Steam Buy Orders: How They Work and When They Beat Buying a Listing
A buy order puts your price in the buyers' queue and waits for a seller to accept it. We cover how it differs from taking the lowest listing, why the top buy order is the real price of an instant exit, how the fee is calculated, and when waiting is the wrong move.
Two buttons that lead in opposite directions
A Steam item page offers two ways to get the item. You can hit buy and take the lowest listing at the seller's price. Or you can place a buy order — name your own price and join the queue, waiting for someone to agree to sell at it.
The first way is paying for speed. The second is paying with time and getting a better price.
The gap between those two numbers is exactly what the market charges you for immediacy. On a liquid item it is small; on a rare one it is enormous, and it is the single thing that most often eats the profit of anyone pricing a deal off one number.
The one thing worth taking away: the top buy order is the price at which you can exit an item right now. Not the lowest listing, not the median of sales — that one. Everything above it is a price for which a buyer still has to be found.
How it works mechanically
A buy order lives on the buyers' side of the order book and follows simple rules.
Funds are reserved immediately. The moment the order is placed, the amount is locked in your wallet. You cannot have more orders outstanding than you have money for.
The queue is sorted by price. The highest-priced order fills first. Between two orders at the same price, the one placed earlier fills first.
Filling is instant and needs nothing from you. As soon as a seller decides to sell at your order's price, the trade goes through on its own, even while you are offline.
It can be cancelled any time before it fills, and the money returns to the wallet in full.
The key difference from a listing: listings are all visible, buy orders are not. Steam shows how many orders exist and what the highest one is, but the prices below the top are hidden.
The fee: where 13.04% comes from when it says 15%
Nearly everyone trips over this, and the confusion costs real money when pricing a deal.
Steam charges two fees: 5% for itself and 10% for the game, a nominal 15% in total. But they are added on top of the seller's amount rather than subtracted from the buyer's price.
Here is what that means in practice. The buyer pays some amount. The seller receives roughly 87% of it, and the fee works out to about 13.04% of what the buyer paid. The fifteen percent is a share of the seller's side, not of the receipt.
| What is measured | Against what base | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Nominal fee | the seller's amount | 15% |
| Actual share | the buyer's price | ≈13.04% |
| Left to the seller | the buyer's price | ≈87% |
On cheap items the effective rate is higher than those figures, because of the minimum fee and rounding to the cent. Treating the percentage as a constant is fine on expensive positions; on penny items it lies precisely where the rows are most numerous. That is why we do not apply one flat percentage across the whole board.
For buy orders this matters in one specific way: placing an order is free. The fee is paid by the seller on the sale. As a buyer you pay exactly the amount you named — which is why a buy order shows the clean price of demand, with no intermediary markup on top.
Why buy orders are worth watching even if you never place one
The top buy order is the most honest figure on the entire item page, and here is why.
A sell listing only means somebody wants to receive that amount. It can sit there for months. A buy order means somebody is ready to hand over money right now: it is already locked in their wallet.
Hence the practical rule of valuation: an item is worth what is offered for it, not what is asked for it.
A quick check before buying "to flip": look at the top buy order. If you are buying a listing at 30 dollars while the top order sits at 20, then selling instantly right after the purchase brings 20 minus the fee. The gap between those numbers is neither profit nor loss — it is the price of the time you will spend finding a buyer.
The same explains why a board without a second price misleads. By our data 91.1% of the rows on any board are posted offers rather than completed trades. A listing price speaks to a seller's intention; a buy order speaks to a buyer's money.
Compare both sides across every marketplace at once:
When a buy order helps, and when it hurts
It works
On liquid items. Where trades run constantly, an order slightly below market fills within hours. The saving is small but repeatable.
When you are in no hurry. Investment buying, building a position, restocking for resale — anywhere without a deadline.
When you need volume. Buying ten copies off the lowest listings means walking up every level of the book and ending with an average noticeably worse than the starting price. One order for ten copies at a single price removes that problem: it simply waits for the market to come to you.
It hurts
On illiquid items. An order on something that trades once a month can sit forever, with your money locked and doing nothing.
When the price is moving. If an item is climbing, an order below market never fills — you will watch the price walk away with your funds reserved.
When you are moving the market yourself. Placing the highest order makes you the new top order. On a thin item everyone sees that, and the next seller prices against you.
Money from a sale on Steam stays in the Steam wallet and does not convert into ordinary money. This applies to any sale inside the platform, whichever way it happened. So for real earnings you have to compare not just prices but the form the proceeds arrive in: a Steam wallet balance and a payout to a card are different things, and the difference between them exceeds any fee.
The hold that breaks plans
A purchased item cannot be transferred to another account for 7 days. The restriction sits on the item, not the account, and the date is visible in the item description.
For a buy order this means the moment of filling is out of your hands. An order can fill in an hour or in a week — and the hold starts counting from then. If you need an item by a specific date, an order is the wrong tool; you need a listing you take yourself, immediately.