swapitshop.com > Reviews > Would you swap your mother in law

Author's product rating:   

Layout & Design	Average
Navigation	Hard
How fast is this website?	Satisfactory
Quality of the Content	Average
Range of Services / Products	Needs improvement

Advantages:	good way of getting rid of small items you dont want for things you do want
Disadvantages:	children need to be supervised as to what they are swapping or bidding for .  TOo few categories

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I joined up with swapitshop.co.uk pretty much as soon as it was advertised, thinking it would be a great way to get rid of some 'stuff'.

I duly signed up and put up my 'swaps'. I received my 'swapits' the currency with which you 'bid' for items you want and sat back and waited. It was great fun watching people bid for my items and bidding against other for the things I wanted, and on occasions I 'won' the item.

I parcelled my things up and labelled them correctly took them to post office and sent them off, and waited.......and waited.......and waited. It is now 4 weeks since I 'won' my items and still they have not arrived so I have cancelled the transactions and am very disappointed. My items were received and my account credited with the swap’s I had earned which is great.

The principle of swapit shop is great, it is totally anonymous and safe in the respect that no-one finds your name and address.

However a couple of things that swapitshop need to address are:

1) they need to point out that it can be expensive to send items through the post. I sent a couple of items that cost me over £2 in postage.

2) the site is mainly aimed at children, and there are many videos, games and CD’s/cassettes that are inappropriate for children, that they can easily get hold of

3) the amount of abuse the site receives in the way of bogus swaps, for example ' bag of conkers', 'mother in law', 'used pencil eraser' to name a few. (what astounds me is people bid for these!'

4) the amount of duplicated offers needs to be addressed also, there are sometimes the exact same item, up for swap 4 or 5 times, with lots of people bidding for them, there should be someone who could monitor this and delete the duplicated ones, to avoid bidders disappointment.

5) people that repeatedly fail to send in their swaps should have their accounts removed, it is disheartening to send in your swaps, and to then not receive them. I have noticed in the last few visits that there is a swapper history section in which green stars appear, this signifies how reliable the swapper is. The more green stars you have, the more reliable the person is. Maybe they should have red stars for those that are unreliable......just a thought.

6)There are too few categories, 6 in total with subsections. I think they could do with more specific categories, i.e. mobile phones a section to themselves rather than them being grouped in with toys and so forth, it is quite time consuming to search through 32 pages of things you don’t want to find the one thing you do. Although there is a search engine, which is great if you know exactly what you want.

I have today RECIEVED the item I 'won' on swapit shop, I am absolutely ecstatic about it. The 2 videos are in perfect condition. THis goes to show that yes swapit shop can work.

However all is not well in swapitshop land this evening. Browsing aroung the 'mall' I was horrified to see that '10 benson and hedges complete with a box of matches' for 10 swapits was avaliable. I have emailed swapitshop to let them know about this and hopefully it will be removed.

It is a frightening thought what our kids could get their hands on without parental supervision, and irresponsible of swapitshop not to censor the ads before they appear.