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Zwaptz
Two people at a round pavement café table, laughing as they exchange a camera bag and a small cardboard box across it, with street life and other tables behind them.

04  ·  of five

How a swap works

From a private vault to two people in a café. Four stages, and a way out of every one of them.

  1. 01

    It sits in your vault

    Appraising publishes nothing. Not to the site, not to search engines, not to people nearby. Appraise ten things and list one — or appraise a shelf and list none.

  2. 02

    You make an offer

    One of your things for one of theirs, or several for several, up to twelve items on the asking side. Both bands are shown, so you can both see the shape of it before anybody agrees.

  3. 03

    Chat opens on acceptance

    Not before. An open message box on an offer nobody agreed to is the cheapest way to reach a stranger who never asked to be reached — and the first thing it usually carries is a phone number.

  4. 04

    You meet, and you both confirm

    Both of you say the handover happened, and only then does it count as done. Neither person can claim a completed swap alone.

A Zwaptz vault showing four items worth around 730 dollars, each card carrying a value range, a confidence bar and an example-value label.
A vault: what you hold, what it is worth, and a confidence on each. Private until you list it.

Either of you can call it off.

Right up until somebody confirms the handover. Both items go straight back to the people who put them up, and back onto the site exactly as they were.

If they never turned up, it is the same button. You are not stuck with a swap that did not happen.

At dusk, a laughing woman in a doorway hands a folded tartan blanket to a smiling man on the step, warm hall light behind her and geraniums in pots beside the door.

Keeping an eye on something

It saves the item to your vault and does nothing else — reserves nothing, joins no queue, tells the owner nothing about you.

What the owner sees is a number: “3 people are keeping an eye on this”. Never who, and never when.

The whole sequence is on the swap.

A swap meet that assembles itself

Six people, one park, everybody goes home with something. Anyone could start one; anybody nearby whose thing sits in a matching band could join.

Six people have far more ways of matching up than two do. Your guitar would not have to become one specific thing — it would have to become something, out of everything that turned up.

The group would pick the place and the time, never Zwaptz. More on group trades.

Five people standing in a circle on grass in a park, laughing: an older man playing an acoustic guitar, a woman holding three hardback books, a man holding a bare bicycle wheel and a small amplifier on the grass between them.

We never say safe

Somewhere sensible

Suggestions built from facts — open now, staffed, busy at this hour, near transit, room for the item. Types of place, never addresses.

Zwaptz has not been to any of them. It does not know who is standing there this evening or whether the lights work. So it tells you what is true and stops there.

A product that told you a place was safe would be making a promise on somebody else’s behalf. What to do when you arrive is on meeting safely.

Two people laughing under a wooden shelter outside a station building, a woman reading on a bench nearby, a cycle rack and a car park behind them.
A station forecourt: somewhere you were both going anyway.
Four people talking beside a low brick wall in a car park outside a two-storey municipal building, a camera dome mounted on the lamp post above them and marked bays painted on the tarmac.
A council car park, overlooked and lit. We never call a place safe.

Leaving is one click

Built to be left

Delete your account from your account page and it is immediate. Your email address, password, postcode and items go, along with their photographs. No retention window, no thirty days to change your mind.

One thing stays: a swap you already completed remains on the other person’s page, attributed to a deleted account. They are holding something you handed them, and that record belongs to both of you.

Everything kept, shown and deleted is on privacy.

Put one thing in a vault

Nobody at Zwaptz vets anybody, and an appraisal is not an inspection — no one has seen either item. Report sits at the bottom of every item, profile and swap, and reaches an administrator.

The longer versions