Please Provide A Cheaper Postage Option :(

Has postage gone up recently or am i just feeling the pinch more than i used to?

I spend ages getting a model to a reasonable price, add it to the cart and then find out its £15 postage! (for a tiny bit of plastic).

I love the service Shapeways provids on the whole, but i havent used it in ages down to the postage cost. I cant bring myself to pay £15 for ship a £5 bit of plastic.

Maybe its not meant for the likes of me, maybe for people who print on larger scales. But i really wish there was a lower price postage that maybe took longer and had less plastic padding in the box or something?

thanks
N

Hi
We're all feeling the pinch, but £15 is too much any day of the week. Im assuming its being sent from another country, but even so - i have things sent for a fraction of the cost from all around the world.

What would be great would be if Shapeways could offer a more afforable postage option that doesnt require signed for etc. and doesnt include X amount of plastic bags to wrap the print in.

Things might be cheap FROM the UK, but since Brexit shipping TO the UK has only gotten more expensive.

DHL from The Netherlands charges a minimum of €30 to the UK.
And it requires quite a bit of paperwork

Yeah, brexit won’t have helped that’s for sure . I guess I’m just used to cheap postage via Amazon. Things get shipped from China for no where near as much.

I’d use a uk based printer but annoyingly it seems they alll require minimum order numbers so again the price wouldn’t be viable.

Just ran into this problem... I literally can't afford this. Shipping *doubles* the cost of what I'm trying to order, and it isn't even that big? It's absolutely ridiculous. I had a number of projects planned for this year, and postage costs are probably going to put a stop to that.

Just bought my own printer and am loving it. Very much doubt I’ll be using shapeways again, which is a shame as I would totally have used it for the odd print here and there but it’s just not viable any more

I have access to several 3D printers, my main reason for going via Shapeways is the fact that the files are unavailable anywhere else... I'd reach out to the seller, but they're mostly inactive.

Doesn’t bother me anymore thankfully as I might my own printer and just print things as and when I want at a fraction of the cost of the postage alone

I would agree that for a small item of simple design the price of one good print is cheaper than the postage to have ShapeWays print and mail it.

But there are a couple of fallacies about how cheap a home printer is:

The home printer can be persnickety in getting ONE good print... it might take several tries before you get that ONE good print, so the cost of the failed prints must be included in the overall cost of that ONE good print.

Part of the failed print cost is because the machine is not setup properly (level, in a controlled temperature/humidity room, clean, etc.) Such that it takes several tries to get that one cheap print. You really need to include the cost of the failed prints in the price of the ONE good one. ShapeWays absorbs all that cost (well, we all pay for it in the high price of the prints we do get!)

But another cost that is often ignored is the antsy-ness of the "lazy" owner of a home printer... we might design the part and fail to verify the design while still in the computer... why not print it now and then discover the errors in the print? I know people that fall into that category (me, included, not in 3-D prints, but in cutting 2-D vinyl decals!)

Well, the cost of the failed print(s) to discover what could have been discovered by just stopping to really look at the design to see if it is as good as it must be to get a good print, needs to be included in the onesy/twosy printing that the home owned printer usually does. In commercial printing, that cost is minimal compared to the printing of thousands of the same item, but is a major portion of the expense of a single printed item. Not to mention the wear and tear on the machine making things that won't be good enough to keep. And if the design has a major flaw, it can break the printer such that the cost of that ONE good part needs to include the cost of repair or a new printer altogether.

When I print via ShapeWays, I spend a lot more time inspecting my design rather than pay such high prices for a print AND POSTAGE to get a failed design delivered to me.

And that home printer limits you to one or two materials, whereas ShapeWays has dozens of materials to choose from.

There is something to be said about the immediacy of seeing your design come into physical existence right before your eyes. And you might perfect a design on the home printer and then upload it to ShapeWays to have it printed in 18K Gold or some other material that you cannot possibly do at home.