14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has introduced two new features to the Steam Community Market of its popular digital distribution service, allowing users to manually verify their credit cards and issue automatic buy orders for certain objects on the marketplace.
Steam is the most popular digital distribution service out there, largely because developer Valve has made sure to add plenty of different features to it, including a fully-functional Community Market, where users can buy and sell all sorts of in-game items, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gun skins, Team Fortress 2 hats, or Dota 2 customization gear, not to mention the popular Steam Trading Cards.
Now, ahead of the long anticipated Steam Summer Sale of 2014, which is supposedly going to start today, June 19, Valve has rolled out two more features for the Steam Market, in the form of manual card verification and buy orders.
First up, Steam users who use a credit card to add funds to their Steam Wallets have the option to manually verify their card, instead of waiting seven days before being able to use the funds on the Market.
The manual procedure sees Valve charge a coded transaction onto your card and, when you enter the correct code, the funds are transferred to the wallet and you can start spending them.
The second major feature allows users to issue buy orders for certain items on Steam.
"A buy order is an order to purchase a commodity item at or below the specified price. This order stays in place until it is fulfilled or cancelled," Valve said on Steam. "You can have multiple buy orders outstanding – up to 10 times your current wallet balance. If an item gets listed for a lower price than what you have on your buy order, you will receive the lower price."
"The buy order with the highest price gets priority for purchasing newly listed items. If there are multiple orders with the same high price, the oldest buy order gets fulfilled first. Buy orders can be cancelled at any time, by you or the system – if the item changes, if you no longer have enough funds in your wallet, or if there are any issues during an attempted purchase."
For now, the Half-Life 2 Trading Cards are listed as commodities and can be purchased using buy orders. Once Valve ensures that there are no problems with the system, it will slowly be rolled out for other trading cards and items on the Steam Market.