| Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14637] Sun, 11 July 2010 16:42 UTC |
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So I finally added a number of the designs we sell on our website to our Shapeways store.
Here are some qualms I have
1) we need to be able to set the markup fee / or preferably total price per material. My experience in retail tells me to price things with simple prices like $40 flat, selling things for $43.36 looks bizarre. But you can't adjust for that because different materials cost different amounts, blah blah blah. Another example is that I would like all WSF colors of our bracelet to cost the same. I would rather earn different amounts of money on them then have it show up as weird pricing on the shop.
2) the interface for adding materials should be check boxes with nothing selected by default, and a pair of select all, select none buttons
3) ( APPARENTLY THIS WAS FIXED ALREADY and I'm living in the past)
there should be a work around so a seller cannot order models from their own shop and pay the markup fee, right now I have to maintain double copies of the products listed for sale in our shop. After adding our 1layer twist ring a while go I accidentally ordered 30 stainless steel ones with markup instead of 30 without. Problematic
4) I'm using the co-creator dropdown menu to allow people to select bracelet/ring sizes, I would like it if I could associate files with those options so I don't have to upload them over and over again, I guess sizing isn't exactly the point of co-creator though.... Maybe there should be a different way to implement that?
I'm sure others have said many of these things but I figured I would set them down while it was on my mind
[Updated on: Sun, 11 July 2010 17:27 UTC]
http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14638 is a reply to message #14637 ] Sun, 11 July 2010 17:04 UTC |
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Glad you're selling on Shapeways now! I second all of those, and it's good you mention them because sometimes we get used to how things are and forget that they could be different...
Only thing is that I thought point 3 had been resolved.
Cheers, and good luck with the sales - Michiel
www.michielcornelissen.com
twitter: @michiel_ontwerp
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14639 is a reply to message #14638 ] Sun, 11 July 2010 17:25 UTC |
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Hi Michiel,
Oops. That would have saved me a bunch of uploading last night, thanks for the heads up! I never tried to do that after I ordered a bunch of marked up parts the first time.
Best,
Jessica
http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14689 is a reply to message #14637 ] Tue, 13 July 2010 01:21 UTC |
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I agree, totally....well #3 is fixed. Shapeways is very good at what they do( print things) but don't seem to understand marketing. I'd hoped that getting a marketing person would result in some improvements. Not much,so far. They need to understand that marketing is the key to their ultimate success.
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14762 is a reply to message #14689 ] Thu, 15 July 2010 08:56 UTC |
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Hi Rob,
do you refer to our marketing in general, or to the features that we're offering for your shops? How about I borrow our marketing manager for a day and ask her to have a professional look at the shops, prices, descriptions etc?
Bart
Community Manager Europe | Shapeways
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14798 is a reply to message #14762 ] Thu, 15 July 2010 23:13 UTC |
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That would be wonderful. Marketing is a difficult task. Every extra click, every question unanswered, every strange price, there are so many little things and each one causes a percentage of people to stop the ordering process. Each one hurts business, and they add up rapidly. Little things most of us wouldn't notice will put people off. Someone patented one click buying because it helped streamline the shopping experience and thus let to better sales.
If you get a professional in to look at and change the way things are done, some great improvements could result.
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14801 is a reply to message #14798 ] Fri, 16 July 2010 00:06 UTC |
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here's an example...free shipping. Shapeways thinks it's great, it actually loses sales. Here's how. Someone sees a great model for $10, they want it. They come to Shapeways to buy it, but they can't. There's a $25 minimum...in their mind you're charging them $25 for a $10 item. It's not fair and they're probably not going to do it; and, they're angry, they may never come back.
If your policy was free shipping on orders over $50, then that customer would likely buy the $10 model, pay $4 shipping and be happy. If they're happy, they tell their friends, if they're angry, they tell their friends....Which one do you want out there talking about you?
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14819 is a reply to message #14806 ] Fri, 16 July 2010 14:08 UTC |
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Hi guys,
thanks for all the feedback, we like it a lot as it helps us to improve the service for you. It is not always easy of course to strike a balance between adding cool new features, which we are very excited about and fixing usability issues for you.
So let's have a look at the issues at hand:
- Markup fee per material; Very understandable, it does mean that where now adding markup is a single action it becomes more involved when this feature appears. Of course you can also make both available, but again more choice leads to a more difficult system for shop owner rookies. We will investigate and come up with some ideas.
- Interface for adding/removing materials; yes, we are a bit suffering from the success of adding new materials. This can be done, we already have some ideas how to do it.
- Ordering your own models without markup; should be fixed.
- Using co-creator for ring-sizes; indeed this is not what the co-creator platform was intended for. We should have a system, which supports sizing. This is a big feature to build, but we will have a look into it.
- Shipping cost; you could argue (and most surveys agree) that slapping on shipping costs at the end of ordering also loses sales. Also international express shipping with UPS is much more costly than $4, list prices are in excess of $50 for lots of countries. We tried the postal service, but even shipping to Spain from the Netherlands sometimes took OVER 2 weeks so that is also not really nice and postal is also more than $4. Next to that the minimum order also covers some admin overhead and packaging. We are taking reducing cost seriously and when we will find a way to reduce the minimum order size we will!
