CS2 Skin Arbitrage — Cheaper Than Chinese Markets

Buy the skin on the Western marketplace shown, then list it on the Chinese marketplace shown. Every row here is a skin whose cheapest Western listing sits below what it sells for on BUFF163, C5Game, Youpin, IGXE and ECOSteam — the deepest CS2 markets — even after the sell market takes its commission.

Yes, for the sell-side commission: BUFF163 2.5%, C5Game 2%, Youpin 2%, IGXE 0.6%, ECOSteam 0%. It does not include what it costs to get the money out — Alipay cash-out, or an agent's cut if you do not have a Chinese account — nor any buy-side deposit fee. Treat the profit column as a ceiling and subtract your own costs.

No. The Chinese price shown is the lowest current listing, not a standing buy order. Selling at that number means listing your skin and waiting for a buyer. Where the sell market's order book is available — BUFF163's own book, and FirePulse's snapshot of the others — the card also shows its best bid: the highest standing buy order, which is what an instant sale pays before commission, so you can see both the patient and the immediate exit. The listing count on each card is a rough guide to how much competition you would be joining, and the 30-day sold count to how quickly it clears.

Picking the cheapest listing on one market and the dearest on another is exactly the operation that surfaces whichever quote is most wrong, so both sides are checked before either is chosen. Every quote is compared against the consensus for that skin — the median across the markets quoting it, plus the SteamAnalyst reference price, a weighted average over 40+ marketplaces. A buy price under half the consensus, or a sell price over 1.5x it, is discarded rather than shown. Where several Chinese markets quote an item, one standing more than 30% above the next is dropped in favour of the corroborated price. The count under the results line tells you how many rows this removed.

Because too few marketplaces quote that skin for anything to corroborate the spread — there is no consensus to check it against, not that the price looks wrong. Those rows are hidden by default; the line above the results says how many, and the "Show unverified" control brings them back with the caveat attached. Anything that actually failed a consensus check is dropped outright.

Steam's 7-day trade hold on newly traded items, price movement while you wait for a buyer, currency conversion, and the time it takes to move an item between platforms. Wider spreads exist precisely because that friction is real — the numbers here are the opportunity before your own costs, not a guaranteed return.

Prices from every tracked marketplace, Western and Chinese, are refreshed every 30 minutes, and a quote older than 48 hours is ignored. IGXE and ECOSteam, and the bids and sold counts for every Chinese market, come from FirePulse's cross-venue book, which is swept a few times a day; where FirePulse and our own feed both quote a market, the more recent reading is used. Each card says when the older of its two quotes was last confirmed, and the badge at the top of the page gives the median across everything listed. Items start at $5 on the buy side, below which fees and trade friction swallow the entire spread.

How many times the item changed hands over the last 30 days across the Chinese marketplaces FirePulse tracks — BUFF163, Youpin, C5Game, IGXE and ECOSteam among them. A wide spread on a skin that sells twice a month is a spread you may wait a month to close; the same spread on one that sells fifty times a day is the trade this page is for. It is blended across venues, so it says how liquid the item is on the Chinese side as a whole rather than on the one market shown. Doppler phases show no count: FirePulse prices the base item, so its figures are attached only to rows without a phase.

The "List on" link under each card opens that item on the sell market, so you can see the current listings you would be competing with before you buy. All of them require an account, and all settle in yuan; BUFF163 and Youpin additionally require Chinese identity verification for withdrawals, which is why most Western sellers use an agent service and pay their fee on top of the commission shown here. IGXE takes a further 0.8% and ECOSteam 1% on withdrawal, neither of which is in the net figure.