Tradable cosmetic items, aka skins, from games like CS:GO or Dota 2, generate multi-million dollar turnovers on Steam Community Market and third-party marketplaces. Players buy skins to look cool in the game while pro traders make a good living out of reselling such items.
As big money is involved, convenient and secure payment methods are required for traders to top up their accounts and withdraw earnings. G2A Wallet by G2A Pay is among the most widely-used deposit options in the CS:GO market. It’s quite a challenge to find significant CS:GO skin sites that don’t use G2A so it’s easy and convenient to buy CS:GO skins with the G2A Wallet.
But there’s now a slight problem, as Wallet users have to figure out how to buy skins without G2A. Earlier this month, the payment provider announced that its services would soon be moved to Zen.com but G2A Wallet would no longer be supported.
To help players buy CS:GO skins without G2A, we have checked out these three major marketplaces for alternative methods to deposit funds.
DMarket
DMarket is a big yet still rapidly growing marketplace where you can deposit through 10+ payment options and buy rare CS:GO skins as well as items from Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, and Life Beyond. DMarket users are able to trade both using bots and directly between Steam accounts (Face2Face trading).
For withdrawing funds, DMarket offers Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Skrill, Payoneer, and other popular gateways. Yet, as G2A Wallet was only used for deposits, we are focused on alternative options to top up a user account.
Credit card payments (Visa and Mastercard) are conducted with a 2.5% + $0.14 per-transaction fee. Instant bank transfers via Rapid Transfer with a 2% fee are available for users from 19 European countries.
Major digital payment methods on DMarket include Skrill and Neteller, both with a 3.9% fee.
The marketplace pays significant attention to the Chinese market as all of the three biggest payment methods in China – UnionPay, WeChat Pay, and AliPay – are available on DMarket with moderate fees (2.7%).
For crypto users, there are Bitcoin deposits with only a 1% fee.
DMarket also supports a number of payment methods popular in certain countries. These options include QIWI, WebMoney, YandexMoney, EPS (Netpay), Giropay, iDeal, POLI, Klarna, Rapid Transfer, and Przelewy24.
SkinBaron
A popular Germany-based marketplace for buying and selling skins from CS:GO, Dota 2, TF2, Z1BR, and Rust.
There are two ways to pay for skins on this site. The first one is to deposit money to your SkinBaron balance and then buy items using these funds. The second one is to pay for skins directly through the available payment methods. This is a convenient option but the marketplace charges an additional 5% fee for direct purchases, “to cover the cost of fraud prevention”.
SkinBaron users can both pay for their purchases directly and deposit money to the platform via SOFORT, bank transactions, and Paysafecard. Standard bank transactions (IBAN SEPA or SWIFT) are only available for deposits.
SEPA payments (0% payment fee on SkinBaron) are bank transfers denominated in euro and available in 37 European countries.
SOFORT is an online banking method popular in Germany and available in seven other European countries. The payment fee is 5% both for deposits and direct purchases (including a “fraud-prevention fee” in the latter).
SkinBaron doesn’t charge payment fees for wire transfers via SWIFT, but the banks do – usually between $25-$65 per outgoing transfer. This makes bank payments quite expensive for SkinBaron users outside the eurozone as they can’t use SEPA or SOFORT.
Since it will soon be impossible to buy and sell skins for G2A Wallet, SkinBaron’s only remaining payment method that doesn’t require a bank account is Paysafecard. To use it, you need to go to a local sales outlet and buy a Paysafecard voucher for your chosen amount that you can then use to deposit funds online. This comes with a shocking 15% fee for Paysafecard deposits on SkinBaron.
As for withdrawals, SkinBaron only offers IBAN SEPA and SWIFT (with a €100 minimum amount for the latter).
BitSkins
One of the older skins marketplaces, BitSkins is well-known among players and traders. It supports the same range of games as SkinBaron.
BitSkins offers a good choice of payment options for crypto users: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin – all without additional fees.
For players and traders who don’t use crypto, there are card payments via MasterCard and Visa. The per-transaction fees are 3.2% + $0.30 for deposits and 3.95% + $0.50 for withdrawals (only Visa cards are available for withdrawals).
Other deposit methods on BitSkins – such as Skrill, Neteller, UnionPay, Webmoney – are provided by G2A Pay. Since G2A is shutting down only its native wallet, these methods may remain available for BitSkins users in the future – provided by G2A’s successor Zen.com. Otherwise, the marketplace might be looking for another provider. Payment fees for these methods are not displayed on BitSkins but you can check them out while making a deposit. When we tried to deposit $10 via Skrill and Neteller, the fees were 6.5% in both cases.
Bottom Line
SkinBaron is losing this battle of the marketplaces as its payment methods are only good for bank transfers within the eurozone. Also, the platform fees on SkinBaron are pretty high – 15%, compared to 5% on DMarket and 5%-10% on BitSkins (depending on a user’s total amount of sales).
BitSkins offers a variety of payment options for crypto users while DMarket has the best range of payment methods overall.
Anyway, even without G2A, CS:GO skins are still available for purchase through multiple payment options. We hope that this article will also help players to choose a good place to buy CS:GO skins without G2A Pay.
