Flipping is buying a skin and selling it again for more. The dependable way to do it is to act as the middleman on one marketplace: buy from people who want cash now, and sell to people who want the skin now. Your profit is the gap between those two prices, minus the fee.
The idea: the spread
Every item has two prices. The highest buy order is what someone will pay right away. The lowest offer is what someone will sell for right away. The gap between them is the spread. If you hold the top buy order and the cheapest offer, the spread comes to you.
Step by step
- Pick an item that sells every day, with a spread wider than the fee. See which skins to flip.
- Work out your numbers before you buy: the most you will pay, and the least you will sell for.
- Place a buy order one cent above the current highest one, under your maximum.
- Wait for a seller to fill it. Other buyers will outbid you, so check it or let a robot keep it on top.
- When you own the skin, wait out any trade hold.
- List it one cent under the cheapest offer, above your minimum.
- When it sells, write down what you made, and start again.
The maths
Buy for $24.91 and sell for $29.99 on a marketplace with a 10% fee. The fee takes $3.00, you keep $26.99, and your profit is $2.08, or 8.4%.
The price you need just to break even is your buy price divided by (1 minus the fee). Here that is $24.91 / 0.90 = $27.68. Every listing above that makes money, and every one under it loses money. Set that as the floor, and you cannot sell at a loss by accident.
What goes wrong
- The market falls while you hold. With that same $24.91 skin, a price 10% lower sells at $26.99 and you keep $24.29, a $0.62 loss.
- You buy something nobody wants. A wide spread on a quiet item often means your money sits still for weeks.
- Everyone else had the same idea. If ten traders cut each other by a cent all day, the spread shrinks until nobody earns. Competition is why spreads on the most popular items are thin.
- You forget the fee. It is the most common beginner mistake, and on some items the fee is larger than the spread.
Doing it by hand, or with a bot
Buy orders only fill when they are first, and offers sell first when they are cheapest. Holding both positions by hand across more than a few items is close to impossible, which is why most serious flippers use a CS2 trading bot.
Our robot for DMarket and robot for market.csgo.com hold those positions for you, every second, and never cross the floor and ceiling you set. They are free for one offer and one order, which is enough to try one flip from start to finish. They do not guarantee profit: you still choose what to trade.