Business Class Customers

The Good: I am now ready to open my own business with my Shapeways products! I love Shapeways! I am opening my web-site soon!

The Bad: I just put in my biggest order ever! It took me 4hours to complete!

The Process is Slow:
1. Uploading 60 separate files takes a long time!

2. Clear out e-mail inbox with 120 emails!
Thanks for uploading! - 60 emails
Your Product became printable!- 60 emails

3. Ordering 60 separate parts takes forever!
Goto my designs-->Goto page1or2-->Click product--->Add to cart-->Repeat 60 times...

4. Wait for payment confirmation...Success!

5. Wait for 120 more emails..
Your design "1-60" is now printing!-60 emails
Your design "1-60" is now shipping!-60 emails

Total emails=240!

Shapeways: Please create a way that Businesses can upload and order many objects faster. I suggest setting up a FTP server just for businesses.

And please allow an option to trim down number of notification emails.

Thanks!

The option to trim down the emails is there. Up at the top click on your name and they check boxes are on the right side. Order Status updates are on there. You didn't count the ups tracking email either .

I see the options for emails:

Send private forum message notifications through e-mail
E-mail order status updates
Subscribe to newsletters
E-mail model comments

I have unchecked the order status updates, but is there the option to change model upload, model print, and model ship status updates?

I'm not complaining too much, Shapeways has a great system for small orders but when it comes to big orders it becomes a really long process.

I totally agree with that. Lots of emails.
Especially the "someone has ordered..." even when it is me who's ordering the model.
It would be nice, to receive only emails that are necessary. I mean, I don't need the "thanks for uploading", but I want to know, if the model became printable.
I don't want to get emails that I ordered a model saying, "someone has ordered..." but I want to know, if someone else has ordered some model, but maybe having just some sort of summary on profile would be better.

Has anyone in Shapeways tried Turbosquid and their publishing and product/selling statistics ?

Thanks for feedback. Let me see what we can do.

I agree that the current interface is not very practical for large orders.

- Robert

Ps. Thanks for your order (and patience)

Hi Designmodeller1

This is too late for you now, but perhaps you could have put multiple parts in one file to upload? Depending on the polycount and materials?

You might be able to put 10 parts in each upload STL, so you would only get 36 emails instead of 240. And it could in theory take one tenth of the time to upload?

That is a good suggestion!

I'm not sure how it would work with calculations though....hmmm since my items are jewelry I could probably put in 4-5 in a single file without exceeding poly count or file size limits.

I will have to do a test file with 4 in it and compare the cost calculation...should be the same.

Thanks for the idea~

Forgive/correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't putting multiple models in the same file also help keep startup costs down? Say you order 5 copies of a model in WSF, the startup costs will be $1.50 per model or $7.5 total. If you combined those same models into one file, the startup costs would just be $1.50, saving you $6. That's a significant savings, even with such a small number of models...

I'm not sure where you are getting the compounding start up costs from?

I believe that the start up costs only apply once per order, else for my 60 parts it would have cost me an additional $90 just in start up fees?

My only problems with combining multiple STL files into one are the need to be still able to order them separately in the future. Say I have a need for 5 rings size7 and 3 size6 this time, if I upload a combined file I will only be able to order that exact quantity at a time.

For now individual files will be the best bet due to the fact that I don't know what designs and sizes will be the most popular.

The startup cost is per "model".

So if you order 60 separate models in *SF you pay 60 times the startup cost. ($1.50 per model in wsf, other amounts for color)

This startup fee (as was explained on the live feed yesterday) is necessary for Shapeways to compensate for cleaning and handling lots of small items.

So in theory you could save the startup cost by putting as much models in one file.
You could upload one bulk file for testing and 60 separate files for later sales. But Shapeways prefers you not to

"They won't banish you" but if enough people "abuse" the system they will eventually have to take precautions I assume.

So in the end : you did good

Very curious what you are going to sell !

When is the grand opening ?

Cheers,

Stijn

LoL, something tells me I am about to feel your pain Designmodeller1! In a couple weeks I will be uploading 64+ individual files to get my miniature company going. (Printed in White Detail, have already uploaded 22 test minis, not part of the 64+, and went through some of this). The first thing I checked for was to see if Shapeways had a ftp.

I thought about uploading multiple minis in single files but I could only fit 2-3 on average per file as they are 100-300polys pending mini, and if I have issues I would rather be able to fix single minis than have to deal with groups of them.

Idea
- I think a ftp login with your account name and password would be great.
- From there I would like two folders, PublicSale and PrivatePurchase. Public would allow them to be seen and sold once you set the info for them. Private would automatically hide them for private view and sale only. I would just dump all of them in private and be done.
- The item/product names would simply be taken from the name of your file minus the extension.

That would greatly reduce a lot of repetitive work, at least for uploading private products. Either way is cool, Shapeways still rocks.

We use our in-house forums, our page on Facebook, and a fan group page on Facebook dedicated to our miniatures. Pictures from the fans get pictured on our page on Facebook, and the one with the most likes gets into the newsletter as the "mini of the month."

We also try to tie into our games. For example, one of our games has a new PDF book of ships (the print version will come in late spring). The miniatures for that are going to be released this month and next.

Our customers' biggest complaint is Shapeways's search engine. As a result of those complaints, I am working on a list of our items, sorted by scale and empire, that links to the appropriate item.

Making the items easy to find is the key. Getting the word out on multiple platforms is essential if you want to grow your business.

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest

If you've got some programming chops, you can use the API to upload large batches of models at once.
I've posted several examples here:
https://github.com/stonysmith/ShapewaysAPI