In plain words: BUFF163 is NetEase's Chinese marketplace where players buy CS2 skins from each other, and Dota 2 and TF2 items too. There are no cases or bets. The seller sends the skin in a normal Steam trade offer, BUFF keeps 1.5% of the price, and the rest is paid out in Chinese yuan (CNY) to a bank card or Alipay account in your own verified name. For anyone outside China, that payout rule decides everything.
Why Betrefs leaves BUFF out of headline prices
Our price checker, investment tracker and trade-up calculator skip BUFF163 and YouPin when they show the cheapest price or the best payout. BUFF's price still appears in the checker's full table, labelled "China only". Money goes in and out through Alipay, WeChat Pay or a Chinese bank card, in yuan, and BUFF checks the account you withdraw to against the name you verified. Most of our readers can't pay or collect at that price, so it doesn't set the headline number.
Can you use it from outside China?
Partly, and selling is the hard part.
- Signing up. One Trustpilot reviewer says you need a Chinese phone number. We couldn't check this, because sign-up runs through NetEase's own login.
- Verifying your name. BUFF calls this real-name verification (实名认证): you prove who you are with a bank card or Alipay. BUFF's English help page on opening Alipay outside mainland China, published 9 October 2026, says to sign up for Alipay's international version with a passport and a non-Chinese phone number, pass its passport and face check, then send BUFF screenshots of that Alipay page and your passport for manual approval.
- Buying. One reviewer says Alipay lets you add a Visa card. Another says they bought through WeChat Pay.
- Selling. One Trustpilot reviewer says you need a Chinese bank account, which needs a Chinese ID. BUFF's withdrawal page says payouts go to a linked bank card or Alipay and fail if that account's name doesn't match your verified name. It doesn't say whether a passport-verified international Alipay account can receive them. Don't list skins until you know you can get the money out.
- Language. The site defaults to Simplified Chinese, with English, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian in the menu. The help centre is in Chinese apart from that Alipay page. On 25 October 2026 the CS2 market page sent us to the login page.
In September 2026 a reviewer wrote that BUFF had "closed off to the whole world, only China is left".
Fees: 1.5% to sell, 1% to withdraw
BUFF's fee page, published 29 July 2026 and read on 25 October 2026, sets two fees:
- a 1.5% trade service fee on each item sold, rounded up to the next fen (0.01 yuan) and already included in the listing price,
- a 1% withdrawal fee, at least ¥2, rounded up to the next whole yuan.
So a skin sold for ¥1,000 leaves ¥985 in your balance, and withdrawing it costs ¥10, leaving ¥975. That's about 2.5% in total. At the rate BUFF's own pages use (6.674 yuan to the dollar), ¥1,000 is about $150.
You can withdraw up to 10 times a day, from ¥10 to ¥50,000 each time, with ¥100,000 a day in total. BUFF says money usually reaches a major bank within two hours in the daytime on working days.
| Market | Fee to sell | Typical buy price vs CSFloat |
|---|---|---|
| YouPin | 1% | 0.9% higher |
| BUFF163 | 1.5% | 1.6% higher |
| CSFloat | 2% | benchmark |
| BUFF.Market | 2.5% | 3.1% higher |
| Steam Market | 13% | 42.6% higher |
Buy-price figures are CS2Cap's September 2026 averages. CSFloat also charges 0.5% to 2.5% to withdraw, and the Steam Market pays only in Steam Wallet funds.
Prices: the reference, not the cheapest
Our own price data from 24 October 2026 doesn't make BUFF the cheapest market. On 10,645 skins priced at $5 or more on both sites, BUFF's lowest listing was a median 2.7% above CSFloat's, and cheaper on only 36% of them. Against YouPin it was about level: 0.9% lower at the median, cheaper on 56%. Against the Steam Market it was 22% lower, and cheaper on 83%. An AK-47 Redline (Field-Tested) was $24.95 on BUFF, $23.94 on CSFloat, $24.58 on YouPin and $31.63 on Steam.
BUFF's real role is as a reference. We hold close to 26,000 BUFF prices, and other sites build on them: CSGOEmpire prices its items from BUFF data, and Skinflow bases its prices on BUFF.
How a trade works
BUFF is peer to peer (P2P): other players sell to you, and BUFF checks the trade. When you buy, the seller has 12 hours to send the offer. You can cancel after 30 minutes. A failed order is refunded the way you paid, and BUFF says WeChat refunds arrive within 30 minutes. When the seller sends the offer, the buyer has 24 hours to accept, or 2% of the price goes to the seller. To trade you need the Steam Mobile Authenticator, a public inventory, and a working trade link. BUFF's FAQ also explains how to save your Steam API key in its settings. Only ever enter it on buff.163.com itself. Sellers who cancel or ship late have similar listings pulled for 3 days, and repeat offenders lose selling for 3 to 30 days. There are also buy orders, counter-offers, skin rentals and quick-sale auctions.
The 7-day hold and trade reversals
Steam lets a CS2 trade be reversed for 7 days after it goes through. So BUFF holds sale money as "pending settlement" for 7 days before you can withdraw it.
Its reversal rules, changed five times since October 2025 and most recently in April 2026, are strict on sellers. A seller who reverses a trade has every BUFF account and phone number under the same real name banned indefinitely, and the Steam account blocked. To get back in, they pay the buyer 10% of the order plus any rise in the item's price, and BUFF charges 1.5% on that. The buyer who lost the skin gets one month of BUFF's Plus membership. If a buyer reverses, the order still pays out to the seller in most cases.
Two Trustpilot reviews from 2025 say a seller pulled the skin back, and one says support never answered. Both came before the current version of these rules.
Who runs it, and where disputes go
BUFF163 belongs to NetEase, the Nasdaq-listed Chinese games company founded by William Ding. It had about 2.1 million visits in July 2026. Its user agreement is under Chinese law, signed in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, and disputes that can't be settled go to the local people's court there. The service is for people with full civil capacity under Chinese law.
Trustpilot shows 2.3 out of 5 from 99 reviews. That's a small sample, and the recent reviews in our data come from players outside China: shut out of the site, reversed trades, and a November 2025 ticket unanswered after two weeks.
BUFF's anti-scam guide says staff never contact you by phone, QQ or text during a trade, and its automated reminder calls never ask for passwords, codes or API keys. When you confirm a trade, check the buyer's Steam name, level and account age against what BUFF shows.
Betrefs has no BUFF code and no affiliate deal with NetEase.
Should you use BUFF163?
If you live in China and have Alipay or a Chinese bank card, it's one of the cheapest places to sell, at 1.5% plus 1% to withdraw. Everyone else should treat BUFF as a price reference. To actually trade, BUFF.Market, NetEase's international version, takes cards and crypto and pays out by bank transfer, for a 2.5% seller fee and 4.6 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 1,055 reviews. CSFloat is the other option.