PoE 2 Trade: How to Price Check Items

Understanding how to price check your items in Path of Exile 2 is an important step in engaging with the Trade economy. If you don't understand how to accurately price your items, you'll struggle to make sales, or miss out on Currency that you could have earned.

You will need to understand how to Trade and use the Trade Site to price check properly. You can check out our Trade Site Guide here: PoE 2 Trade Site Guide

The basics of pricechecking items is to simply compare the item you want to sell to similar items on the Trade Site. However, becoming proficient at price checking your items will take time and a deeper understanding of Path of Exile 2, the current meta and why certain modifiers may be desirable to certain players. Take your time, pay attention to which modifiers you tend to make use of and be patient with yourself.

Price Checking Rare Items

It's common for people to misunderstand pricechecking Rare items. Often, players will be overly specific and not turn up any results, but there are a few things you can do to improve the process:

1. Don't be hyper-specific with the modifier values and don't feel the need to include all modifiers in your search. Instead:
2. Determine which 2, 3 or 4 modifiers are most valuable on the item. For example, on a Weapon, this may be the Physical Damage per Second, Critical Hit Chance and Critical Bonus. On Boots, this may be Movement Speed, Life and two Resistances. This is where game and meta knowledge becomes most important
3. Set the minimum value of the modifiers you are checking to round numbers that people are likely to search for, rather than the exact modifier values. For example, instead of typing in a minimum value of 43% for Cold Resistance, set it to 40%.

Let's use an example and work from there:

First we need to establish which modifiers are most important. On Boots, Movement Speed is almost always the most desired modifier. Secondly, Resistances and Life/Energy Shield are always valued fairly highly, followed my increased Rarity of Items Found (aka. Magic Find).

Let's not be overly specific here and start out with 3 things: the Movement Speed and Resistances. I'm going to use a Count search of 2 for the Resistances to show results of items with at least two Resistances

Let's have a look at the search results and break it down:

Take note of number of results:

• If there are many results (dozens, hundreds or even thousands), you can be more specific with your search and add an additional mod to your search or refine the modifier values
• If there are none, or very few results, this could mean a few things such as you being overly specific with your mods or mod values, or including low value mods that people don't commonly list; or it could mean that your item is incredibly good and is a one-of-a-kind. We'll get to this a bit later.

In this case, you can see that we found almost 4000 matches for our Boots, meaning we can be more specific. These boots also have a decent amount of increased Rarity and Energy Shield, which we can add on to see if we get closer to their actual value

Above, you can see we are getting closer to discovering the actual value of the boots. We still have over 100 results, so we could opt to be even more specific by adding in the Evasion Rating, Mana or even Stun Threshold, but we need to be careful to not overly complicate our search and limit our results to the point where no similar items show up on Trade. However, with over 100 results, it's safe to add in the Evasion Rating here as it is a desirable mod. I've set the Evasion Rating in the Search Filters to 150 (our Boots have 170) and below are the results:

Now, we're pretty close to knowing the actual value of the Boots, with similar types being listed for approximately 9-10 Divines. We can further gauge the value of our Boots by comparing our Energy Shield, Resistances and Rarity of Items Found to the ones on Trade and can see ours are fairly comparable. If other Boots had significantly higher Energy Shield and/or Resistances, we could assume our Boots might be worth a bit less than those - it's a bit of a balancing act, but one you'll learn.

However, there's one other important piece of the puzzle: time listed.

On each listed item, along with the price, you'll see how long ago the item was listed. In this case, the 9 Divine Boots were listed a full day ago, indicating that they may not be worth as much as that. The next pair was listed only 8 minutes ago and it might be worth checking to see if they disappear from the Trade Site soon, which indicates that they were possibly listed for too little and sold very quickly.

In this case, our Boots could sell fairly comfortably for 7-8 Divines, possibly a bit more or less, but it's better to not over-value your items, have them sit in your Stash for several days until they lose so much value that you end up selling them for less than what you could have a few days, had you priced them correctly.

This first example should provide provide a decent insight into the thought process behind pricechecking your Rare items, but in summary:

1. Don't be overly-specific
2. Search the most valuable mods first and build from there, adding one mod at a time
3. Take note of how long similar items have been listed for
4. Don't overprice your items: rather undercut the market, sell quickly and use the Currency you now have to purchase upgrades for your build

Important Notes

There are some important things to take note of when pricing your items to avoid falling into traps that could have you misprice your items.

