How I Discovered FunPay and G2G
Nowadays, websites like FunPay and G2G feel like they've always been around. But I still remember when they were brand new—and when we were among the first people using them.
Let's start from the beginning. Both projects appeared around 2015–2016. It doesn't really matter which one came first. Either way, both showed up more than 15 years after gaming marketplaces had already existed.
Back then I was selling Lineage 2 adena on pwlvl.ru. Whenever I had fresh stock, I'd message them on ICQ. From there it worked in different ways: sometimes they'd message me when they had an order, and sometimes I'd simply hand over an account loaded with adena so they could fulfill orders themselves.
Selling accounts or expensive items like epic gear was much more complicated. You had to contact one of the always-busy middlemen (guarantors), and the whole process involved a lot of hassle and very little trust on either side. Eventually, pwlvl decided to solve this problem by creating CashPass. The service became quite popular, and I was happy using it. But finding buyers was still inconvenient. Then one day I got more adena to sell and, as usual, sent them a message on ICQ. Instead of taking the order, they told me that from now on all pwlvl suppliers had to list their offers on their new website, funpay.ru (it wasn't .com yet). It was basically CashPass, but with one huge difference: instead of waiting for someone to contact you, you could publish an offer that every buyer could see. They also promised ridiculously low fees—I don't remember the exact number, but I think they advertised something like 3% 😂
That's how I became one of the very first sellers on FunPay. Today, there are more than 1.5 million accounts with at least one completed sale.
At first, though, there were almost no customers. Most of my orders actually came from FunPay employees, who were still selling through pwlvl out of habit (and at much higher prices), but now they had a much more convenient supplier network where sellers competed against each other on price.
Around 2017 I decided to start botting in World of Warcraft. After researching the gold-selling market, I discovered something interesting: Europeans were willing to pay about three times more per gold than Russian buyers, while Americans paid almost six times more. (The gap isn't nearly as big today.)
There was just one problem: FunPay didn't have European or American customers back then. That's when I discovered FunPay's western counterpart—G2G—where I could sell gold to Europeans, and its older "father," PlayerAuctions, where Americans were buying. (At the time, G2G barely had any American customers.)
Little did I know, this was only the beginning. Over the years I ended up using many other Western and Chinese marketplaces, each with its own quirks and strengths. And I still use many of them to this day.