Product not visible

Hello,

we have recently finished design and presentation of our first product and want it to be available on Shapeways. The material that it will be sold in is porcelain and we are aware that it isn't yet available since you are testing your new printers. However we want public to be able to see the product and despite checking the "display to the public" button it isn't. The product doesn't show up on our shop nor on the category we gave it. Now we are not sure are there any regulations product must go through before it is visible or is it a bug. If would be great if you could give us some more information on the problem.

Product name: Infinity Heart
Link of the uploaded model (hope you can open it): https://www.shapeways.com/model/upload-and-buy/3139757

Kind regards

Artmax

So now you (Shapeways) should put some smarts in that other view list. Add some options like being able to sort and filter those models for display. If you can't show not-for-sale models in your store you should be able to selectively show them in this user creations list in a specified order with categories. And you should also be able to not show for-sale-models models in the user creation list because why duplicate what's in the store unnecessarily? If the user creations list is morphing into a gallery of what can be designed but not manufactured or sold then store owners should have the option of using it for that exclusively.

Having said that I can only expect Shapeways to not add such options within the Millennium. So if you want to present your ceramic designs in the store as a preview you are forced to offer them for sale in some other material material. That's the recommendation Shapeways made when they transitioned away from the old ceramics process.

What I did was place all of my old displayed ceramics designs into a store section called "zeramics - old process" and available for purchase in white strong and flexible at a price of $1000.00 per model. I set the high price to discourage purchase since they are designed as food compatible items and there are now no food compatible processes. If ceramics ever comes back I can work through the parts one by one and reset prices and put them back into other appropriate store sections. And why did I call the section "zeramics"? Well you can't sort the order of store sections since they appear to be sorted automatically alphabetically so starting with the letter z pushes that store section to the bottom of the list where it is out of the way. If your ceramic designs are appropriate for sale in other plastic materials then you could treat them as normal models and just add the option to sell in porcelain later when and if the process will be offered.

We're facing issues with uploading of pictures. Often pictures become deleted or duplicated.
You can hardlyy get hold on what photos are displayed and how often. This consumes a lot of wasted time and the shop does not look any better.

Some products that are supposed to be visible for the public but not yet for sale are not displayed at all.

Please fix all these bugs.

Now a feature, not a bug. See Mitchell's post above. You now have to offer items for sale and as public for them to appear in your store. About the only option you have to discourage sale of such items is to apply a mark-up of something ridiculous like $1,000,000 for the material(s) offered. Or you could temporarily add a rule breaking component in your model so that it fails rule checks thus preventing sales until the part is ready. Not good solutions but those are the only solutions I can think of to work around the change in policy.