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Monday, February 18. 2013
Thursday, December 20. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #9: Pay to Play
We're back with the seventh in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
Thursday, December 13. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #8 Data is Your Friend
We're back with the seventh in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
Once your shop is set up for holiday sales, you're well on your way to being optimized for selling into the new year. These last few tips are going to help you set up a longer term strategy for maintaining a good shop.
Wouldn't it be nice to know if all the things you were doing to improve your shop were actually working? Data to the rescue! While scary at first (to me at least!) data really can be your friend by letting you:
1. Keep track of sales
2. See where traffic is coming from
3. Use it to your advantage
1. Keep track of Sales
As a Shapeways shop owner, you have a great tool at your disposal: The Sales Overview Download located on your My Shop page. The Sales Overview Download (XLS) allows you to see exactly what models you're selling in which material, when they have shipped, and which country they were shipped to. With this data you will be able to create your own shop analytics which can help you improve the performance of your shop. This great blog post dives into the details.
How is this helpful? If you see that you make most of your sales in silver, you can tailor your designs to sell even more. If you see most of your sales coming from Japan, you could think about what items might appeal to that specific market. You don't know what you don't know until you experiment and measure!
2. See where traffic is coming from
Ever wanted to know exactly how many hits you get in your shop on any given day? Where they come from? What keywords they used to find you? How long they stayed on your page?
Google Analytics can tell you all those things! Check out this handy tutorial for setting up Google Analytics in your shop. It's as easy as pasting a quick code and unleashes a lot of data you can use to improve your marketing efforts.
3. Use it to your advantage!
Using the data, you discover how to tailor your shop to your customers. For example, if you see a lot of traffic coming from Twitter, (like we do!) you might consider tweeting more often about your products. If you tag @shapeways with it, we'll often re-tweet it or favorite it, exposing your product to all of Shapeways followers (10,000 and counting!). Read more about it in this handy Shapeways guide to Twitter.
Alternatively, you might find that a lot of the traffic to your page is coming from search, in which case you would want to consider AdWords or optimizing your descriptions for search even further.
So dive into data, you might be surprised by what you find. Next week we'll take a look at advertising, and using those AdWords that Google may send your way just for signing up for Analytics!
Thursday, December 6. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #7 Fan Engagement
We're back with the seventh in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
While advertising and promotion is important to get your products known out there, having a conversation with your customers is often more powerful than just broadcasting a message. Customers feel like they get input into a product they are buying, just the same way you feel when you design something for 3D printing! Best of all, they get to tell a cool story, like this one from Pete, our CEO:
So what are you waiting for! Get chatting to your customers, and see how much customer engagement drives sales.
Thursday, November 29. 2012
Holiday Shop Owner Tips Series: #6 Promotion
Your shop is ready, your products look great, so now it's time to promote yourself! We love the incredible designs that you create on Shapeways and we do what we can to promote you via our blog, the Holiday Gift Guide and our weekly newsletter. To get the most success for your products you can't just rely on broadcasting, you need to go where your audience is.
The first step is to tell your friends, using your own social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google + and your own blog or website if you have one. The next step is to go beyond your social networks, and spread the word to blogs and magazines, people who have a bigger reach than just you.
Here are two great excerpts of ideas from our community members, read their full posts for more details.
Joaquin Baldwin describes how to make your product go viral in this informative post about his Seed of Ygrassil sculpture.
I wanted prototypes of the models printed, pictures for galleries ready, videos, various other networking and popular sites covered and a website all ready for the first day of my designs going 'public' to the world.
Have any tips to share? Post them in the comments, and let us know what you do to make your holiday season fruitful!
Thursday, November 22. 2012
Holiday Shop Owner Tips Series: #5 Merchandising
Merchandising is all about designing for the occasion. You already have products, you simply need to tweak them to appeal to holiday shoppers.
People usually shop with one of three things in mind: type of gift, price, and recipient. Knowing this, you can make it easier for them to find your products by tagging your products according to potential recipient, theme and occasion. Tagging is the fastest way to help you hit different categories.
