Review: Buy & Sell World of Warcraft Accounts

It’s amazing how many different ways there are to make money, isn’t it? One is in buying and selling virtual goods, a growing industry.

The idea around the virtual goods market is that you can purchase something that exists within a virtual world. Like a Habbo avatar or Gaia clothing or even Second Life real estate. What crazy times we live in, huh?

Within the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) world, there is World of Warcraft (WoW), the king of all MMORPGs. And lots of enterprising people have decided to build online markets to sell & buy WoW accounts. One such service is even purchasing paid reviews like this one.

So onto the review. Their site, called BuyMMOAccounts.com, isn’t exactly what I’d call professional-looking. Kind of 1980s, if you ask me. The value proposition is simple enough: you can buy and sell your WoW account, though they certainly push buying an account as opposed to selling one. Let’s pick it apart, shall we?

Text

I see lots of annoying marketese. That’s bad. Many users are turned off by what appears to be a pushy or sketchy sales pitch. The frequent use of bolding, text color changes, and text size changes all reek of this.

There’s also way too much text. Most readers aren’t going to read any of this. The use of gratuitous text has SEO benefits, though. There’s lots of keyword-rich paragraphs here. I can’t knock them for that. Unfortunately, it looks like someone with Microsoft FrontPage marked this page up and believed that every other paragraph needs to scream for attention, making none of the paragraphs very readable or enticing.

Usability

I don’t see a clear focal point. Sure, my eye is attracted to all the elves, gnomes, and orcs scattered everywhere. But there is no clear call to action. I have to hunt around to find out how I can buy a WoW account. That’s bad. Don’t make me work to pay you.

After a bit of searching, I can see the Buy Horde Accounts and Buy Alliance Accounts links in the left column. Ah. So there they are.

Now how do you sell an account? By happening to see the link buried in a paragraph below the fold in the middle of the page somewhere (or on the graphical link in the left column). I can understand that. They’re trying to minimize sales and emphasize sales. And perhaps, with the keywords they’re targeting, they’re not trying to increase their supply of accounts. Perhaps they already have a vast supply being created by players overseas and just want to profit by selling them. Fair enuff.

But at least make the buying process easier. That’s why users are on the site, right?

One last nitpick. The homepage has a line of text that looks like a link, but isn’t. The line: “When purchasing an account from us you can be assured that” is blue and underlined. But it’s not a link. Bad bad bad.

Trust and Security

The site isn’t shy about it’s 100% guarantee, though it’s delivery doesn’t fill me with trust. I’m hit with more marketese that looks more like the site is trying to scam me than reassure me. I’m sure that’s not their intent, but that’s what’s happening.

To their benefit, there is a live chat option and a couple of toll-free phone numbers. That’s cool. If their users don’t want to deal with a sketchy-looking site, they can deal with a live person. However, do people who use virtual worlds want that kind of hassle? Wouldn’t they prefer virtual help over real live help? I don’t know; just a guess. I also wonder how much these support options cost BuyMMOAccounts.com. A well-designed site could actually cut down on these support costs.

They also list credentials from VeriSign, McAfee, and RatePoint. I’m not sure how much security that actually means, but the average user may not question it as much as I am.

My Suggestions

Okay, enough of the harsh criticism. I ripped into these guys good. Now it’s time to play nice. Here’s what I’d suggest, listed in order of importance:

1. Hire a professional web designer and give the site an overhaul. Make it look more professional, usable, and trustworthy. A good designer will know how to drive more sales and reduce support costs. A good design can do all that.
2. Hire a writer to rewrite the content. It’s possible to keep it keyword-rich without appearing like untrustworthy marketese. This will aid in SEO and drive more sales & conversions.
3. Hire a professional web developer to rewrite the HTML & CSS to use web standard code (which is more SEO-friendly), add a sitemap.xml file, a robots.txt file, and all those other SEO goodies.

Suggestions #1 and #2 are more important because they’ll increase sales. It looks like BuyMMOAccounts.com already ranks pretty high in search engines, especially for the keywords they purchased in this review. With these suggestions, I believe they’d be able to convert more visitors into buyers, thus increasing their overall revenues.

Good luck, BuyMMOAccounts.com!