How to Trade — the Trade Site and Currency Exchange
Trading massively speeds up your progress — when you can’t craft that last resistance line or enough damage yourself, you just buy what someone else made. PoE2 0.5 trade has two pillars: items go through asynchronous trade, and currency goes through the Currency Exchange. Both differ from the old “both players online, whisper back and forth” model, so it helps to understand the structure first.
Item trade (the trade site)
You search for items on the official trade site (pathofexile.com/trade2) or the in-game Market Panel (default key /), filtering by the modifiers you want.
Item trade in 0.5 is asynchronous. The key point is that you can buy even when the seller is offline.
- Sellers list items in a Merchant’s Tab at a price of their choosing.
- Buyers find a listing and press “Secure Item,” which teleports them to the seller’s hideout (the NPC Ange) to buy at the listed price. The buyer pays a Gold fee (the seller pays none).
So you buy at the listed price with no haggling or live trade window — much simpler. Note that selling requires a paid Merchant’s Tab. Buying is free and unlimited, but to list items for sale you need a Merchant’s Tab (premium tabs bought before 0.3.0 can be converted for free).
A direct-whisper trade path may still exist in some cases, but the current default is asynchronous trade. The exact remaining scope of manual trading isn’t firmly confirmed.
Currency Exchange
Stackable, bulk currency uses a different venue from items: the Currency Exchange. It opens when you invite Ange in Act 4 to your hideout, and you can also Ctrl+click that NPC to open it.
The Exchange is an auto-matching market.
- You place buy/sell orders with an “I Want / I Have” interface and pay Gold; matching orders are filled automatically.
- No meeting, no whispering, and the other party can be offline.
- Besides currency it handles bulk goods like essences, runes, catalysts, omens, soul cores, distilled emotions, and boss invitations.
Because it auto-matches with no interaction, it’s effectively scam-proof. As a beginner, prefer the Exchange for currency trades — it’s both safer and easier.
Price checking and etiquette
The fastest way to check prices is a tracker like poe.ninja (poe.ninja/poe2), which shows live currency rates and unique-item prices. For a specific item, search similar listings on the trade site and price near the cheapest comparable ones. Which currencies actually hold value is covered in Currency Management.
Etiquette is simple: price your listings sensibly and trade within the system. Since asynchronous trade and the Exchange are the default, there’s far less live whisper etiquette to worry about than before.
Avoiding scams
The good news: 0.5’s default trading is scam-resistant. Asynchronous item trade executes at the listed price (there’s no live window to swap the amount at the last second), and the Currency Exchange auto-matches. The classic “change the amount in the trade window” scam mostly doesn’t work here.
Still, keep these in mind:
- Treat any trade outside the system as a scam. “Let’s do it on Discord,” “I’ll send first, then you send,” “let’s use a middleman” — those are scams. Only ever use the in-game trade and the Exchange.
- If you do a manual/direct trade, verify the exact item and the amount/currency in the trade window before accepting — watch for a last-second swap.
- A too-cheap listing may be stale or bait. Before assuming it’s a steal, check the price on poe.ninja.