Read Tip #3 on discovery for more about tagging your products. Tags relating to themes and occasions can be as broad as holiday, christmas, Valentine's, mother's day, fathers day, birthday, even just the simple tag of gift will help you get found in search. Tags relating to recipients can be broad too: men, women, parents, children, hostess gift, secret santa, teacher, stocking stuffer.
You can also use the description and photos to highlight gift ideas.Gunter Art and Design shows how his jewelry is perfect for a girl by using his own girlfriend in his photos.
Lastly, don't underestimate the power of seasonal gifts! Ornaments, hostess gifts and decorations for the home are all popular choices. This great snowflake generator from Kimotion Arts is a perfect example of an inexpensive ornament that makes a great gift. A lego snowflake? Perfect for the man, child or techie in your life!
Do you have any tips or tricks to share? Share them in the comments!
And for those in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving!
Monday, November 19. 2012
Quick Tip: Finding the Center of Mass of a Model
Do you need to know if your model is properly balanced? The first step is to determine where it's center of mass will be. Fredd shared an excellent tip on the forum - you can use the free MeshLab software to calculate it! Fredd writes:
Meshlab can detect it:Thanks Fredd!!Lots of goodies, besides it being free.
- Import your model, click Filter/Quality Measures and Computations/Compute Geometric Measures.
- Then click show layer dialog icon. [It] looks like a sheaf of papers (It is under the Window in the top header)
- Center of mass looks like what you are looking for. Plus gives bounding box dimensions, surface area and volume.
I plotted the result for 'Suzanne' in the image to the right.
Thursday, November 15. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #4 Personalization & Shapeways Co-Creators
You will get this pop-up where you can specify what is able to be customized on your model whether it is adding text, adding an image or even changing the size. You also indicate how long it will take you to make these changes once someone has ordered your model.
Best Practice Examples. Kaetemi makes this customizable keychain that can have custom images.
This is the what the customer sees for kaetemi's model:
As always, if you have tips or any questions, share them here!
Monday, November 12. 2012
8 Tips for 3D Printing with Sketchup
Sketchup is a great choice if you're new to 3D modeling: it's free, easy to learn and there are TONS of free tutorials available. Even so, you may need to know a few things before you can get your models 3D printed.
Community member Marcus Ritland from Denali 3D Design shares 8 great tips on MasterSketchup.com. These tips include making your models printable, making them look great and keeping them affordable.
Don't forget to give him some kudos on the forum!
Thursday, November 8. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #3 Getting Found in Search
We're back with the third in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
Categories & Tags. How can you help us help you get discovered in search? Categories and tags! On the model edit page, under the material picker, you can choose two categories to put your model into, and then create an infinite number of tags.
Categories are the indisputable "what" that defines a product, and they are mutually exclusive or at least have one primary purpose. Tags will still be used to share other attributes, like the occasion (e.g., holidays, gifts), suggested recipient (e.g., for him, for her, for mom), qualities (e.g., geeky, whimsical), or even potential uses (e.g., driving, photography). The wider the net you can cast, the more potential buyers you can catch!
Two great examples are jewelry and homewares. For a bracelet you would choose the categories Jewelry and Bracelets and then create tags to describe them: the color, the style and who they might appeal to.
Best Practice Examples. Kevin Wei has done a great job with the Cosma Silver Bangle using these tags: art, arabesque, architecture, facet, filigree, floral, lace, lattice, mosaic, romantic, silver, white, Valentine's day. These tags describe his design, and even suggest which occasion it might be appropriate for.
For a coffee cup, the categories For Your Home and Dining are perfect. For the Aero Cup, Kioro Design has used these tags to cover a broad range of searches: art, for your home, dining, ceramics, coffee cup, cup, espresso cup.
The more tags you use, the more likely someone looking for something like your product will find you. It is not redundant to use both the tags coffee cup and espresso cup, it just increases the chances that someone will find it in search, either on the Shapeways site or using a search engine like Google.
Do you have any other tips for getting found in search? Any questions? Feel free to share them here!
Stay tuned for next week's tip: the role of personalization and custom gifts in 3D printing.
Wednesday, November 7. 2012
Design for 3D Printing 101: Intro to Design for 3D Printing
Welcome to Design for 3D Printing 101: Intro to Design for 3D Printing.
When you are designing for 3D printing there are two main factors that you really need to take into account before you start.
