GameRates Full Review

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 200,000 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.

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 (or enter in how much real currency you are looking to spend) 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 (but we imagine if you are in the middle of an instance or on a raid, and all of the sudden have to “go” to “pick something up” it could be a major inconvenience). Payment wise they only offer Paypal to process credit cards (you don’t need an account) and Money Order.

Customer Service

It took an average of thirteen minutes to reach a live support agent. This is completely unacceptable even for this industry. It then took an average of another twenty-two additional minutes to answer our three simple questions (location, phone number, current server stock). Although the responses were informative and well constructed they simply took too long.

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 (they seemed to have about 1,000-3,000 gold on most servers at any given moment, although many were out of stock when we ran our tests with the customer support agents). Maybe it was just the fact that we had to go through this same process numerous times to get proper averages, but we found the wait times and slow responses infuriating.

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.

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 1,000 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 3,000 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.

Apparently you can estimate how long a delivery will take by asking live chat support to check how much currency they currently have on a server. We found their responses to generally be honest and to correspond with actual delivery times. However, this requires you to go through customer support which means it will take at least twenty frustrating minutes.

Conclusion

Swagvault is a large secure company that appears to be dealing with some growth problems. Although the vast majority of their currency is delivered within the advertised timeframe if there is any error along the way it is often extremely difficult to resolve a problem due to understaffed customer service department. Their phone line is nothing more than an outbound number that always goes straight to a pre-recorded voicemail notifying you that at all agents are busy.

The combination of a slow customer support staff along with all deliveries being exchanged face-to-face in-game can often make purchasing currency a bit of a headache.

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.