Markups

Hi there,

I realize that although the "Set total for all for-sale finishes in family" can be useful, I think it would be a lot easier for it to be changed to "Set MARKUP total for all for-sale finishes in family."

The reason behind this is I'd like to sell my item for a set price only. I'd like to earn, for example, 15$ on every sale of the model I uploaded. It is quite time consuming and kind of a hassle to go in and do the math for each and every material type so that I'm accounting for not only the markup but the 3.5% fee.

I would be so grateful for a change to this! Let me know if it's at all possible

Thanks Shapeways and hope to hear from you soon!

Rachel

Have you tried the Pricing CSV? It makes the process rather quick.

Hi there! No I haven't yet.. I'll look into this, thank you very much!

Hi artislife7.

While setting consistent markup for you might be a natural, we've gone with setting the final price, because that way it's easier to create consistent prices for shoppers. So that when I view your product in bronze or brass, or when switching through different stainless steel finishes, the price doesn't change (unless there's a good reason for it, like the jump from plated gold to solid gold). It's also easier to set those familiar $29.99 prices. So yes, setting the total price is in the favor of shoppers.

This is an old topic that has been brought up many times over the years, and one we talk a lot in the office... and rightly so. I've personally a discussion around the pricing tools twice this week. So it's something we actively think about.

Just throwing in my 2 cents worth in again on this subject. Needless to say that the Shapeways philosophy of setting prices is not the same as that of many store owners for many varied reasons.

At the very least the family structure is too coarse to use a constant family pricing capability, particularly for the precious and semi-precious metal families. Just sampling one of my smaller parts shows that the max to min ratio prices of materials within the families are 3.3 ($49/$15) for semi-precious metal and 17.9 ($648/$36) for precious metal. It is inconceivable for me to understand how setting a constant price within these families can be of any benefit to shoppers, or not crush sales for the lower priced materials.

And personally I don't even feel it's a moral or responsible practice for SF options, but hey, that's just me - Mr. one speeding ticket in decades of driving. It also becomes a huge hassle to activate all possible material options if you reject the Shapeways pricing philosophy. As a result I'm toying with just offering each model in one material and opening it up to other materials only upon request. (And please don't recommend the csv. It shouldn't be necessary and it's not going to work for me.)

MrNibbles I completely agree with you that the material family pricing is practically useless with Precious and Semiprecious Metals. Here, I find myself carefully pricing one material at a time to create a few price points that matches with the perceived value of the material.

On the bright side I have few models worthy of semi or precious metals. But it's still a pain to do fixed mark-ups for everything else.

If you agree that the base cost changing is a good reason for changing the final cost, then surely that's a good reason for setting a proportion markup.
If you care about the right-hand digits of prices in dollars, why don't you care about the same in Euros?

Why don't you make it straightforward for people to do price setting whatever scheme they choose to implement?

Here is a method which could be applied per model (or even per shop) to auto-calculate prices:

[list type=1]
[*] M : the multiplier (for example, 0.3 would be 30% markup)
[*] R : rounding factor (round up the value to multiples of this, for example 5.00 would be multiples of $5)
[*] A : an absolute markup (for example, to make a profit of $1 on everything, would be 1.00)
[/list]

so the price of an item would be set : Multiply base cost by (M+1), then round up to next multiple of R, then add A.

This method satisfies those who just want a percentage markup, those who want a flat markup, those who want a combination of both and those who do one of those and then tweak the right-most digits for psychological purposes. In short, practically everybody.
Even people who can't do maths could be accomodated with a simple explanation of how to get the use-cases above.

At the moment the method implemented on the website only satisfies those who want to set the price in dollars for each material individually, or for it to be the same for everything regardless of the base-price - that is, I think, virtually nobody.

Many people would I think like to maintain their pricing scheme regardless of how the base costs change over time.

So to accomodate everybody, I put forward the method described above (three entry-boxes), with the additional buttons.
[list type=1]
[*] immediate click button : Apply function to all materials for sale
[*] persistent check-box : Reapply function in the event of a price change.
[/list]

This might not be the easiest thing to do, but hell, you guys are already calculating base costs using volume, machine space, surface area and number of parts, and doing frankly amazing calculations to derive those, so it's not like it's an unreasonable level of complexity.

I think everyone has a point here and I can understand each of them. As for myself however, I will use the csv. Of course the materials must be marked the way they are, but the simple markup that I'd like to earn for my hard work is important and needs to be added on in an easier way, so the best way for me is using a spreadsheet that will do my calculations with a few clicks of my mouse.

It's interesting to sell the same product multiple times, but with different materials, however, doesn't that take a lot of time to upload again and apply all your preferences?

Also, I agree that it would be nice if we had a choice. Making my life easier will encourage me and others to continue to use shapeways.

I can understand that from a Shapeways standpoint that having more uniform prices makes things less confusing for a non-designer shopper. SW will do what they think improves overall sales and set the pricing framework to encourage storeowners to do certain things. That's perfectly understandable. Does the average shopper (who doesn't upload things here) even understand why prices for blue or white plastic SF gizmos would be different? Probably not. In regular large volume manufacturing a white gizmo likely costs the same as a blue gizmo unless the plastic resin pellets are different costs. And even if resin costs vary the final price differences can be so negligible that the manufacturer simply charges the same price per unit product. But in such a case we are probably talking a fraction of a cent per unit, not $0.50 or $1.00. So there's the conundrum. If a store owner wants to be "fair" with a constant or percentage mark-up, while possibly confusing customers, they need to do a lot of work entering each price individually or do a work-around with the csv. The whole paradigm of 3D on demand manufacturing is touted as being radically different than standard manufacturing, yet theories of pricing things manufactured in traditional ways still seem to cling to this new realm.

