Sticker Price Check Guide

A guide on how to better price check skins, and what techniques respected pricecheckers use.

What is a "price check"?

A "price check" is as simple as it sounds, it's when the price of something is checked. In the terms of CSGO skins, it's the evaluation of overpay based on rare aspects of skins (stickers, patterns, float, etc.).

Useful Terminology and Acronyms

Phrase	Meaning
ovp	overpay
pc	price check
sp	Sticker percent, or the percentage of the stickers price added to the skin's value
rmb	Chinese Yuan, the most widely used currency for pricing skins
B/O	Buy out, or the price the seller is asking
C/O	Current offer, or the highest offer the seller has received
Liquid	A skin with no special characteristics easily sold for cash
Illiquid	A skin with special characteristics, commonly stickers, float, pattern, or other quirks

Important Skin Price Information

Where do you get the prices?

• Prices are gathered using Buff163[buff.163.com], a Chinese marketplace used predominantly by collectors.

What dignifies if a skin receives overpay?
There are 3 main categories for overpay.

• Stickers
  
• Float
  
• Pattern

How do I check these things?
The easiest way is to use a browser extension such as CSGO Trader[csgotrader.app] or CSGO Float Market Checker[chrome.google.com]
These will show a lot of information, including float (and float ranking), approximate price of stickers on guns, pattern id, sticker wear, and a lot more info!

Do these things stack? Like if it has a good float, and good stickers?

• Yes, if a skin has multiple rare features, each gets overpay.

Stickers!

The most common price checks, also the one with most complexity.

What goes into a sticker price check?

• Sticker price
  
• Sticker quantity
  
• Skin
  
• Rarity of craft
  
• Sticker position
  
• Other things may also add specific amounts of value

Sticker Price

Sticker price is how much money the sticker costs, the easiest way to check this is through the use of a browser extension like previously discussed.This is visible either by highlighting the sticker while the skin is selected, or the total price of stickers is visible in the top right of the skin's icon. Reminder: The prices here are slightly skewed, they are based on SCM (Steam Community Market) and not Buff163, meaning prices will appear higher.
When total sticker price is under $5 USD, generally no overpay is offered. Depending on stickers, this price may be higher, undesirable stickers get no overpay.

Sticker Quantity

The amount of stickers applied increase the amount of overpay, a 4x (or quad craft) of a singular sticker will generally get the highest amount of overpay. This amount varies depending on the other factors on this page. 1x, 2x, and 3x crafts will get approximately the same amount of overpay per sticker, but 1x's may receive more in certain situations.

Skin

The skin stickers are applied on matters a lot to price, for two main reason, either how well it matches or how rare it is. The rarity will be explained in the next section, so the match is what will be discussed here. The match of the sticker is most commonly due to colour, such as blue stickers on a blue skin, or red stickers on a red skin.
The match may also be thematic, such as fish stickers on a fish, or water skin.

Rarity of Craft

The rarity of the craft is most often in reference to how many of the craft exist, the most impressive of which is a 1/1 (or a craft that only exists once). These 1/1 crafts are most commonly worth a lot more than other crafts, due to there being only 1 skin like it.
1/1s are often new skins, with old stickers, as these are the hardest for average people to achieve, but skins like the USP-S Road Rash shown above are a 1/1 on an old skin.

Sticker Position

Listed below is a guide and YouTube video that shows each skin, and it's positions ratings.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2590458348&searchtext=sticker+positions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vJ9SWhzYXI&t=9s
Best positions (or #1) will get the most overpay, though best positions are not all equal.
AWP:The AWP (scope) receives the most overpay for it's best position.
AK-47:The AK-47's best position (the wood) will also receive above average overpay, but not nearly as much as the AWP.
Glockk/USP/Deagle:The best position on each of these will also fetch above average overpay, sometimes a glock will fetch more than the others, but they're all very similar.

Others
Other things that may cause more overpay are recreation skins, or more interesting crafts (Such as Porn or Dat ISSAA BIG ♥♥♥♥ crafts)
Recreation skins are most often crafts made to be the same as a professional player's skin, such as KennyS's "Magic Stick"

How to Price Check

The easiest way to price check a skin is to compare.
this is mostly about stickers, but applies to all categories.
The recommended way to do this is by using Buff163's sticker search tool.




You can search any sticker, organise by slot, and 100% wear. Then it will show you each skin listed with such parameters.

Example

Say we were to price check this Glock-18 Franklin

First we check if it is a 1/1, this can be done easily on FloatDB[csgofloat.com] and then search skin and stickers.

As we can see, it is a 1/1, and has a .007 float. So first, lets find what a .00 float Glock-18 Franklin gets for overpay. This can be done on Buff163, by finding the skin and using its float tool to find similar listed items.

As we can see here, the lowest listed .00 float is up for 199.99 rmb. So that's our base price, any sticker overpay will be added to that price. Now let's see if there's similar glocks listed on Buff, we'll use the sticker search tool to do this.


This is the only glock (right now) listed with the same stickers, this glock is asking about 200rmb overpay. Which we'd add to our base 199.99. BUT we have to chec something more, our glock we are price checking is a 1/1, so lets see if this glock is as well.

Here we can see it is not a 1/1, which means our glock will get slightly more overpay. We will use the base price, with the added overpay seen on the Steel Disruption as a low end of a range, and we will find a price we deem fair, the other glock is asking 50% sp (sticker price), so we will go up to 75% for our high end.

Final Price Check
399.99 rmb - 499.99 rmb

And we did it! We did out first price check together, I did a hard one where we needed to find a 1/1's price. But a normal price check will be easier, you will not have to do all of those extra steps. It is important to remember sometimes you may find a reference price that is not accurate, this is on your discretion. To test any weird looking prices, compare similarly priced stickers, or find the same craft on a different gun/skin.

Closing Remarks

Thank you for reading through!

I hope this guide can help you on your price checking journey. If you have any advice, or tools, list them in the comments, and if you have any questions, also list them down below. If you see a question not answered, and you know the answer, answer it. Remember, we are all together in the skins world, and it's important to help eachother!

If you'd like to donate to me, here is my trade link.
https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffer/new/?partner=1048658677&token=7ot0Ds55
And if you'd like to contact or follow me, here is my Twitter.
https://twitter.com/B1U3_CS

[hic kimseyim]

awesome guide!

[REDBULL IS WATER 2.0]

Great stuff

[HO CHI MINH]

You are doing God's work

[𝙓𝙏𝙍𝙀𝙈𝙀]

Good hogya

[gRegZ]

Amazing guide, thank you !