- What application to design with
- What material you are designing for
In this first introductory session, we are going to look at choosing the right type 3D modeling software.
There are now many 3D modeling applications you can use to 3D model your designs to 3D Print, ranging from very expensive professional engineering software to free online tools to get you started. Choosing the right software is an important first step in ensuring you can realize your ideas with 3D printing.
If you want to create organic, sculptural forms and characters to 3d Print, you may want to start with freeform surface modeling software. This modeling process represents the surface of the object, not its volume. With this method you will manipulate the surface of the model to create the form with points and curves. This gives you the freedom to do flowing forms, but can sometimes make it harder to achieve tight tolerances if your design is made to integrate an external object.
Above is a screenshot from Sculptris, free surface modeling software. Image via Flickr
If you are looking to engineer a product (or robot) for 3D Printing, you are better off using Solid Modeling Software. This process defines the volume of the object you wish to model, by creating solid geometry, which you then modify by extruding or cutting away mass. The "Design for 3D Printing 101" image above was modeled using TinkerCad, a browser based 3D modeling application with drag and drop functionality to make it very easy to get started.
Above is Autodesk's 123D App, a solid modeler with which you can 3D Print direct to Shapeways.
You can of course experiment with each to to find what works best for you, but often the tools within the application are designed for a specific kind of geometry. There is a relatively steep learning curve when you start to learn to 3D model, but once you hold your first design in your hand, it makes those challenges a pleasure.
There are a number of free applications in each type that you may want to download and play around with to get a feel, watch tutorial on YouTube and ask questions in the Shapeways forums as there is a wealth of knowledge within the Shapeways community.
In the next Design for 3D Printing 101, we will look a little closer at some of the 3D modeling software options available to get you started 3D printing.
Friday, November 2. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #2 Function & Form
We're back with the second in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
This week we'll be sharing suggestions on function and form, namely how to choose the right materials for your products. If you are making a product for yourself, it's great to have unlimited choice and to be able to experiment with various materials. But if someone is buying your product, you want to help them choose the best material for your product so they have the best experience possible. For example, your customer probably wouldn't want a ceramic iPhone case or a wedding ring in Frosted Ultra Detail...
To get started, when you upload your model to your shop, all materials are automatically enabled. It is important to check if all the materials are appropriate. Ask yourself:
1. Does my design meet the design rules for this material?
2. Would this product make sense in this material?
3. Do I have all materials selected still? If so, can I help customers decide by limiting the choices?
To select materials for your product, the easiest thing to do is to make a material selection when you are editing your product page for markup, description, or other details.
Overall, there are three things to keep in mind: design with the material in mind, use images that reflect the material options, and less is more.
Read More »
Thursday, October 25. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #1 Master the Basics
Can you believe the holiday season is only nine weeks away?! Fall snuck up on us, it's almost Halloween, and that means that the holiday shopping rush will soon begin in full force.
Shop Owners, we're here to help! We've prepared a nine part series of tips and tricks to help you get your shop ready and make the most sales in the busiest time of year.
Here is what's in store:
Read More »
Thursday, September 6. 2012
SolidWorks Tutorial: Creating a 3D Model Using Sketch Pictures (VIDEO)
From time to time, you'll likely come across an image of something you want to create a 3D model from. With SolidWorks, you can use the sketch picture tool to import an image to build from. This Kebo bottle opener by Rush Product Design Studio makes for a great example, and we'll use it in this weeks tutorial from SolidWize.
By bringing the picture into a sketch, you can quickly reproduce the desired geometry inside of SolidWorks using just a few lines, arcs, and the fully define sketch tool.
Watch the full tutorial below. If you right click and save the picture of the Kebo, you'll be able to follow along. You can also download the completed model from the Solidwize Shapeways page.
Kebo Bottle Opener Upload 2 from Rohit Mitra on Vimeo.
Next week's video will cover using Simulation Xpress to validate and optimize your design for a Shapeways Stainless print.
About the author: Rohit Mitra is the founder of SolidWize.com, a membership based online training system for SolidWorks users.
UPDATE: Solidwize is holding a webinar on creating beautiful renders using Photoview 360 next Wednesday, September 12th. Check out http://solidwize.com/webinars for more information.
