warning to shop owners you may have markup at $0

when shapeways added the detailed frosted material they set the markup based on the max detailed value irregardless of weather you offer the model in that material. if you did not your markup will be $0.

because shapeways does not inform you of $0 sales you will not know how much money they have lost for you. check your shops and join my petition



Petition:
The following changes must be made:
1) To keep shapeways honesty and to alert shops to mistakes all sales must be brought to shops attention immediately(email or url callback)
2) To protect shops time investment set materials to unavailable if they calculate markup for new materials as $0.


mctrivia

I support this petition.

Moreover, I wish that by default the mark-up is set the same for all materials, instead of zero. Every time when a new material is added (without notification), I should immediately run along all my 100+ models and correct the mark-up. As any Shop Owner, I am not looking for more administrative work.

Oskar

Strange... I got the feeling that this time Frosted Detail had been added only for models already having (regular) Detail material available and were initialized with the same markup as those older materials.
Am I wrong or is there a bug that prevented this mechanism to apply everywhere?

In case nobody has noticed: This is a recurring problem with every new or changed material and the solution is super-easy:

Shapeways should NOT make ANY second guesses on material choices nor markup values, i.e.

- DO NOT add new material choices to any model
- DO NOT guess any markup values out of blue sky
- DO NOT set any new material as primary choice (think of the silver/jewelry case)
in other words
- DO NOT fiddle with any shop items in any way

rationale:

Nobody at Shapeways knows whether an existing model is compatible with the new material. Much less, nobody at Shapeways knows whether a shop owner WANTS to offer a specific model in a specific material and at WHICH PRICE.

------

Apart from that, and if you are still reading: The entire logic behind materials needs a revamp:

- There needs to be the concept of "material groups", i.e. all variations of WSF, all variations steel, all silver, all detail, all ...
- That funny inverse logic (remove available materials) needs to be turned around. i.e. the shop owner ACTIVELY assigns his choice of "material groups" to his models. One click instead of many.

rationale:

"Material groups" would make it a lot less cumbersome to set up a shop item and also greatly reduce customer confusion.

- All reasonably designed models are made for specific types of materials. What's made for variations of detail, will not work for any of the steels and possibly not for any of the WSFs.

- A customer cannot determine whether a model will be any good when ordered in the latest-and-greatest ultra-high-tech material which Shapeways just added to the model over night.

- A customer can very well decide whether he wants that plastic item in white, black or blue (material group WSF), but should not be bothered with overpriced choices for steel which would not print, anyway.

Though I agree that simplifying selection is a good thing it is not always the best. Many of my dice can be printed in every material safely. Many people order it in WSF and die it themselves because this is the most cost effective. Not all are willing to die themselves and pay the extra for color. Others want there dice in steel only. I don't get much orders in other materials but will now for the Frosted Ultra Detailed because it makes some of the designs I made printable where they were not before. Though in that case they are only available in that material.

Though setting new materials to not available would be safest for people like me who have over 200 models it takes for ever to add a new material to all of them. I have requested shapeways to add the ability to alter the material pricing and availability through there API which would let me automate the process through my server but they are very slow to add features.

so 2 clicks to add "material group WSF" and "material group steel" vs. 10 clicks to
- remove all
- add WSF
- add WSF black
- add WSF blue
- add WSF green
- add WSF red
- add steel glossy
- add steel matte
- add steel bronze glossy
- add steel bronze matte
- add ...
?!?!?

Honestly, while you (and I, eventually) might benefit from an API, most others will not. Given the sloooooooow progress on any of the forum suggestions, I would seriously question whether API improvements are the right thing to do at this time.

Read those notes about the material inventory pseudo-spreadsheet and you may understand.

yes the 2 click would be better.
The API is the best way since shapeways is bad at getting updates that really mater to the shop owners. With the API people like me can write the fix and make it available to everyone. Writing a simple system that is not flashy and cool looking but fast and functional I could have a really useful model inventory system up and running in a day that we could all use. Normally I would just hack the form interface and parse the resulting html to get what I want done but shapeways uses such a stupid and backwards interface system that it is not easily hacked.

Yes, KISS please ....

my bet: it will not happen

yah shapeways is not likely to rewrite there code to something more sain. But the API hopefully will open the doors to letting me write the more KISS friendly functions. Time will tell.

I just checked my models... those that are available in detail materials have the frosted available with the same markup as regular detail... the models that don't have detail as an option don't have frosted either - seems like SW got it right to me (or did I completely miss the point?)

And just in case you didn't know... there was a hiccup when the last set of S&F colours were added - all made available with $0 markup... but that was kept quiet and fixed rather quickly before most people noticed. I don't think the same mistake would be made twice in the space of a few months!

Nancy, Bart or Ralph would be the right people to contact directly about such matters

well they did do it again since 100 of my models where set to $0 markup for these 2 materials

Last time, I think it is was about 2 hours or less after I emailed Bart that the problem was in hand and a fix being resolved.

What did Shapeways customer services say about the issue? And has it been fixed for you yet?

I take it that, you do know that if you manually add a material from the list of 'not available' that you will need to add the markup and then save for each material?

they said it looks bad for you.

i had to manually update the price of each model. took 4 hours.

Yes the material choice is a never ending story.

Material groups where each shop owner can assign and remove materials to and from would solve a lot of nasty problems.
Also markups can then be assigned to material groups

What's also often needed to have some information about the minimal wall size found in an object to disable materials in which the object is not printable. I often have the situation that a model is rejected caused by some materials I've added later on (maybe not having in mind that some material isn't suitable for the model)

Woody64

+1 !!

I agree - I have 270 models to administer - this is nuts !

I recently replied to an old customer that my markup is ONE for ALL materials - i do not "punish" a customer by adding a higher markup just because who chose silver or stainless steel.

So by default a markup should be set the same for all materials instead of zero - then each shop owner decide what to do next.

as a minimum I need your database structure to write the code for you. It would help if I also had your function libraries and interface classes.

I think the only thing that can solve such a issue is the already given proposal of having material classes.
The material classes are handled by the designer and materials can be added or removed from classes.
The designer assigns a class to a model so adding materials can be a very quick topic.

In my case I would have:

SmallWallSize
+WSF
+BSF
+GSF
...

BiggerWallSize
+ SmallWallsize
+ TD
+ WD
+ BD

I would add FD and UD to SmallWallSize.

There can be one list of not suitable materials per model handled by shapeways and the designer.

NotSuitableFor
+ BD

In that case this model can not be ordered in a material which is part of the assigned material class but was recognized from shapeways as not suitable.
A designer can remove the material after an update of the mesh which may cover the problem.

Woody64

Hey guys, just caught up on the thread.

I'm working with the web dev team to figure out the best way to fix this process (we're on Skype right now talking, actually). I do like what you guys are suggesting about material grouping and simplifying the shop inventory process. Maybe there can be an exceptions list for shopowners who want to add their own materials? Maybe we can notify shopowners a day earlier so they can prepare for the launches better?

For FUD/FD specifically, I'm not sure what exactly happened with the markup, but those of you don't have any of the old Detail Materials in your shops should not have gotten FD/FUD added. If you find out this wasn't the case, please let me know which models (if there were many just pick one) went rogue on us. We'll look up what happened in our databases so we can prevent this from happening again.

Thanks again for all your feedback--it really does help us with our priorities.