Swagvault.com Review

Our comprehensive and independent Review

Introduction

SwagVault was founded in 2004 as an eBay company designed to sell Diablo II items. They left eBay with a favorable 99.7% feedback rating on nearly 10,000 purchases. Their bizrate ranking tends to hover between 75-90% on average. They later expanded into a full featured website covering virtual currency for all the major MMO’s. They have a self-reported 220,000 customers making them one of the top currency sites out there.

Although they claim to have an office in Washington D.C all of their customer service and delivery departments are located in Beijing, China. The company is funded by ShenHua Innovative Technologies.

Many users claimed to have issues with them back in 2008. It made me quite uncomfortable when I started the review. They are one of those websites who can show so many positive and negative reviews and feedbacks that it is quite puzzling. Nonetheless, it seems that they are much more reliable since 2009 and got a green Bizrate which seems to corroborate what they claim:

“SwagVault is a leading provider of services tailored to the needs of MMORPG players who want to maximize their online gaming experience. Whether you are looking for game items, currency farming, or power leveling, SwagVault provide these services at competitive prices while maintaining the highest of standards. “

Let’s just hope it will go on.

Ease of use

Swagvault got a very clean and ordinary but efficient layout. The site offers services for many of the online games (27). The user will immediately realize that the site is of potential use to them or not and the great readability of the website will help you find your way to what you need in a few seconds. The navigation system is really functional and download times are pretty decent even during U.S. prime time. Everything got a great visibility: credentials, features, categories. Even their FAQ is a model of clarity.

Overall, this is a great and very informative website.

Reliability

It took an average of two minutes to reach a live support agent. The responses were informative and well constructed. The customer support agents were helpful with the tools to provide us with a quote on the amount of currency they had available on any server to give a solid estimate of delivery time.

As we monitored the web we came across a lot of user feedback about Swagvault trying to delay the process.

“We have also heard of reports where SwagVault tries to “delay” you so that they can acquire more time to acquire the currency before you press for a refund. They have asked customers at time for additional information to combat “fraud” by proving who they were by faxing their ID and other sensitive information. Obviously no one in their right mind is going to fax these documents over to Beijing and SwagVault knows this so they use it as a tactic to delay you and give them some extra time to acquire more currency. It should be noted that this tactic is rare, and may no longer be in use, but we have talked to real customers who have had it pulled on them in the past and that’s just wrong.”

Overall they got a pretty good customer service. Their representatives speak excellent English and are really friendly. They provide 24 hours live customer chat service as well as a telephone number. They claim to deliver most orders within 24 hours and aim to deliver instantly after your order processes. They currently offer currencies, power leveling, and game cards. Any other questions can easily be answered by their fast and responsive customer service online chat.

Press and web release

They got solid credentials with a good visibility. Swagvault also appears in most articles about MMORPGs services companies.

Internet Release

Bizrate Detailed Rating

Bizrate Rating	Alexa Rank	PageRank

Compete

Here is their graph on compete. (U.S. panel stats)

Web monitoring, Complaints and rip-off boards, web release

They got a long history (2008) of delivery and support issues which seem to have been solved in 09. There are really little reviews on the Internet which are worth linking. Keep in mind that our job is to select valid and up-to-date information.

Webmonitoring

Transactions

At Swagvault, you may buy currency, game cards and PL for 27 MMORPGs. You can also buy items for FFXI. Everything is very well documented and they will redirect you on Toonstorm.com website for accounts.

Purchasing

Swagvault has a nifty purchasing process with an interesting customer rewards system that is setup very nicely. You select the amount of game currency you wish to buy and add it to your cart and then checkout. Here you either create a new account or log in if you are an existing member. You then enter in all of your normal contact and billing information and proceed to the next step.

All deliveries are conducted face-to-face in-game, but Swagvault tries to make this as easy as possible. You select your normal playtime hours so that you are not interrupted. Payment wise they only offer Paypal to process credit cards (you don’t need an account) and Money Order.

They were selling at pretty much the market standard. We decided to contact their customer service to see if they would offer any price matching from a competitor’s site. Unfortunately Swagvault does not do any form of price matching, they did inform us however that price fluctuates frequently and to check back periodically. Customer service was easily reached and contacted and able to hand our questions.

We placed our order for 2000 gold with our Pay Pal card and received our confirmation page instantly. Within about 3 minutes from our order confirmation we received a trade from one of Swag Vaults agents. We quickly acquired our 2000 gold and with amazing speed and ease. We were rather pleased with the ease of the purchase.

Repeat customers

They have put in place a membership reward program that gives discounts based on past purchase history.

Discount System

Delivery

We really dislike face-to-face delivery. Currency companies claim that it is safer and more secure, but what they really mean is safer and more secure for them. Instead why not adopt or at least offer the “auction house” method where you put cheap items up in the auctionhouse which they then buy to deliver your currency.

The numerous mediums of contact and ability to fit your schedule were convenient and with most orders of around 2,000 gold. When you have to arrange another time to meet them it can become a bit of a hassle. This combined with the fact that they only hold the gold for a certain amount of time before allocating it to another customer can become a bit frustrating if you have a busy schedule.

Average delivery time varied a lot, because they often try to match your playtime so that they catch you while you are online in the game. All deliveries are suppose to be delivered within a day and as long as you order is under 5,000 gold they should be able to come through on this request over 90% of the time. Our average delivery time was about seven hours, but note this was because we had some orders delivered within thirty minutes to an hour and then others delivered around the 24 hour mark. Delivery times aren’t that consistent and it’s a pain dealing with customer support if something goes wrong.

We like that they admit that they don’t keep huge stocks, and almost everything is a just-in-time inventory system where they are constantly purchasing gold from farmers and then dishing it off to customers 24/7/365.

Feature set

Swagvault is available in seven different languages and you can convert a price into eight different currencies-the site will cater to almost anyone. We will add a few of the features that we didn’t already documented above.

FAQ

Their FAQ is clear and quite good overall. You will find almost everything you need inside. We would advise them to make it even clearer in terms of readability.

Refunds

No refund policy.

Discounts

They have put in place a membership reward program that gives discounts based on past purchase history.

Languages

One of the fantastic strength of their website is the awesome work they did to translate almost everything on the site in six languages. (English – French – German – Spanish – Italian – Swedish) I could only verify French, English and German since I don’t speak Spanish, Italian and Swedish. They did something really great. They deserve for that effort our Foreigner Friendly award.

Summary

Buy from Swagvault

Swagvault is a large secure company that appears to be dealing with some growth problems since 2008. Although the vast majority of their currency is claimed to be delivered within the advertised timeframe, most of the users will point out that, if there is any error along the way it is often extremely difficult to resolve a problem due to their customer service department. Their phone line is known to be nothing more than an outbound number that always goes straight to a pre-recorded voicemail notifying you that at all agents are busy. They don’t have a real refund policy or any guarantee.

They are a reliable, safe, secure company, but can be a bit of a customer service hassle if something goes wrong. Luckily, this is not normally the case.

Overall we felt Swag Vault was a very efficient and safe site to make gold purchases’. There customer service was top of the line and quickly responded to any question that arose during the purchase process. The site was relatively easy to use and easy to navigate through. We would definitely recommend Swag Vault for safe gold purchases.

We also are happy to deserve them our Foreigner Friendly Award, for they are one of the only website really caring for foreign customer who can’t speak (or read) English fluently.

UPDATE

We have been re-updating reviews lately. Nothing changed about Swagvault. They are still a very good website.