Shapeways Shops 8th of January 2009

@andreas,

1, thats exactly how it would work. Each model has a base price and the designer can choose how much they would like to earn.

2. im a bit surprised that so many are interested in sanding, and we are looking at this.

3. We're looking at painting. Did you look at our painting tutorial? If you have any results good or bad email them to us, that way we can let everyone learn from them.

4. You can sign up for the beta now, we will add people as we can.
https://www.shapeways.com/betashops/betashops_sign_up

5. You can choose a logo, url, shop name for now and we hope to add more things in the future.

Joris

Apologies, digression from thread topic.

We use a Objet 3d printer at our school. Our models are UV cured resin. Typically, how we finish our printed models is we wet sand down the model, and spray paint it. We don't use airbrush. We just get those off the shelf spray cans. (Tamiya brand highly recommended. Dries extremely fast in comparision to other brands. Expensive though.)

Our workshop technician does not recommend we finish with a paintbrush for the simple reason that it takes more skill. You can easily leave glops of paint and unsightly brushstrokes on an otherwise perfect model if your hand is shaky. With spray cans, as long as you spray at an arm's length distance from the model and go over in several really thin coats, the finishing will be perfect. I got it right on my second try. If we need different colours on a model, we just use masking tape to mask off the areas during spraying.

Regarding sanding... a 3d printed model will appear acceptably smooth to a casual beholder. I had not noticed the texture until the technician pointed it out to me that the grain was not acceptable in a presentation model. (Obviously, I am not a very observant student. XD ) But when we handed in our models, the difference was immediately apparent between sanded and unsanded painted models. The sanded model just looks more polished and way better... it shouts quality. (And people are more willing to pay for quality, lookwise and etc etc...)

Okay, you guys can continue with the shop talk. =D

---

Joris, I posted in another topic a picture of an object created by a zcorp printer, spectrum I believe is the model name, and it is just as it sounds - the texture map of the model is printed directly on the surface as it is created. Major drawback is that it is a powdery, plastery material that is brittle unless treated. Otherwise it looks and feels pretty solid. In the picture I posted, the model was grabbed from world of Warcraft using a program called OGLE so the polycount as well as the texture resolution is low.

Also, for objects that require add on parts I could just say in the description, "go to mcmaster.com and order four of part #XYZ123" or "is compatible with 1.25" diameter electric tealights" so no problems there.

Thanks for the answer.

Yes, I did it exactly as explained in the tutorial.

I've used Tamya and Revell acryl colors. Here's a picture. But I was so far not able to have the same look as the originals (see the bicorne).

Maybe the can produces better results ...



I've already sent a message for beta testing ...

Hey folks. I've finally had a chance to check out the shops feature and read through this whole thread! Holidays busy-ness is over now, whew...

Some of my thoughts:

Selling Tools

I put this at the top, because I think it is very important that something like this be implemented before the January opening.

We need to be able to monitor our sales. Mistakes always happen when people and computers meet. Let us see a list of sales for each product. Each sale listing should include the date of sale, the price of the item and the buyer's name.

IMVU has a link at the bottom of each product that only the seller can see. When you click on it, you can see every sale of that item. You can also choose the time frame (ie. January 2006 - December 2007) for the list of sales. This way, one can track sales *and* monitor the success of the product over a period of time.

Bounding Boxes vs. Volume Pricing

I'm really getting used to the volume pricing. It makes sense to me .. the more material you use, the more it costs. But I suspect there are charges involved in the actual space taken up by a model in the printing bed isn't there?

I would say if large bounding box - low volume items are causing Shapeways a problem with printing expenses, maybe you should introduce an "element" of bounding box size in final pricing.

How do you go about this ? Well, of course I have an idea

So you charge for volume first, as you always have, but you would add a percentage based on the size of the bounding box.

Here's an example. Let's say I have an item for print that is 10 cm3 in volume, but it has a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm space. So the initial charge of $2 per cm3 is applied, which starts the item out at $20. If the bounding box takes up the same amount of space as the volume then there is no extra charge. But in this case, the bounding box takes up 10,000% of the actual volume. So, maybe you charge an extra 1% of cost for every 100% extra in size. In this case, you have 99 extra 100%'s involved.

This results in a 99% increase in cost of the final model, which results in a model that costs almost twice as much.

In order to keep your Shapies happy though, you will probably need to reduce the material cost in such a way that you have a happy medium. People should eventually be paying more than they are now only in the extreme cases where a huge bounding box significantly affects Shapeways own printing/staffing costs.

Colour

There has been a lot of talk about painting. Personally, I think dying works really really well to colour these materials. I've tried it with purple, and the results are that *very little dye* is needed to produce a nice colour. To much and it will be black. The result of dying is uniform and impressive!

