April 10, 2007

Swaptree - review

Swaptree beta logo


Remember last year when I talked about Swaptree? I bet you don't. It was way too long from then till now: in July they were in private beta and they still are, yet they are expanding slowly Swaptree's userbase by inviting more people into the private beta, and last week I was a lucky one. Anyway, you probably don't recall what Swaptree is, so let me quote myself:

So, what's this "swaptree" thing? Swaptree is a free service that allows you to swap things you have and don't want with things you want to have. It just works like this:



You manage a list of books, CD's, DVD's or games you want to trade, and a wishlist with stuff you want to have. To simplify it, you can easily do stuff like import your Amazon wishlist to swaptree. Then, the site does it's own magic by itself and you don't have to worry about anything. When there's something you want available to swap with something you have, you'll be asked if you want to do that trade. If you want to, swaptree manages even the packaging issues so you don't have to bother with nothing:



And when you realize, the swap is done! Easy, isn't it? Well... This is the part when you start wondering about the implications of such a system: it can't be just as easy as that... Well, as you can see through the blogosphere, it really is as simple as that.

So, I've tested the application and I was really surprised about how neat it is. Yet, there were two things that gave me some frustration.

The first thing is that you need to give the ISBN or the UPC of the product you have for swapping. You can't just surf, think "oh, and I also have this and don't want it" amd click on it, as you can do for your "want list". When you click on the "I have this" button in an item, you must provide its UPC or ISBN. That makes things not as easy as they could be, but on the other hand it is understandable if you think that they want some warranty that (a) that product exists (as a tradeable product), (b) you have an original product, and (c) you really have it. But the frustration really comes when you pick a big pile of CD's, books and DVD's you don't want anymore and start inserting their ISBN/UPC's, just to recieve as reply an error message saying "Please enter a valid ISBN number (for books) or UPC code (for CDs, DVDs & games) below.". And, damn, some of those items I'm 100% sure have a valid ISBN/UPC code! First I thought that only "issued in USA" items were on their database, but not even that. Sucks, in a big pile of items I only managed to insert (by now) four.

The other thing is that I added four items and no one had them in their wishlists. OK, less then 24 hours later I could already swap one of those by one of these:

66 | 100 | 3 | 0



but none of those things were in my own wishlist. So, is the model not working? Not really, that's not the issue here. This is a "relational value network", where the service value grows with the number of users and marked items (both as "I have" or "I want"). The growth is exponential, since a trade can be done in several layers: Imagine that I have something you want and you don't have nothing I want: that can be fixed if you have something a 3rd person wants in exchange of something I want. Now add up to 5 layers of complexity. Right! :-) The issue is that, for now, and being this a private beta it's no surprise that this is like that, Swaptree is lacking users.

What leads me to yet another issue, this time about something that could greatly enhance this service "social networking". I'm not a fan of social networks, and I really feel like social networks like Hi5 and Orkut are completely useless, but sometimes they are well-explored: take Flickr as an obvious example. In Swaptree you can see items you want, but you can't see "who has this item" and "what do those people also have". See, if I start browsing over SciFi books, for instance, I might want to see who has some books I liked, and, if they do, what other SciFi stuff are they into.

Finaly, in the previous post I asked this: "is this going to work overseas or only on USA?" Now that I'm in, the answer is... I don't know. Now, you can only choose, on the countries list, United States, but there is a Country list, so I guess they'll soon add more countries. At least I hope so, because until Portugal is in their orchard my swaptree can't give good apples.

10 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:04 PM

    SwitchPlanet.com already has this up and running and it doesn't have the bottle neck system of item for item swaps. They use switchbucs to mediate the trades. This also allows SwitchPlanet to guarantee all the switches. If it doesn't go as planned they just refund your switchbucs.

    Does SwapTree guarantee anything if you send off your items as described but never get the item you were supposed to get?

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  2. Oh... I didn't know about SwitchPlanet. I'll check it out and review it soon... Thanks!

    About what SwapTree guarantees, I honestly don't know. Since it only works in the States, I'm not really using it.

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  3. Anonymous8:01 PM

    i signed up for Swaptree and listed a great video game, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Swaptree told me to ship the game since there's a swap available. I shipped the game, and..... still have not gotten ANYTHING for it. what a bunch of crooks. i emailed swaptree at least 4 times!, all my emails were ignored. terrible customer service.

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  4. Anonymous5:39 PM

    Same here. I've sent a game and never got my trade. I've sent a bunch of emails to them and never got any answer from swaptree. They just ignore their customers. You'll be scammed if you use their website.

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  5. Anonymous2:02 AM

    SWAPTREE SUXS! Ditto the non-existent customer service. They simply do not reply to emails.

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  6. Anonymous2:26 AM

    Seriously, I left the website long ago after losing money by paying for the shipping of my items and never receiving items in return. Unfortuately I had 5 trades at one time and in 4 of the 5 transactions I was 'ripped' off due to mail fraud. There was absolutely NO Customer Support and even worse I felt the company considered my frustrations as overreacting. It would seem to me that the website has gained an influx of individuals that realize that the website is an easy community to introduce mail fraud with little or no consequence.

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  7. Anonymous10:25 PM

    swaptree has horrible customer service. I was a happy user for over a year, but when my account started getting errors the swaptree team brushed me off. As of 4 months later i still have huge errors and have lost a ton of money with the swaptree site. The staff says i cant get it fixed and they are unwilling to fix it at this time, but may fix my account sometime in the future. Other users have had to wait a month to reciev help. I would not recommend this site and hopefully a better site comes up in the the future.

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  8. Sure, you can get good books. But there's no way to message a user about confusion about a book, and they can say they have something when it's actually not as they described it. People are unreliable, there is no way to contact users, swaptree admins do not respond to questions and complaints, books are often damaged, and you get blamed for rejecting trades even if the books are damaged, not the right book, etc. Blamed means you go down on the list to get trades, which means the more unreliable people try to trade with you, the less likely you are to get good trades. And if you try to contact admin about problems, they don't respond. They can't even get books to you that people don't send.

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  9. I just joined this site. It seems to me that a lot of people are very happy about this site and I think it looks pretty neat. MY real question about it is are you really saving any money on it? After the cost of the postage and the envelope to send the item in you've spent about $4-5 anyway. At least in the case of books you'd most likely find the item on ebay for about the same price without losing the item you'd be trading. So..is it worth it?

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  10. I gave Swaptree a try, and was sorry I did. I agreed to trade a dvd, mailing mine out FIRST CLASS MAIL as required by Swaptree. I received the dvd I requested, but the other member didn't receive mine. The USPS refuses to look for lost items. I returned her dvd via UPS and closed my account. Buy books at your local library's Friends of the Library, or Ebay, or Amazon. After all the trouble and expense I went through over a couple of used dvds, I'm sorry I ever heard of Swaptree!

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