How to Fix Steam “Inventory Not Available at This Time”

A while back, around 2018-2019 there was a nightly maintenance for Steam. After that, players kept getting an unusual inventory error, even though the servers were in order.

This infamous error was the “Inventory not available at this time” and it would occur when players opened their inventories in order to trade or sell items. Not much information was given by Steam, but they did propose a fix a long time ago.

Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to get to the bottom of the issue, however, let’s hope that they do in the future. Until then, try the method below to fix this error.

Fix Steam “Inventory Not Available at This Time” Error

It seems as though this is only a temporary fix, and the issue might occur again for you. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s frustrating waiting for it to get fixed on its own, especially when trading.

In those cases, you’ll need a quick fix. But before we get into the method that was proposed by Steam, make sure to restart the Steam application and the game you’re playing and see if that makes a difference. If not, try this to fix “inventory not available at this time” error on Steam:

Quit Steam and all of the games that you have open.
Navigate to the Steam installation location. Usually, that is: C: Program Files Steam. However, you might have a different installation location. In that case, browse for it.
Delete all of the folders in the Steam folder, except “steamapps” folder! The steamapps folder is the location where you have most of your games so make sure you don’t delete it mistakenly.
Restart your computer and then launch Steam from the installation folder, and not a preexisting shortcut!
Your Steam application will download all of the missing files, i.e. the files that you’ve deleted.

Soon after that, once everything has been downloaded and installed, your Steam application will launch. When it does, kindly check whether the issue still persists.

Like I said, chances are that you might get this issue once again in the future, so this is more of a temporary fix. Until Steam finds the origin of the issue and fixes it, this remains one of the few ways of fixing this error.