- Additional cost for coloring. Please realize there is more to it than setup cost of a color bath. Each model needs to be dipped for the right amount of time (and uses a little dye) and needs to be dried. This is now mostly a manual process. Investing in automation also costs money. We will of course start filling complete machines with set colors, but currently we do not get enough colored model orders to make that economically feasible.
We are taking the user facing part of our website very serious and actually just recently we decided that Robert (our CTO) will personally lead the definition and development lead. You can expect him to come with some ideas in this part of the forum soon.
In all, thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it and need it, to continuously improve. Please be aware we do have limited resources and will also make mistakes (not too many we hope) but try and do our best in keeping a balance between improving the shop owner UI and getting new exciting features released.
Hope this clarifies things a bit!
best regards,
Peter
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14826 is a reply to message #14819 ] Fri, 16 July 2010 19:34 UTC |
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| pete wrote on Fri, 16 July 2010 14:08 |
- Shipping cost; you could argue (and most surveys agree) that slapping on shipping costs at the end of ordering also loses sales. Also international express shipping with UPS is much more costly than $4, list prices are in excess of $50 for lots of countries. We tried the postal service, but even shipping to Spain from the Netherlands sometimes took OVER 2 weeks so that is also not really nice and postal is also more than $4. Next to that the minimum order also covers some admin overhead and packaging. We are taking reducing cost seriously and when we will find a way to reduce the minimum order size we will!
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I'm not asking you to change your shipping procedure, just the way it's presented to the customer. You include shipping,admin overhead and packaging in the price (regardless of the cost), that's a percentage of the price....lets say 10%. If a customer buys the minimum, $25, that shipping,admin overhead and packaging cost is 10% of $25 ---$2.50 OK, if a customer only wants to buy something for $10, charge him 10% of the minimum order (in this example--$2.50) and call it shipping and handling. Or increase it slightly..$3. Then you make slightly more money, the customer doesn't feel pressured into buying something he doesn't want...everyone wins. And, there's still the option to buy more for free shipping.
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14853 is a reply to message #14826 ] Sat, 17 July 2010 16:52 UTC |
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| Quote: |
- Interface for adding/removing materials; yes, we are a bit suffering from the success of adding new materials. This can be done, we already have some ideas how to do it.
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Please make a quick intermediate solution for that. A simple one liner (one line of code will solve that) which adds all the materials and the user can delete it. And afterwards you will have enough time to provide a more sophisticated solution.
If you don't know why then please try to add 5 items this evening and restrict the material list to materials suitable for wall size < 1,5mm. Afterwards you will know why this is so painful ...
woody64
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #14927 is a reply to message #14853 ] Mon, 19 July 2010 15:09 UTC |
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Yes, that is easy enough. I am on it.
- Robert
Robert Schouwenburg
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #20501 is a reply to message #14819 ] Mon, 15 November 2010 07:06 UTC |
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Hi,
I'm a new user and I believe that per material markup should be available, because a more expensive material , (i believe ) should have a higher markup.
I'd love the following options 1. to globally set up a percenttage markup for each product.
2. To be able manually set a different markup for each material.
unellenu.com
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #20516 is a reply to message #20501 ] Mon, 15 November 2010 14:43 UTC |
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For a quick fix can you make it so I can enter
10%
in the box and it will treat the markup as a percentage instead of dollar amount? Better yet if you have time
$1+10%
but then you are getting into more complicated parsing though it can be done (at least in PHP) pretty easily.
Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/mctrivia or my blog at http://4ddice.blogspot.com/
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #20715 is a reply to message #20516 ] Thu, 18 November 2010 22:24 UTC |
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We are working on a great solution - stay posted it will be released in December (Jan latest).
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #21127 is a reply to message #14819 ] Wed, 01 December 2010 12:39 UTC |
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Hi,
Regarding ring sizes I'd like to be able to duplicate a product :to save re-entering the same info multiple times, and then to just upload the new (different sized )model.
I'm happy to list different sizes of the same product as different products, because for example a size X ring is going to be heavier than a size J ring and thus material prices will be different.
Alternatively a devoted sizing feature would be nice.
Janelle.
unellenu.com
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #21259 is a reply to message #21127 ] Sat, 04 December 2010 01:11 UTC |
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For rings it would be nice if I could just upload the 65 standard ring sizes and the user can pick there ring size from a list. The price could then be determined based on the design file that matches there ring size. Shows them a preview and lets them order right away.
Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/mctrivia or my blog at http://4ddice.blogspot.com/
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| Re: Per material markup, checkbox material selection, no markup fee charged to seller [message #21267 is a reply to message #21259 ] Sat, 04 December 2010 11:17 UTC |
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Hi,
Offering multiple sizes as a single product is indeed very interesting option. I have put it on the list.
Best,
Robert
Robert Schouwenburg
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Search
. And I've been asking for 4 since we got revisions. Where it would be like the revisions, except, you would order older revisions, or in this case different sizes.
(( - save - forward to the next item. Try that 10 times. Maybe you will mention what I mean.
