Post your Sales Overview CSV

Here is mine, see SalesOverview2016-01-20.csv attached.

As you can see, my DNA ring is the best seller followed by my Ouroboros Ring. My DJ Headphones Cufflinks and versions used to be good sellers until Shapeways told me they are not going to sell them anymore because of printing errors. I corrected the errors for the main version, but Shapeways never sold it again. They do sell on Etsy though.

Post your sales overview CSV too if you want. By doing so it helps shop owners see what would be good areas to spend our valuable time on.

Crickets

HAHA!!

Wow, thank you for sharing your sales overview. It helps a lot. I haven't sold nothing yet here, but since i haven't printed nothing yet, that is not surprising. I ordered few of my prints, and they will arrive soon. And my plan is to basically sell them on e-bay and similar places. But the question is for practicality and time and money, can i go and type address of person who buy my model on e-bay instead of my own address when i make an order from shapeways?

Tnx again, happy selling, continue with great work

Happy to contribute! I'm glad you found it helpful.

What you're asking about is called drop shipping and yes you can do it that way with Shapeways. However, you can only do it for addresses in your own country. Shapeways wont ship to an address that's not the same country as the billing address.

For international orders you would need to order your products ahead of time to have them on hand to ship them from your location to the international location.

Nice sculpts! Yeah, when you order these you can take pictures, which work way better than the renderings when it comes to showing a prospective customer what they'll get. Also, you can take pictures that give prospective customers ideas of how they can display your art.

Thanks for your post, it gave us some insight into the shop set up.
I've looked at your models as well, for the rings there is no customize function. How do we get different sizes?

Edited: found the links in description. So you hide the model, but share the link to these models? nice way to manage the information. another lesson.

do you use only sculptural do make your model?

Thanks! Happy to contribute!

I do all types of 3D modeling. I learned that I was good at doing sculpture a decade or so ago, but for decades before that I used 3D modeling software to make stuff, using CNC for example.

Yeah, that's the way you do variations currently. You upload the product variant, a ring size for example, and then you mark it for sale, but do not mark as show to the public. That way it doesn't show up in your shop, but you can place a link to it in your description. Shapeways will change this soon though! Shapeways is currently working on product variations so it will probably work like eBay, Amazon or Etsy where the customer can pick a product variation from a drop down list.

Thank you for reply.

That is really unfortunate for me, cause my country is very small and isn't really a market for anything lol. I will have to figure out some way to avoid paying double shipping for no reason, which will increase the price of the model and add unnecessary time for customers to wait. I will still post them there on sale and see what is going to happen. Not going to have high hopes, lol. In the meantime i will offer my services here in designer for hire program. Just waiting 3 prints to get printed and to arrive.

I see I see. Yeah, it's a little unfortunate for those in your situation. I'll bet though that Shapeways will eventually put in the security protocols that would allow drop shipping from other countries. All in good time. Keep in mind that if you order your products in bulk you save on shipping to you because you only pay shipping once for multiple products being shipped to you.

One thing I've noticed about my international customers is they don't seem to worry too much about shipping costs for some reason. Perhaps they have it in their mind that if they're going to make an international order that it's going to cost a lot more for shipping so they don't hesitate too much.

In the meanwhile, perhaps you could look into Fulfillment By Amazon. This is where you send your products to Amazon and they store the products in their warehouses and ship the products to your customers when you get orders.

Then again, Shapeways is good too! If you can direct your customers to Shapeways you wouldn't have to pay Amazon or eBay selling fees. What I would try to do is find out what kind of people buy sculptures like yours and then find a way to advertise to them. Also, make sure you have all the keywords that people will use to find your sculptures, like desk art, figurine etc. That way people can find your products by simply searching Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Another thing, who says you have to stick to retail? Find out what retailers will buy your sculptures at wholesale prices. Price wise, wholesale sells for about half retail. You would only make something like a few dollars on every unit, but you sell them 10 or 20 at a time. Another benefit of wholesale is the advertising factor. Every time someone buys your product it then gets word of mouth advertising that builds your brand name. If you have multiple retailers helping you sell you then also have multiple ways people get to know your brand.

Wow, thank you again for so extensive help. I guess lots of work unrelated with art creation will have to be done. Advertising, searching, etc. Oh well, it is what it is

Happy selling

Happy selling to you too!

Hey thanks for sharing the data! helps alot for someone starting out.

How do you sell on Etsy? just link the product page from SW?

No, there is no way to do that currently. What you do is you get an order and then you either make it yourself or you have someone make it and in that case you have that shipped to you and then you repackage it and ship it to the customer. Some are using Shapeways with Etsy and they are having Shapeways send the item to their Etsy customer. This called drop shipping. It works, but it's limited to just the country you reside in.

There is a guy that has special software that he has created and he has posted on the forum about it. It's software that does the dropping shipping work automatically, among other things. I'm about to go to sleep and so I'm too tired to search for it, but I remember that the guy sells lots of branding iron attachments for Bic lighters here on Shapeways and also Etsy. At the time of his posts he was wanting to know if anyone was interested in buying and using his software to help them with their Etsy sales fulfillment.

gotcha, thanks!

This is an interesting topic, without actually uploading my sales overview, I will say I just started my Shapeways shop in March 2015, I now average about 70-90 items sold per month and would like to increase that number. I looked at your Etsy store and did a few searches and from appearances it looks to be mostly artsy kinds of accessories. Not really a good fit for my product selection.

There are only a few items that I can actually customize or at least offer in multiple sizes. I have one item in particular, not currently in my store, that I want to sell the smallest in Red, next size in Orange, next in Yellow, followed by Green and so on, but I cannot see any way of doing this without having multiple items and place them individually in the store in the manner you have suggested. Any insight would be welcome.

Bud

Maybe only a hint from my shop concerning materials

@woody64 That is a fairly good mix of materials. In my case a full 73% of my sales are Black Strong & Flexible, followed by Red Strong & Flexible Polished at 8%. All other materials are less than 3% per material. 98% of my items are available in SWF and only 2% is limited to Acrylic.

This is one reason why I would love to see a polished black or at least semi polished black SWF offered, or even hoping that the HP FusionJet might be a solution (although SW has been silent after the announcement of the partnership, bad Shapeways, go sit in the corner and face the wall until you realize what you've done!)

Yes, I'm asking that for years now since that would boost sales. At the end many buyers don't like the grainy look of unpolished BSF.
The new Acrylate did so far good results. Unfortunately there's once more another sort of bearer needed or they simple deny multiple connected items

Woody64

Thank you this is interesting, as a designer debating whether its worth spending the time creating a bunch of models for this site, this is certainly encouraging