So, if you are considering including colour as an "add-on" done by shapeways, I think you will find dying much easier than spray-painting, not to mention it won't chip off. It seeps right in. Downside: it doesn't smooth out the finish of the item.

To Sand or Not to Sand

I don't think sanding is a viable add-on feature. Sanding is an art unto itself. It requires a skilled and per-item-sensitive worker. If sanding is added, I think Shapeways will encounter a fair amount of customer and seller dissatisfaction, and I think the price to sand objects will be prohibitive to the buyer.

I think we will see new printers within the next 5-10 years that will produce smoother finishes. And I'm sure once a good affordable smooth-printing machine is made, Shapeways will buy it

All that said, the finish of currently affordable printers is unique. In some ways, I think buyers will come to appreciate the texture and associate it with artful objects rather than mass-produced items from a mold. I think some artists may even appreciate the medium to a degree that they will actually *design for* the roughness in some cases.

Casting and Manufacturing

Perhaps in contrast to my previous suggestion, is there any thought about shapies like me, hiring out the molding/casting/and general manufacturing of items *through* Shapeways. What I mean by this is, would Shapeways consider hiring a reputable and affordable secondary company to do this manufacturing? Then prototypes could be developed here, and more materials (ie. resin/vinyl/metal casting) could be introduced. In the end, the most desirable finishes, and pricing could result.

Shop Customization

Eventually, I would like to see shapie shop keepers have the ability to customize their shop pages from top to bottom - like a myspace page: background, fonts, html...

Promotional opportunities for us from Shapeways

-Ability to purchase banner advertising on the Shapeways shopping pages.

-Showcase pages

-Window-shopping pages where buyers can look through a set of pre-ordained categories. You see this on Ebay and on Etsy. IMVU used to have this, but neglected the idea to the point that you can't find the categories. I saw a notable decrease in sales since IMVU did this. With categories, people get to window shop. They see and buy items that they would never have looked for. If all a buyer has is a search field, then will buy a good deal less than if they can window shop.

-themed catalogues that could be sent as an email newsletter or can be accessed on the Shapeways site. The catalogue would consist of ... well ... a theme of course .. like Spring Garden for example. Then the pictures and descriptions could be lifted from the html on the pages of items that had butterflies, and flowers, and GNOMES with the appropriate link thru's.

Re: adding extra bits

Bvicarious brought up the point of adding extra bits like steel axels to one of his items. I think there is some merit to thinking about this.

If Shapeways got big enough .. sorry ... when Shapeways gets big enough, is it concievable that they could offer the adddition of special common thingies to a purchase, such as:

-a leather thong or metal chain strung through a pendant

-a broach pin glued to the back

-stickers or decals added to models, or sent unattached with the package for the customer to add (perhaps laser cut?)

While we're on the topic of expanding .. keep a close eye on Ponoko. Their advertising suggests they want to expand to the 3D printing market. I would prefer to see Ponoko stick to laser cutting and Shapeways continue their awesome service. I wonder if any cooperation between you two is possible...

Models made available to public

I am not interested in this. While the type of modelling required for Shapeways doesn't translate to other things, like game art because of Shapeways high poly needs ... I would not want my models available to anyone who might print them in the same fashion with another company, or worse yet, beging to manufacture them after using my model as a prototype.

I understand that one may wish to give the customer some control over tweaking a model. Maybe there is a better seller-involved way of doing this. Fortunately, Shapeways models are vetted for manifold and watertight issues before they are accepted for download. So this shouldn't be an issue to buyers. Sellers should be prepared to test their models before offering them on the market.

Limited editions

IYes, I am a fan of this. Put a counter on a product page that counts the number of sales. When the limited number is reached, then the product page's status is turned to invisible so only the seller can see it.

Resizing option for buyer?

Not a big fan ... When I design a model, I usually take the medium's/material's abilities into account. So, if I have designed something with a 2mm wall, then it should probably stay that way. If someone resizes it smaller (25%), so that the wall then becomes .5 mm, the wall then may not be stable enough, and the customer loses.

Also, details may not be visible enough in smaller sizes, and the functionality of the item may decrease.

Bundling Items

I think this is a good idea.

What if the piece I design is so high in poly count that its pieces need to be separated into different products? I would like to bundle it for ease of shopping.

What if the piece I design has such a huge bounding box, that it would need to printed in pieces? Again, a bundle would be good for easy shopping.

What if I made three cute bunny sculptures ... one is sniffing a flower .. another is munching clover, and the third is a couple of bunnies making whoopee? I could sell the separately, but maybe I could offer them as a bundle of three also, and reduce my overall markup. Let's say if each sculpture has a markup of $2.00 ($6 markup if you bought them separately), then I could make a bundle of the three with only a $5.00 markup to encourage multiple sales.

