Expands your potential customer base
Steam has its own micro-economy based on its trading cards and other Steam-specific items. While Steam has a built-in marketplace that lets users trade these items with one another easily, it does have limitations if you want to trade these items with other Steam players that you aren’t friends with.
Finding and identifying your Steam Trade URL allows you to sell these items on third-party websites to reach the largest number of potential customers possible. This URL lets people see what items you have in your inventory and what you might have available for sale.
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Where To Find Your Steam Trade URL
Finding your Steam Trade URL is easy.
- Open Steam.
- Open your Steam inventory.
- Select Trade Offers > Who can send me Trade Offers? on the right side of the screen.
- Scroll down to the Third-Party Sites header and copy your trade URL from the text box available there.
If you post your URL somewhere and you’re receiving more trade offers than you know what to do with, you can create a new URL to buy yourself some peace. All you have to do is select Create New URL. You will need to copy and paste this new URL for any future trade opportunities.
Is it Safe to Share Your Steam Trade URL?
Don’t worry — no one can gain access to your Steam account through your Trade URL. It’s perfectly safe to share on other websites, and you can easily swap to a new one if a potential customer ends up harassing you or pestering you about a previous trade.
How To Enable Trade Requests on Steam
Are you interested in people reaching out to you about your inventory items? You need to make sure your privacy settings enable people to send you requests.
- Open Steam.
- Select your username and then select Profile.
- Select Edit Profile.
- Select Privacy Settings.
- Change your inventory privacy to Public.
Once your inventory privacy is set to public, you’ll be able to receive trade requests from everyone — not just your friends. If you ever want to stop trade requests from coming in, repeat this process but swap your privacy settings to friends only.
How To Tell if You Can Trade an Item
Not all Steam items can be traded, but most can. There’s an easy way to check: look at the tags on an item. For example, you can trade almost all trading cards for others. You can also sell these on the marketplace for actual money, which you can then use to purchase games.
Take a look at the image below. It has numerous tags associated with it, but the one you want to look for is the Tradeable tag.
Although it isn’t visible, if you scroll far enough down, you will see that it’s listed at $0.06, with the number of cards sold on the community market in the last hour. If you’re on a strict budget, it’s not a bad way to make a few extra dollars for your next game. Almost every game has a set of trading cards that you can receive simply from playing through the game.
What Kind of Items Can You Trade?
Steam gives players various items that range from trading cards, player skins, stickers, and more. Some of these items can be sold, while others can only be traded to other players.
When you make a trade offer, you select items from both players’ inventories that you wish to trade. You essentially request the items you want from the other person’s inventories and offer your items in exchange. The other person can then accept or reject your trade.
Some Steam items appear only for a limited time, such as during seasonal events. You can use these emoticons and stickers to decorate your profile and customize it to suit your tastes. If you want one of these items after the event ends, your best bet is to trade another player for it.
Trading on Steam Is a Fun Mini-Game
Steam is more than just a gaming platform — it’s an entire ecosystem and marketplace too. While you won’t get rich selling items on Steam, it’s a fun little minigame you can take part in. If you want to open your inventory up for trade or make trades to other players, the first thing you need to do is find your Steam Trade URL.