Some of the added confusion of pricing is a result of the material button approach to price discovery. A shopper literally has to click on each material button to see what the price ranges are within a model. So in essence the price discovery process has been serialized and requires the shopper to remember prices while clicking. This makes it difficult for a customer to make a quick price point decision. A display of material price with a mouse over material button would make things easier but so would an optional pull down menu to show all material prices at a glance. Or displaying a price range for the model would also be of some benefit. I just feel as though some things have become more klugey with interface changes, and that the interface changes drive other decisions that sometimes force everyone down a less user-friendly path in other areas.

Also ponder the wasted time that could be instead spent on entering tags or uploading more product photos. Let's assume 150,000 models uploaded every month. 50,000, or a third, actually make it to a store with markups. Also let's guess it take 4 minutes to go carefully through the material selling list and manually set mark-ups. That would be a total of 3333 hours of user time spent on just this task. If you had the option to enter a single mark-up value (fixed or percentage) and only had to enable or disable materials that entry time could easily be lowered to less than a minute per model. If nothing else think of how the world could be saved by lowering mark-up time CO2 emissions!

Good suggestions there drloris, and everyone eise.

Ecommerce and Shapeways has made putting products for sale incredibly easy, but the truth is, creating and marketing a good product takes considerable effort, no matter what the tools are. So while we can't make the the effort go to zero, we are interested in creating increasingly efficient tools. (In addition to the broad range of other things we do.)

To second MrNibbles wishes, I do hope you turn off your engine while managing your Shapeways shop

You should also not drive while managing your shop!

But my point about CO2 emissions, although in jest, was meant to point out that a few extra thousand hours of laptop computer time each month results in an additional 1.5 to 2 million kilograms of CO2 emissions over the course of a full year. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a US EPA department or program that highlights the efforts of companies that modify their computing platforms and software to increase efficiency and reduce their CO2 footprint. It is all the rage these days!

I applaud you Mr. Nibbles!!!! You put things into such good perspective, and I totally agree with you! Here's to hoping Shapeways listens on that! Things being easier will save EVERYONE time. And saving the environment... well... hell ya! Haha :-D

I'll come up with any angle I can to make a point. Creative thinkers, unite!

Hear, hear! I'm a big fan of the approach drloris outlined, particularly the description of setting an absolute markup. That's what I currently have to do manually, and with so many products and variations on those products it becomes quite time consuming as MrNibbles described.

MrNibbles said:
A fishing pun with that avatar? Brilliant!

Sometimes you must cast your lure 100 times before you get a nibble.

Hello,

Although I understand the issues with pricing and markups, I strongly recommend to keep the current system of establishing the end price rather than defining a percentual margin.
Why?
1. This allows you to properly set your price , rather than have customer prices as that come out of a equation as a kind of accident.
2. This way you can categorize price levels (yes I would like to have also fixed prices in euros, but unfortunately SW is dollar based).
3. Helps you to think about your sales price target setting and even allow you to gain more margin at all. Sounds silly, but it works.

It is not about he margin. You have to think as a customer. Would you buy your product? If yes, what would you consider a reasonable price? The answer should be yes and yes. If your price setting is very low, you could even send the message that your product is maybe not as good. If your price setting turns out to be too high, you have to reconsider your markup or change the product (save material or improve the product features).

It is good to create your own price list, and look at it. You will discover that some product prices will appear not logical in comparison to your other products. Once you have this full picture, you're able to re-set your price. If you want to sell products, you always have to look at your products through the eye of the customer.

In our case this resulted in some products with very low markups and other with pretty high markups. Overall it makes sense.

Kind regards,
Maurice
RAILNSCALE
http://railnscale.com/

Most of my models are small scale model aircraft in WSF which I design as a hobby and sell to raise money for a local charity.

I don't set a reasonable price, I try to charge a standard markup for all my models but make them as cost efficient to print as I can.

I say *try* because Shapeways final price policy cam cause the potential money I raise to fluctuate widely as printing costs and exchange rates vary. In an extreme case a model I checked recently was raising 2c for charity rather than the $1 I had intended (less fees of course).


I suggest that shop owners be able to choose an overall pricing strategy for their shop, EG:
- Final price (current model, customer centric)
- Percentage markup
- Fixed markup, possibly with exceptions (most suited to my needs)

I to would like to see prices set by % mark up, the problem I have with setting a fixed price for the group is I mainly sell metals, and the pricing variations between metals in the same family are too large. so I have to always go in a just prices by hand any way.

Also using the csv upload is a pain because I need to break up the downloaded csv, into 4-6 smaller files before uploading because when I try to upload a file with 3000+ price changes it never finishes processing the file.

For me the best solution would be.

1. Set a Store Wide mark up (% based )
2. On each Item have the option to apply store markup (on by default) or set per item markup. (% based)
3. On material families the option to apply Item mark up (on by default) or set per material family markup. (% based or $$ Based)
4. Set prices for each material/finish manually. (% or $$)

This would save me a huge amount of time. I've had a few models where I have forgot to set a markup and made no profit or a material's base price has changed which reduced my markup to almost zero.

Cheers, stephen

Is there a clipboard tool out there that might ease the effort? Something with an equation scripting ability that would let you copy the base price, hit a hotkey, and then paste the result into the final price box? Still a bit of a pain but less error prone than doing the math in your head and typing individual numbers. It would be an interim solution that works around the present limitations.