Addressing the shops as they stand now

I think the adding a banner feature is broken. I tried to upload a banner (which was in jpg format), and I was informed that my banner could not be loaded because it wasn't in jpg form

I'm hoping also that the inability to have invisible products in our galleries and shops is only a bug. There are things that are not finished or that I would prefer to keep private. So the invisible feature is needed.

Will you bring invisible back?

Well, I think that's all for now. I pity the poor one having to read all of this

-Whystler

Another aspect of allowing customers to scale the model as they like is how it affects the commission we get from the sale. Suppose I set an object at $25, it costs $10 to print, and the customer wants to scale it by half. Would it then cost $5 to print but still have my $15 charge, so the customer would pay 5 dollars less for something half the size? Would it be percentage based, and I'd get half of what I normally would? These questions are enough to argue against the idea. It would be easier to allow shop owners to list their objects at whatever and however many different sizes as they want. Still, it sort of adds to the concept of getting what you want exactly how you want it, and 3d printing is the best avenue for providing that.

re: bounding box size, I don't know how shapeways operates, but to my knowledge the software can arrange as many different objects as will fit and do them all at once. If an object takes up the entire space of the 3d printing bed, they can't group any other objects with that batch. Time = money to some extent, even with a 10 day turnaround time, so it might technically be adding to the cost for shapeways. Maybe some kind of flat fee based on bounding box size would be fair?

re: casting and manufacturing, I already have made some molds and plan on doing more very shortly. I will probably end up selling some castings of objects on Etsy or someplace. Does shapeways have any opinion on this one way or the other? I like the idea of people buying original 3d prints from here, and buying my rapid prototype-aided castings elsewhere.


re: ponoko, I just signed up for their prime service a few weeks ago, and even with the reduced rates it's tricky to make something cheap enough to be attractive to a large audience, but I digress.. even if they don't cooperate with each other I'd still like to marry their lasercut parts with shapeways' 3d prints.

Yesterday I was oncemore asked for a custom design.

Since you are already working on this, I can share my requests:
- customizing an existing modell
- asking for a new one

for both there's the need for calculating the design costs as extra to the model.

Andreas

Pricing Model - this issue has been raised on this thread.

First, I would to comment that your present model has considerable appeal. A simple deterministic inclusive cost delivered to anywhere in the world, tax paid. Great.

Next, I would like to think about the print process. Here, I suspect that in some cases the machine time is proportional to the volume of delivered plastic, in some cases it might be closely related to the volume of the bounding box. Others might be somewhere between these figures, but few, if any would fit outside this model, although we can expect some effective job to job down time or setup time.

I think job setup / changeover time should be absorbed into your pro-rata charges, as they are at present. That's a really good feature of your present pricing model. You don't want to make a lump sum charge to produce a zero volume model & then add charges for the actual end product. To do so would actively discourage new users.

If you print time is actually proportional to the volume of delivered plastic, then I think you've got your pricing model spot on.

However, if your process time is closer to proportional to the volume of the bounding box, you should consider adding complexity to your pricing model.

The reason is this. Clearly you will have the cost of your consumables & your machinery needs to earn money. However,by charging proportional to delivered material volume, you may be acting to your own disadvantage, and to the disadvantage of your customers. You encourage your designers to make hollow models. In so doing, they (we!) might be putting extra design work in to make a model that looks identical, but is lighter. But in so doing you might be saving little machine time, and the impact on the cost to you of materials might be relatively small.

I am suggesting that your pricing model should be the sum of two components. One, proportional to the volume of delivered plastic (the present model), plus another, proportional to the volume of the bounding box.

This could discourage your contibutors from investing their time in an endeavour that reduces your selling price, but has little impact on your costs.

How would a price proportional simply to the volume of the bounding box work out? I guess it wouldn't fly, because it gives too much encouragement to designers to make solid (as opposed to hollow) models. That comes down to how sensitive your costs are to delivered mass.

Kind regards
Greg Walker

Wow guys, there is so much information in the posts above! You're overwhelming us a bit here, but in a good way. I can't possibly answer everything in a legible way but will try to adress as much as I can.

About the pricing discussion: rtdgreg hits the issues right on the nail. So we're looking along those same lines at a model that allows us to lower prices overal but isn't complex.

Because of this I like Whystler's model also but we need to do the math on that to see if it would work.

woody64's suggestion that we need standard pricing would seem to imply that everyone would have the same rate?

bvicarious, about the scaling: that would seem to be the case. About Ponoko+Etsy, it is curious to see that you would use all three services or want us all to work together. I had personally not considered that. I thought that a person would either try Ponoko because they liked them or their materials or us for example. Using all three would seem to point to some kind of OpenID for manufacturing.

