Managing Your Markup During Repricing

Hi everyone,

Today we had a huge announcement about repricing. This is exciting, but it does mean you'll likely want to adjust the markup on some of your products.

You can download your pricing .csv today to see both prices, and proactively adjust your markup before the new prices go live Tuesday, October 7th. Here's an example:


Follow these steps to ensure you're ready for next Tuesday:

At noon Eastern time on October 7th, the base prices will change in accordance with the new prices you see on your model edit page. Unless the new base price exceeds the customer-facing final price that you had set, shoppers will still see the same prices for your products on Shapeways. (See an example.)

To see the impact on your shop and make any pricing changes, we strongly recommend using our Pricing CSV Wizard. You can download a snapshot of your shop as it looks today (with both existing and new base prices), see what's changing, and set new prices that you'll use after October 7th.

How to use the Pricing Wizard (Found by clicking the Sell Tab, Scrolling & selecting "Pricing .CSV Wizard" or /shops/settings depending on your digital preferences)
Log in to the Shapeways Pricing CSV Wizard and click 'Download CSV'
Look at the 'new_base_price' column to see the new prices in each material
You can check your existing markups by adding a column to compare total prices with the old 'base_price' or the new ones
Update the 'total_price' column with the final prices you want to use
After noon Eastern time (16:00 GMT) on October 7th: Head back to the Pricing CSV Wizard and click 'Upload & Preview' to upload your file and preview the changes

I work on a Mac, is there any way to get a csv wizard file that is not a .exe file?

My digital preference is to not use the csv approach, let all the mark-ups remain at their present numeric values, and let the sales prices float to original mark-ups plus new base prices. Is that a possibility?

draw, that was what I expected the default to be...I'm kinda surprised at the decision to keep the customer-facing prices the same while slamming the shopowner-facing markups, in some cases to 0. I'm glad they're being transparent about it -- if you look on the blog, Peter answered that question right away -- but hmm.

It shows hardcore loyalty to customers, which makes sense at bottom -- customers are where the money comes from, and that's what both we and Shapeways are here for -- but considering how much buzz the reprice is causing already, I'm worried that it could be seen as insulting to shopowners.

Wind Of Change - Scorpions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ goes so good with this changes!

Can you tell us more about what you are seeing? The file should download with a .CSV file extension and should open in Excel, OpenOffice or GoogleDocs with no problems.

Beyond that, a standard question: what browser are you using?

In my way of thinking customer loyalty would reflect a lowered price of products (in the 70% (?) of cases where prices will drop). Instead the mark-ups will be increased for 70% percent of the models to maintain original prices. Lowering or dropping mark-ups to zero in remaining cases has the opposite effect and forces account owners to dig through their accounts to recheck or alter mark-ups. In the cases where mark-ups drop to zero the account holder will receive no future notices that a sale has been made, right?.

A more common sense change would be to allow mark-ups to increase in the 70% of models and to retain mark-ups in the remaining 30%. Even more preferable (from my point of view) is to at least provide the option to keep mark-ups constant across the board. The sane person inside of me says that mark-ups should be completely decoupled from Shapeways pricing unless mark-ups could be defined as a percentage of Shapeways costs - but that is also not an option.

I don't have access to a spreadsheet program right now so the best I can do is download the csv files to have a record so I can recheck everything at a later date. This reminds me of the the last material options changes earlier in the year that caused everyone to scurry around in their accounts. Scurrying should not be the default condition resulting from Shapeways policy/pricing changes.

I'm here to register my annoyance that the .csv file has entries for prices of the form "1,234.56". Splitting a line of the csv file with the comma character fails, because of the comma inside of such a price. My code to interpret the file would be a lot simpler if the above was written as 1234.56.

(Edit: perhaps I should be more annoyed at previous csv format designers, this seems to be standard.)

