Product Inventory Management

I am completely stuck now.

I am trying to upload a batch of new models, and manage existing models, and I CANNOT upload or adjust my pricing.

I have three options.

I can use the model page. Except that with this weird new page layout, prices are only displayed either without sales tax and VAT, and I have no idea what markup to add to round up to a flat Euro price that I can circulate among my customers.

I can use the new Markup CSV Wizard. Except again, it only displays prices ex sales tax and VAT, so I still don't know what markup to add.

Or I can use the Product Inventory Management, which I always used, and found adequate for my purposes. Except I can't, because, now when I change the markup, the price vanishes and changes to some unintelligible figure which makes no sense, and the new markup doesn't save to the model page anyway. It's broke.

So here I am, with an inventory of new and existing stock, and a day off to sit and organise it, and I can't because I seem to have no access to apply my preferred pricing structure to it.

This is simply no use to me at all. How are people supposed to make head or tail of any of this? I haven't the time to waste a whole day trying to figure it out, or asking people for answers that should be readily available on the website.

Am I the only person sitting here like this? Can somebody please fix the Product Inventory Management back to how it worked before, and I can use it again?

Hi Bunrattypark,

Am I wrong or even before the update it was impossible to maintain a flat Euro price because the prices that do never change are actually the Dollar prices and the Euro prices change depending on the exchange rate?

Yes, I have asked before if I can tie my prices to Euro instead of the dollar, because I have no dealings at all with the dollar currency, all my customers are Euro customers. Every so often, my price would fluctuate as the dollar changed, and I had to log in and readjust my markups.

Now, however, the Product Inventory Management is BROKE. I have wasted a second afternoon trying to update prices, to no avail at all. Not only have Shapeways managed to make a mess of their website update, but they seem to have broken other things that were working normally.

I wish I knew how I am supposed to update my prices, as it is fundamental to having a shop on Shapeways at all. We have just had a pricing update ontop of everything else, just to complicate things further, but as it is the weekend, I wonder if there are any Shapeways hands on the rudder to keep this ship straight through this massive upheaval?

Customer service in Shapeways is brilliant, I cannot fault them. It appears they are being let down badly by whoever organises the web facilities. I suppose it is out of the question that on the very weekend we are having this wholesale pricing update, that the Product Inventory Management might actually work, so that we can update our prices in keeping with the update?

I told my customers my new models would be available in October, as they are all asking me, and now I cannot make them available, as I cannot put accurate prices on anything! At this point, I have no idea what to do next.

You can download the CVS file in Euro if I remember well.
The only problem is that you do not have the VAT, right?
What about making a new column where you multiply the price by 1.19 (19% VAT is applied by shapeways in Europe) and then adjust your markup accordingly? (do not forget to multiply also your markup by 1.19 before adding it to the price with VAT to get what the European customer will pay excluding shipping)

Many thanks, unfortunately, my computer seems to have no facility to alter the CSV, only read it. So I cannot use it for updates. I can get my calculator out and start backwards calculating VAT, etc. but I have very little spare time to attend to this. The Product Inventory Management used to do all this automatically, and I cannot understand why it doesn't work the same week that the new pricing comes in. We really need that fixed.

Hey Bunrattypack, which software are you using to read the CSV?

I was using Microsoft Office, which I am not licensed to edit in. I have since managed to open the CSV in Microsoft Works which I can freely edit in.

I still prefer the old Product Inventory Management, which seems not to work properly now. Can you have a look and see what has happened to it?

I think in future, I will abandon attempts for a flat Euro retail price, and just add a flat markup to the model pages instead. It's not ideal, unless sometime soon we can tag to the Euro instead of the dollar. It means when I advertise my models outside of Shapeways, I cannot tell people the price they will pay, which I really wanted to do. But I can't keep readjusting my markups every time the dollar fluctuates.

The Product Inventory Management works to a fashion for me (WinXP, IE8.0) but is very slow and IE8 reports errors on page. It works just fine in Firefox though.