you press a button to "hide" and never see that trade (or optionally user) again. The closest thing to that right now is to click their trade, click their name, then block, then hit back several times, which is a real pain to do for as many quicksell trades as there are, hence the frustration. By simplifying that process of blacklisting bad traders on a per-user level, you remove the frustration from the equation and with a few exceptions for sell-tough hats, quickbuying becomes infeasible. Sort of turning the free market against them, if you will.

I'd be surprised if this kind of thing were ever implemented though.

He could have hidden your offer. That would make it disappear from your offers. Another way to find him is if you ever traded with him before you can find his profile in your trade history.

It's fine if you're only looking for cheap paints in one trade and expensive paints in the other.

As you have it now, however, you're putting the same huge list into both trades, and I would personally classify that as relisting.