GameRates Full Review

THSale started in mid 2004 as a Chinese currency supplier that was solely business to business. Upon seeing, that they could cut out the middle man in early 2005 they started selling directly to consumers. THSale has continued to gather users and grow in size since 2005 and is now clearly one of the major players. Their website claims that from the start of 2007 until now they have over 200,000 members and nearly 900,000 orders completed, quite an accomplishment.THSale started in mid 2004 as a Chinese currency supplier that was solely business to business. Upon seeing, that they could cut out the middle man in early 2005 they started selling directly to consumers. THSale has continued to gather users and grow in size since 2005 and is now clearly one of the major players. Their website claims that from the start of 2007 until now they have over 200,000 members and nearly 900,000 orders completed, quite an accomplishment.

It should be noted that THSale went on a buying Spree and owns the following companies:
akgame.com, BroGame.com, eing.com, gamegoldvip.com, gamemobile.com, gocdk.com, igs.com, itemrate.com, mmocart.com, mygamestock.com, oforu.com, power4game.com, proleveling.com, rs4sale.com, withgames.com, wowgoldvip.com

This served as a sort of virtual arms race of currency company acquisitions against IGE with ThSale focusing more on Chinese wholesale companies. However, for both companies this has presented some logistical problems and a few growing pains that show up in their customer service and delivery departments.

Purchasing

ThSale has an easy non-obtrusive purchasing system. They ask for your real name, character name, and phone number and ask you to set up a delivery time if you don’t want the currency instantly. You are then presented with a number of payment options to complete your order. At the same time ThSale.com’s site can be a bit annoying. For starters the livechat is a big buggy in firefox although works perfectly in IE. Furthermore, the tone of the text and FAQ on the site are rather mechanical and not especially informative. Oh, and floating live chat button that bounces all over your screen while you are checking out remind you of that pesky sales agent who just won’t leave you alone when you already know exactly what you are looking for. If I want to speak to the live chat agent, the big (static) button on the side bar is enough for me. However those are small annoyances and overall the site is easy to navigate and purchase from despite these little unprofessionalism’s.

Customer Service

The online customer service department speaks mediocre to decent English and is relatively polite. When asked where they were located they said the United States although their suppliers are from China. When I asked where in the United States they said California and when I asked what city they said San Francisco. At this point I asked if that is where the customer service agent was based, and he said yes; although when I asked what the address of their headquarters that he, “forgot the detail, we have an Office in EU, asia and so.” I asked him since I use to live in San Francisco about where in the city he was located at which point he asked for a “moment please”. It seems that they do have a small suite in San Francisco located right next to an awesome UPS office according to Yelp. After about 10 minutes (I guess he “ran” outside to find out what the address was!) he told gave me a full address and correctly identified it as the Lakeshore Plazza (although denied the existence of the UPS store there).

Then again, as long as customer service agents are helpful, it doesn’t really matter where they are located and they were fairly helpful. Unlike a number of stores they actually gave us an actual address (that matches up with their Bizrate account and domain name registration records; and is an actual office space location). I questioned the customer service agent for nearly thirty five minutes, and he stayed with me (even if a few times he had slow responses) and seemed fairly honest about operations and grew on me as the conversation went on (even apologizing for his slow responses a few times admitting he was talking to multiple customers at once and asking me “what was on my mind”). The availability of a 1-800 number was a big plus for their customer service department. It’s just nice to be dealing with a company that you can contact by some other means than e-mail or live chat.

Delivery

Most of the time THsale delivers your purchased currency face to face although occasionally they will mail it to you. With very large orders they sometimes require you to set up items in the auction house that they will “purchase” from you. The customer service agents are honest enough to tell you that delivery times vary depending on stock levels, but if they are in stock you are suppose to get your currency within 30 minutes. Although for most cases they seem reliable, there has been a large amount of complaints regarding extended delivery times over the past three months combined with a dropping BizRate rating that may indicate some supply concerns for THsale as they face an expanding customer base.

Conclusion

It seems that most of the complaints about THsale regard their powerleveling services. Allegedly according to a number of sources they use bots to assist their powerleveling and a number of accounts have been banned as a result. When you filter out the poor reviews for powerleveling their currency delivery service seems reliable.

Their customer service agents are decent, they provide a phone number to reach them, and delivery time is not too lengthy (although larger orders seem to take longer than advertised). The main complaint we have with THsale is that the quality of their service seems to be dropping in recent months. We believe this is a result of new management and capital provided by IDG Ventures Boston (http://www.idgvb.com/) a Venture Capital firm who is responsible for a number of purchases of similar smaller originally Chinese virtual currency sites and seems to be in the process of integrating all of them together.