Friday, February 13, 2009

SwagVault Full Review

SwagVault was established in April 2004 in Washington, USA. The company started out by selling WOW Gold on eBay. They later expanded into a full featured website covering virtual currency for all the major MMO’s in order to serve the US and European customers. Their products covers WoW Gold (World of Warcraft Gold), WOW Game Card & CD- Key Codes, AOC Gold (Age of Conan Gold), EvE Isk, Maple Story Mesos, Lorto Gold, GW Gold, L2 Adena so and so on.

In April 2006, the company claimed a total number of 200,000 customers in the US alone according to mmosite.com. At the same time Swagvault tried to boost their image in China by acquiring the country’s biggest online guild, the Temple of Jialan (TJ). Today, it is one of the biggest currency sellers in North America with a subsidiary office in China. As of June 14, 2007 the website ranks in Alexa at 27,671, challenging IGE at 26,737.

Old-time customers seem to be pleased with the company’s service: Swagvault`s eBay feedback hovers at 99.7% from 9,636 feedbacks. The company also scores a high 73% satisfaction on Bizrate with more than 2,500 customer reviews. Recent complaints about the company are mainly focus on the slow response of the Customer Service.
Now, they have a self-reported 420,000 customers and are still developing.Generally speaking, they are one of the earliest providers in this line, Though their customer services sometimes are not “Excellent”, they generally offer competitive prices and instantly delivery.
Regardless some downsides, we may say that www.swagvault.com is a good choice.
Purchasing (Score: 5/5)
Swagvault has a nifty purchasing process with an interesting customer rewards system that is setup very nicely. You select the amount of game currency (e.g. WOW Gold) 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. Payment wise they only offer Paypal to process credit cards (you don’t need an account) and Money Order.
Unlike many other currency companies, SwagVault does well in selection and pricing. They provide many cheaper currencies and items, which make them standing out in this part and we give full score.

Customer Service (Score:4/5)
SwagVault has some of the best (if not the best) customer service in this industry. They provide customer service through a FAQs page, by phone, by email, and by live chat. The site's FAQs page is fairly extensive. Most of the common questions are addressed. Plus, the affiliate program has its own FAQ page.
The phone number for support is long-distance, so we were glad we didn't have to hold too long. Our representative was helpful and warmly. The question was answered quickly with perfect& fluent English, so we were off the phone pretty fast.
Compared with 2007, their Live Chat services are greatly improved. Our latest test with their Live Chat was pleasuring experience. The agents we talked to offered more legitimate responses and less canned copy and paste answers. Once you are connected with a live chat agent the response time to your specific queries has greatly improved indicating that the number of customers an agent is serving at once has decreased. We are glad that, SwagVault, as one of the earliest providers, does not let us down and worth our support.
As they still have some space to improve, we do not give them full score for this part.

Delivery (Score 4.5/5)
As some other Currency stores, SwagVault requires face-to-face delivery for some MMORGPs.They claim that it is safer and more secure, but 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 is about 7 hours but sometimes it varied, 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. Delivery times aren’t that consistent but you can turn the customer support for help and your problems will be solved quickly at their assistant. 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. What’s better, 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.

Conclusion (Score 4.5/5)
SwagVault is a safe, secure, bet to purchase your virtual currency. They provide 24/7 customer service with fast response times although we would prefer their delivery time be more consistent. They are the market leader and are not going anywhere and they are generally a professional company to deal with.
All in all, SwagVault is a reliable company that can meet your MMORGP currencies, Game Time Card and Items Demands.

No comments: