Shops on a Minecraft server: plugins for trading

In short: for a server shop there's EconomyShopGUI (a free version and a paid Premium, current versions cover 1.16–26.x, in-game shop editing, Bedrock forms, a transaction log) or the paid ShopGUI+ (also sells permissions, commands and spawners; its SpigotMC title says 1.8–1.21, with 26.x builds in the authors' Discord). For player shops there are the free QuickShop-Hikari (a chest, a click and a price; Paper and Folia 1.20+, up to 26.3), ChestShop (a sign by a chest; the latest release is the 3.13 pre-release for 1.13–26.2) and Shopkeepers (villager traders, item-for-item trades without Vault). All but Shopkeepers need an economy: Vault and an economy plugin — see economy and Vault.

Server shop or player shops#

Server shop: EconomyShopGUI and ShopGUI+#

/shop
/sellall inventory
/eshop additem Ores DIAMOND 120 30

items:
  1:
    type: item
    item:
      material: DIAMOND
      quantity: 1
    buyPrice: 120
    sellPrice: 30
    slot: 0

A server shop is often opened by clicking an NPC — see NPCs on a server — and menus without trading are built with menu plugins: menus and GUIs.

Player shops: ChestShop, QuickShop-Hikari, Shopkeepers#

line 1: (empty)
line 2: 16
line 3: B 20:10 S
line 4: ?

• ChestShop. Leave the first line empty — the plugin fills in your name. The second is the amount, the third the prices: B is the price players buy at, S the price they sell at, separated by a colon. With ? on the fourth line the item is filled in from the chest. Right-click the sign to buy, left-click to sell. An admin shop with unlimited stock: "Admin Shop" on the first line; it needs the ChestShop.admin permission and no chest.
• QuickShop-Hikari. Click a chest with an item and type the price in chat. Buyers find goods with /quickshop find, and an owner can add helpers with /quickshop staff. For the display item above the chest the plugin can use PacketEvents or ProtocolLib.
• Shopkeepers. A villager sells, buys or trades items. Asked about Vault support, the FAQ says no: the trading interface is designed for item trades only, with items such as emeralds as currency.

An auction house is a separate kind of player trading: see auction plugins.

Prices, exploits and dupes#

The most common hole in an economy isn't a plugin bug but a pricing mistake. If an item can be bought from the server for less than the server pays for it, a player buys and sells in a loop and prints money.

• The buy price is always above the sell price. Check it with every discount and multiplier: a donor's buy discount plus a sell multiplier can flip the prices.
• Crafting and smelting chains. A block and nine ingots, ore and ingot, wheat and bread must be priced consistently, or crafting and selling becomes the better deal.
• Price limits. In ChestShop minimum and maximum prices are set in priceLimits.yml. In EconomyShopGUI a negative price (sell: -1) disables selling or buying an item.
• Creative mode. By default EconomyShopGUI keeps players in creative and spectator mode out of the shop (banned-gamemodes) — leave it that way.
• Logs on in advance. In EconomyShopGUI transaction-log: true writes trades to a file, and the docs explicitly recommend the /eshop logs export export for finding price exploits. ShopGUI+ keeps a separate transaction log. Compare them with CoreProtect logs.
• Dupes hit the shop first. A duped item sold to the server turns into money. QuickShop-Hikari rolls back an inventory or economy operation that fails — the authors call it dupe protection outright. What Paper fixes itself and how to find a duper is in dupes and exploits.
• Console commands in goods. ShopGUI+ can run console commands on purchase (commandsOnBuyConsole), and so can EconomyShopGUI Premium. Write them in full, with nothing a player types, and let only admins edit shop files.

Which one to pick#

• A free server shop with in-game editing and Bedrock players — EconomyShopGUI.
• Selling permissions, commands and spawners, different prices for different players — ShopGUI+; for 26.x, builds from the authors' Discord.
• A player market on Paper or Folia 1.20+ — QuickShop-Hikari.
• Classic signs, Spigot or older versions — ChestShop; for 26.x there's only the 3.13 pre-release so far.
• Trading without money, atmospheric villagers — Shopkeepers.
• Selling for real money — that's not an in-game shop but a donation store: see donation store and monetization and the EULA.

Shops and cheats#

A shop menu is an inventory window, and every click in it reaches the server as a packet. Dupe exploits are built on that: clicks on slots the window doesn't have. And /sellall turns into money everything that AutoFish, Nuker and AntiAFK farmed for a player. DGuard — the best anticheat for a modern Minecraft server — checks packets, inventory, combat, movement, building and the world: BadPackets compares every click with what a vanilla client could send. It gathers evidence and doesn't rush to a verdict, and if you turn on the punishment log, every ban in the panel comes with a report that's easy to compare with the transaction log.

FAQ#