I was thinking about work arounds to prevent my mark ups from being altered by your algorithms on Oct 7th. Could we possibly put our stores into a certain state so the markup values are not changed? For example if we set items in the store to be 'not for sale' before October 7th and then set them to back to 'for sale' on October 8th, might something like that prevent the changes? Toggling one check box in each model would be a lot easier than changing back all of the offered materials in every model that is affected. There must be some esoteric way to option out of the present scheme.

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ETA:
In addition apparently some models are reflecting incorrect new base prices pricing because of calculation bugs (see my ornament discussion in the big price change thread). When will it be safe to download the cvs file to archive a valid bug-free data record of stuff?

I only managed to import it into LibreOffice. I used " as text delimiter and unmarked "Quoted fields as text" (I'm not sure it's written like this in English, though). I also had to define English as the document language.

@SavIsSavvy

What would happen for Products D and E ???


PRODUCT D $12 $912 $900 $10 ??? ???
PRODUCT E $12 $912 $900 $14 ??? ???

I finally managed to get the csv file. I spent hours editing it in google docs and when I tried to upload it I got an error message. It is telling me that I may have altered something other than the last two columns, but how do I know? There are over 4000 rows! am I expected to look for errors in the entire document. This is an unrealistic expectation and very unprofessional.

This is a waste of time, YOU GUYS REALLY NEED TO JUST KEEP OUR MARKUP THE SAME! Why is no one listening to this complaint, and why does shapeways think that it is ok to sell our designs without a markup if the new production cost exceeds the price we set? Would you guys print for free if we set our price lower than what you charge for it? What about the designers who don't check Shapeways every day? Some people are going to be extremely upset if they give away their designs without knowing about this deadline.

You can remove rows from the sheet where the material_for_sale (column N) is "not-for-sale"
There's no point to updating prices that you're not offering to customers.

Is there any chance you typed something wrong into Column N, such as a price? Or letters into Column M?
If you don't mind, you could PM your CSV file to me and I'll be happy to take a look.

Thought about this example some more where markups are greater than base prices. I think these will be the results. Sales prices won't change but mark-ups will and they won't drop to zero. This is still not a good work-around to avoiding Oct. 7th automated mark-up changes. Must think of a different approach!

PRODUCT D $12 $912 $900 $10 $912 $902
PRODUCT E $12 $912 $900 $14 $912 $898

I have to agree. I'm going on record: I think the way you're repricing isn't right.

For models with lower cost, whether to hold prices or markups constant was an option, and I'm OK with it that you've chosen prices. I understand you had to pick one.

But for models that are going up, markups should float up above them. I think lowering markups, and particularly slamming them to $0, is not ethical treatment of shopowners.

I wish you'd reconsider.

Does anyone know how to change the base price from 1.00 to 1,00 in excel? Because my excel doesn't recognize 1.00 as a number. So I could alter the total price, but not with total_price = base_price + 6,00 or total_price = 1,2*base_price. And I'm not going to manually alter all the total prices by adding things up in my head. Otherwise, I'll change my price per model (24 in total where the price increased) after the whole change. One way or the other, it's going to be a lot of work. I really prefer the time when mark-up could be set, instead of total price.

I tried in Excel too, but only managed to do this using LibreOffice.org... See above how I did (sorry for the screen print being in Portuguese).

While digging into this issue last night I noticed something store owners may not be aware of. If you upload a model, set your markups, and then update the model at a later date your markups may change. Your markups will change if your updated model has a different base price (because of material volume changes, density changes, etc.).

This likely explains why the markups will be changing because of this material pricing change in the affected materials. That's how their software now deals with base price changes and they won't have time to change things to avoid the problem before October 7th. I registered this as a bug but Shapeways probably considers it to be a feature.
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=21190 &start=0&

+1 Markup must float above!

You can use the Data=>Text to column function. There you can change the decimal separators under "Advanced" .


Having downloaded the new CVS now and I'm completely confused.

Does that already reflect the new pricing?

I have now items where the total_price < new_base_price.

Also the items itself do show the *WSF* items with "price now" and "price soon".

Woody64
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