Escape From Tarkov – 9 Best Beginner Flea Market Tips

Learn how to make tons of money in Escape from Tarkov with our Flea Market beginner guide. I always enjoy learning player markets and EFT is a fun one to make quick money. This guide will focus on basic tips and understanding of the market while our advanced guide will go more in-depth.

If you read everything in the beginner and advanced guide, you’ll understand how to make a million roubles in under 30 minutes.

Disclaimer (7/8/2021) – The original guide below is before Battlestate Games made several changes to the Flea Market. Such as removing locked timers on items, raising the Flea Market level, and only in-raid items being sold on it. (1/19/2022) We’ve updated certain information to reflect updates.

Table of Contents

Beginner Tips

Tip 1 – Filter by Item

Tip 2 – Use the Refresh Button

Tip 3 – Don’t Trust the Average Price

Tip 4 – Maximum of Three Offers/Listings

Tip 5 – The Fence Adds Cheap Items to the Market

Tip 6 – Buy Quickly With Clicking and a Hotkey

Tip 7 – Fees Will Screw You Over

Tip 8 – Pricing at 1999 Instead of 2000

Tip 9 – You Don’t Need to Play the Market to Profit

Before getting into the guide, I focus on making money from rouble transactions over bartering. That’s not to say you can’t make money bartering items, it’s mainly simpler to focus on the money. Also, I don’t use bots or macros and won’t discuss them in this guide.

Beginner Market Tips

New players don’t have access to the Flea Market until they hit level 15. This opens a whole new world as players frequently buy items for more money than Dealers will. On more than one occasion, I’ve sold food for 6k-8k roubles compared to selling it to a Dealer for 100. If you take a minute or two, the amount of money you can make is a lot higher with the Flea Market.

Some quick tips for beginners using the Flea Market are below:

Tip 1 – Filter by Item

Right-click items in your inventory and use “Filter by Item” to immediately find the listings for your item. This a quick way to find what you’re looking to sell without going through the hassle of searching for it. It’s especially useful if you only use the market occasionally.

Tip 2 – Use the Refresh Button

This tip is on the beginner and advanced guide because it’s important for both. The refresh button at the top right corner of the Flea Market is two arrows circling each other. This removes all sold listings and adds any new ones since the last refresh. If you’re struggling to buy an item with error messages like, “Offer Not Found”, click the refresh button.

Tip 3 – Don’t Trust the Average Price

When you go to put an item on the market, it shows the minimum, maximum, and average price of that item. This isn’t a bad way to get a general idea of the average price, but it changes so often that it’s misleading. If you want to sell something on the market instead of a Dealer, look at what prices sell fast and where the prices even/average out. That’s where you want to sell.

If you research an item, you’ll get a better idea of where to sell. However, it’s usually a good idea to not go past the first page.

Tip 4 – Maximum of Three Offers/Listings

All players start with a maximum of two offers or listings they can put on the Flea Market. Similar to Dealers, players have a reputation that can give them more listings. In order to increase it, you’ll get .1 reputation for every ₽100,000(roubles) worth of items sold.

The reputation to number of listings ratio is below courtesy of Fandom. Players can also lose reputation by having listings expire or manually removing them.

Reputation	.2	.2 to 30	30 to 70	70 to 150	150 to 500	1000
Offerings	1	2	3	4	5	8

Tip 5 – The Fence Adds Cheap Items to the Market

If you’ve read my beginner tips guide, you’d know not to buy from the Fence. However, the Fence puts items on the Flea Market that often undercut players significantly. I’ve bought items that average at 20k for 4k from the Fence.

This is an exception to the rule when you’re looking at listings and the Fence throws something on the market at a huge discount.

Tip 6 – Buy Quickly With Clicking and a Hotkey

Many people accuse the market of being ruined by macros and bots. While this may be true, the best way to buy something without those is to click on the “Locked” button and mashing “Y” simultaneously. If you do this quickly enough, you’ll still be able to combat other players for when they slip up.

Occasionally multiple cheap listings become available at the same time and this creates an opportunity to snipe items past bots or macros. Also, sometimes you’ll have better luck buying an item with multiple being sold by the same player.

Tip 7 – Fees Will Screw You Over

One of my least favorite parts of the Flea Market in Escape from Tarkov is how they handle fees. No items are at the same amount and a lot of other factors come into play to decide how high or low a fee is. It comes off as a way to price fix from the developers to try and combat scammers. The dynamic fee pricing likely helps consumers in the long run and only hurts people like us playing the market.

Make sure you test the fee of an item you want to sell frequently before buying a bunch of it. It’s entirely possible the fee of your item is higher than you’re selling it for. Higher fees also apply to items with lower durability.

However, you can get a discount on market fees by upgrading the Hideout’s Intelligence Center to level 3. This cuts the fee by 30% and gets you making more money.

Tip 8 – Pricing at 1999 Instead of 2000

You’ve probably seen companies take advantage of this method in real life. By pricing an item at 1 rouble less than the competition, you’re highest on the list. Most players filter by price and are looking for the cheapest deal. It doesn’t matter if the difference is only 1 rouble or 1 penny. Your item is the first one they see and the one they’re going to buy.

This tip goes hand-in-hand with Tip 4 in our advanced tips guide.

Tip 9 – You Don’t Need to Play the Market to Profit

There are endless ways to make money on the Flea Market, but at the end of the day, it’s easy to make a little extra without much effort. You might hear about people making millions from trading and maybe you’re not the sort of person that wants to stare at the market. That’s okay. But I can guarantee you it’s easy to toss something on the market for 10x to 20x the price of what a dealer pays.

Here are a few examples in roubles:

	Screw Nut	A Pack of Screws	Light Bulb
Dealer Price	727	2,355	825
Market Price	13,000	10,000	15000

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I hope these beginner tips help you understand how the Flea Market works and how you can take advantage of it. Advanced Flea Market tips are available here. If you have any specific questions, feel free to comment below.