1. Extremely well-rolled, expensive items take longer to sell. Sometimes you will compare an excellent item and see a similar one listed for 3 days: this might not mean that it is overpriced, but rather that it is just so good and so expensive, that the market for it is incredibly limited. If you know you have a good item, be patient with it as it can take a fair amount of time to sell
2. If your item isn't particularly special, and isn't selling, it is overpriced. If you want to sell it, lower the listed price. It is all too common for new players to massively overvalue their items and then complain that nothing sells: if this is you, you need to improve your pricechecking skills and start undercutting the market rather than listing your items for unrealistic prices that no one will pay
3. Lower prices gradually: if your items aren't selling, but are good, slowly lower the price of your listed items over a period of hours, or once a day until they sell.
4. Take note of what sells and why
5. If you list an item and instantly receive dozens of whispers for it, you have underpriced your item. It is considered good trade etiquette to still sell the item for the listed value, but it is also common in cases like these to unlist the item, price check it again, and relist it for a correct value. Just make sure to not overprice your item after this happens.
6. Do not list items for trade if you aren't willing to portal out of a Waystone to sell them. The reason Trade is so awful isn't only because of the Trade Site, but rather because of the behaviour of players: if you want trade to be better, be a better trader yourself!
7. Offline Results: you can also search for Offline Results by clicking the Online Only dropdown in the top right and selecting "Online and Offline". This will show results of items listed by players who aren't currently online, and this can be useful when pricechecking especially unusual or valuable items.

And the most important note:

Don't be lazy and expect other people to price check for you. Many players will not price check their items and instead dump them in a sell tab and wait to see if they get whispers for it, then ignore those messages and re-list the item for a higher price. This is incredibly bad trade etiquette that will often land you on the ignore list of many other players. Be respectful of your fellow Exiles and treat them the way you want to be treated.

Price Checking Unique Items

Price checking Unique items is usually a fair bit easier than Rares as the modifiers are fairly set. However, there are some clever tricks to appraise your Unique items more easily.

Let's look at a popular Unique Item that has several modifiers with wide roll ranges: Ventor's Gamble

One way to search for this would be to manually type in each of the modifiers and values you have on the Ventor's you want to sell, but there's a clever trick to make this easier.

Firstly, type "Ventor's Gamble" into the search bar, and make a search.

From here, if you hover over any of the listings, you will see a small magnifying glass icon with three lines beneath it on the bottom left. By clicking this, you'll bring up the Search Filters page with each of the modifiers listed for you, into which you can type your modifier values

Remember that it's better to start with round numbers and then further refine your search to hone in on the exact value of your item. Similar to Rare items, try to identify which of the modifiers are most valuable on a Unique item and work from there, building up.

Avoiding Price Fixers

One hurdle in the way of accurately price checking your items is that of price fixers. These are dishonest players who attempt to scam others by listing popular items for a far-too-low value in order to have unwitting players mistakenly list their items for a similarly low value, so that the scammer can then buy those items at the low price, and resell them at the correct price.

Let's take a look at an example with the popular Unique Gloves Hand of Wisdom and Action. At the time of writing, Uncorrupted Gloves like these sell for approximately 4 Divine Orbs, but if we do a search, that might not seem to be the case:

Above: These players have deliberately listed this item at a very low price in order to bait new players into selling them for the same, incorrect price.

How do you avoid price fixers?

1. Scroll down a little way into the trade listings and see if there is a consistent value that most people list the item for. Do pay attention to the rolls on the items, but if there's a big jump in price from the first few listings to the rest of the listed items, it's likely the first few are being price fixed.

2. Low price, long listing time: If a popular Unique item has been listed at a surprisingly low value, but hasn't sold for several days, it is 100% being price fixed. Usually, when popular items like this are listed at the cheapest price on the market, they will sell instantly, meaning they won't ever be up on the Trade site for several minutes, hours, let alone days.

3. Hit the "Ignore Player" Button to never see a listing from that specific scammer again

If you do fall into a price fixing trap, you will be inundated by whispers from other players wanting to buy your item. Don't panic - you can press Enter and type something like "/dnd Mispriced Item" in the chat window to silence them while you properly price your item.

Price checking your items properly takes time and experience. Be patient, learn from your mistakes and don't overvalue your items. Path of Exile 2 is a complex game and it's totally normal to not know things, so be willing to ask questions if you don't understand something.

In case you missed them, we have several other guides covering Trade in PoE 2 that you can read here:

• PoE 2 Currency Exchange
• PoE 2 Trading Guide
• PoE 2 Stash Tab Guide
• PoE 2 Trade Site Guide