About a week ago, we loosened up the ownership restrictions on limited items to allow users to possess multiple copies of the same item. One of the effects of this change is it is now much much easier to make trades with other players. In the past, if a player wanted to send me a trade, he would have to have items I didn’t already own. For a lot of our power users, this can be really difficult!

Since implementing this feature, I’ve personally seen my number of incoming trade offers triple. A quick look at the database confirms that there are now roughly 55% more trade offers flowing through our system. It’s been about eight months since we published our last guide to the Trading System. What better way to usher in the trading renaissance than to provide some tips and tricks for would-be traders?

1. Get access

The ability to trade items is a Builders Club-exclusive feature. For as little as $5.95 a month you can support the future development of ROBLOX and gain access to the trading system (among other premium features). If you have Builders Club, you’ll find the main trading system screen here. From this screen you can see your inbound, outbound, completed, and inactive trade offers.

2. Find some trades: more offers are better offers

Maybe you’ve already got thousands of trade offers flooding in. But if you don’t, the best way to find someone to trade with is to browse through the Collectible section of the ROBLOX catalog. This is basically an exhaustive list of all the tradeable items. When you see an item you like, shoot trade requests to the players offering the item for the cheapest price (these are the people mostly likely to give you a good deal on this item, since they are already looking to unload it). The “Send Trade Request” button is on the user’s profile page.

Getting good trades on ROBLOX is largely a matter of leg work. If you’re only going to send out one offer, you have to make it a pretty good one, because the other guy has to accept. However, if you send out 10 different offers to 10 different people, you might get lucky and get a good deal. Careful, though; you don’t want to end up with more copies of the item than you originally wanted. One way to prevent this is to have all of your outbound trade offers include one low-value item of which you only own one copy. If this deal goes through, you’ll trade away that item and it’s absence from your inventory will spike all your other outstanding offers.

3. Recent Average Price (RAP) can be a trap

To give you an idea of what an item is worth before you trade or sell it, ROBLOX displays a historical price graph and a “Recent Average Price” next to every collectible item. The “Recent Average Price” (or RAP) is an exponential moving average of the item’s sale price. This means recent sales are weighted more heavily in the average. It also means that this number becomes very stale if the item has not sold recently. For items where multiple copies sell each day (i.e., cheap items), you don’t need to worry about this. However, for items that have very few (i.e., less than 20) private sellers, you really need to be careful. Some of the rarest items on the site have very low RAP, compared to their scarcity. You wouldn’t want to trade one away for less than it was worth, would you?

4. Traders use certain items as money

We recently updated the trading system to allow users to include Robux as part of a trade. However, these additions are taxed at 30%, just like regular peer-to-peer item sales. To get around this, there is a set of items that experienced traders include in trades instead of money. These items have certain properties: many of them exist (so their price is hard to manipulate), they are liquid (easily convertible into Robux, if desired), and they are in high demand (which helps preserve their value over time). Here is a partial list of very common “money” items:

• Dominus Vespertilio
• JJ5x5’s Top Hat
• Overseer’s Eye
• The Classic ROBLOX Fedora
• Clockwork’s Headphones
• Headrow
• Perfectly Legitmate Business Hat
• Azure Pinstripe Fedora
• Desert Scout

If a particular user doesn’t have anything you want, you can be happy trading for one of these items. They’re very easy to trade to other players and you can basically “buy” items from other players at RAP (or slightly better) with these.

5. Push the decline button a lot

Sometimes the best negotiation tactic is just saying, “no.” When someone offers you a bad deal, don’t even bother counter-offering unless the trade is very close for you. You can’t deal with the crazy.

6. Practice your art

If you’re trying to make a profit trading items on ROBLOX, it takes a lot of practice. You need to know all of the commonly traded items, which ones are in demand and which ones are rare, and which ones you can easily sell and which ones you can trade to the right guy for twice what they’re worth, and which ones… The best way to improve is to trade a little each day, and also to get advice from the professionals in the Let’s Make a Deal forum.

A lot of you are already expert ROBLOX traders and we’re interested in having you share your strategies with newcomers. What techniques in this article do you think are particularly effective? What strategies of your own have you developed?