n
I also want the ability to be able to ship to counties other than the one I'm in. Let me explain why I want this. I'm in the middle of setting up my own website, partly because my Shapeways shop does not let me organize things the way I would like and frankly needs more maintenance than I have time to spend on it.
Also some of the stuff I'm currently designing has working parts that need to be printed in BSF and body parts that need printing in FD. To add to the confusion there are several items that share common parts so I need to add these to each order somehow. So I would need to put links in saying what the other parts were that need to be ordered at the same time.
The other solution would be to have them order from my shop, then I order all the required parts from Shapeways get them shipped to me then I ship them on to the customer.
But this has several problems, firstly there is 2 lots of postage incurred and all the extra time this incurs unless I spend a lot of money to keep all the parts in stock. Also most of my customers ( about 70%) are in the US and as I'm in Europe,that adds 20% vat to the costs as I'm too small to reclaim it on exports.
So what would be nice is if an order came into my website and I could just order all the parts from Shapeways for direct shipping to the customer. BTW I'll probably do this manually even the geek in me wants to set up an automated system.
I know there are problems with Shapeways systems in that they can't cope with the vat in this situation but I'm sure the extra flexibly this would give us shopowners would result in more orders which would pay for the costs of re-writing them. I've also heard tell that payment processors may object, but Paypal seem quite happy to take orders from my French account for delivery to Thailand.
As regards my travels I'm still at home
Things have conspired to delay me, I had to have my six-monthly meeting with the French business support organisation and the earliest appointment I could get was 28th November - They don't give me any financial support , but I got some free courses from that about running a business in France ( and on those found out all the things I'd done wrong trying to run my first business in France!) and will get some tax concessions for the next 3 years - assuming I manage to make a profit before then.
I also did some commissions and some website to help fund the trip - I'm still waiting for the payments for two of those to come in as I don't want to end up a burden to her while I'm there(though she does earn more money than me !)- I could just go and hope that they pay me while I'm away, but I know I'll be much easier to forget about when I'm 3,500 miles away.
As it happens the waters only just gone down in her house and she still can't get to it as the (lower) road is still flooded. She's had the car towed off to be cleaned and repaired but we are not certain what state it will be in after 4 weeks underwater.
Tom