steam market api?

[Mason]

Hi I'm new to trading (mainly cs:go) and I'm trying to create a program for myself to monitor prices and such, but I'm having trouble finding any documentation at all about the steam market api. Clearly it exists because websites such as this one manage to grab prices off the steam market.

 

Any nudges in the right direction would be much appreciated thank you.

[Mengh.]

There are 2 ways you can go about this.

 

1) Have a bot scrape prices for you, directly from the item's Steam Market JSON. There isn't really any documentation for this, but it's fairly easy to understand.

 

This JSON can be accessed via http://steamcommunity.com/market/priceoverview/?appid=730&currency=1&market_hash_name=<SkinName> where <SkinName> is a HTML encoded string of the skin's name in full.

 

Example:

 

http://steamcommunity.com/market/priceoverview/?appid=730&currency=1&market_hash_name=StatTrak%E2%84%A2%20M4A1-S%20|%20Hyper%20Beast%20(Minimal%20Wear)

 

Pros:

• Own pricing
• Up to date prices
• May not need to pay for API usage

Cons:

• You'll need to allocate a lot of space for holding a database of prices for all 9000+ items.
• You'll need to program a rotation as to get through all items, as this JSON method only returns information about a selected skin, not all.

 

2) Use someone else's API for prices.

 

Backpack.tf allows you to see the prices of CS:GO items, setting appid=730.

Here is the documentation: http://backpack.tf/api/docs/IGetMarketPrices

 

Steamlytics also offer an API: http://csgo.steamlytics.xyz/api

 

Pros:

• Free / Cheap (as long as you cache prices, rather than fetching them every single time)
• JSON fetched will return prices of all items

Cons:

• API updates every 6 hours, so may not be as accurate