Whystler: we know how important analytics will be for you guys but will not have this in place before the opening. About the dye, I agree completely this does seem to be the best way to go. Sanding: I personally agree with this also, sanding is too complex to carry out consistently. If you know any very good casting firms feel free to email them to me. With regards to Shop personalization: the MySpace example made me physically cringe, but I understand the point.

The "window shopping" points thta Whystler brings up are very valid also. We get lots of different people that visit Shapeways and we have lots of models also we have to try to find a balance between window shopping, allowing people to find exactly what they need and showing off all the shops and models.

yanying, yes, Tamiya paint is the best and we do paint Objet materials in the same way that you guys do. Although I personally do not tend to sand them.

Your pricing per cubic centimeter is very simple and easy. I think this is one of your main advantage, because the user can understand very easily what drive the cost ahead. Some of your competitors are using a “proprietary” formula which use many variables. For the average user, the quoting button works with black magic! Sometimes the formula can be somewhat reverse-engineered by quoting several different parts, but this is not for the basic hobby user because it is anoying and not fun – unless he is a math freak !

However, I think that the shipping cost integrated in the part price is not very fair, because the guy that orders a part from the Netherlands pays the same that somebody ordering from the U.S.A (and in facts he “subvents” a part of the shipping cost to the U.S.A – The guy in the U.S is making the best trade). I think it could be better to reduce the price per cubic centimenter of material. You could say for instance: Europe, add 10% shipping to the price of the parts / Rest of the world : add 20% shipping to the price of the parts.

In facts, the only things I ordered which had the same shipping worldwide were leds from Hong Kong and pager motors – In both cases, it was very small items shipped in an envelope.

Yeah, we love the way that the pricing is simple and instant and we're not likely to give that up.

It is true that customers in certain countries are subsidized by others.

The idea is that we will expand production locations at one point so this will no longer be an issue.

My issue with the shipping is that I don't think that a lot of people realize it. If you go on Amazon you think, wow this book is only $8, then you make a decision to buy it and end up paying $6 in shipping extra.

We didn't want it, one price seemed more honest, clear and direct. But, this might hurt us since the price perception is higher.

As a consumer, when I buy an item online I am usually attracted to the price that is given before shipping is added. And then when reasonable shipping is added, I just accept it. I don't actually think ... is this item worth it's price plus shipping? I usually just evaluate whether the item I like is worth it's price before shipping in order to make my purchase decision. This is unwise shopping, but it is instinctive.

I have to admit, pricing for shipping on Ponoko is scary. I made an item that costs $15 to produce, and yet the shipping and handling is $30 ... When I see this as a consumer, I am not interested. The instinct I get here is that the company is either overcharging, or not good enough to find a decent postal rate. And what happens is, I start looking for someone to give me the same service elsewhere with sane shipping costs.

-Whystler

I. Shipping

My experiences concerning shipping is contradictionary.

I love the way shapeways does. Having the price of a piece and no extras and no shipping costs.

I often did it the way Whystler does and ended up in an attractive price but with a shipping cost that destroys this advantage completely.

Amazon is often so attractive since in many cases there are no shipping costs.

Also shipping costs added at the end of the ordering often hasve some nasty suprises. For one country it's cheap but all the other ones have horrible prices.

II. The Shop

I've started the shop today and there's one important thing I see as first impression.
When you are member and logged in you get the shop view.
But non members end up with "user details" at the right side instead of "shop details". Am I right?
So people coming from a reference didn't recognize that they are in a shop?

Andreas

Woody, you are right but this is only temporary. When we go live on the 8th it will be different and then everyone can see the Shops, the logos in them etc..

Joris

ad II:
That's ok then ....

III. I did an update on "user profile" of the shop description.
After saving that the "shop name" wasn't visible any longer and the shop url disappeared and resultet in 404.

IV. There should be the possibility to add some general descriptions for the shops.
(To my point of view that can be done in the forum. For example one thread for each shop, linked to the shop description ).
Did you discuss that inernally?

V. Errors/Feature requests. Do you use an interface (Bugzilla or anything else) for that (maybe I missed that)

Andreas

VI. When ordering my own items my own "markup" is also included in the price of the order?

Woody, you seem to have hit a bug, the shop sometimes updates in this way and then the name is lost. It has to do with the saving of the photos and should be corrected tomorrow. I will correct it for you manually.

You can add a small general description under "description" on your profile under 3, but I guess we could do it with the forum also. We did not talk about this, but we can certainly do this.

We do have bugzilla internally but it is not acessible to beta testers. But, you can email anything to me and I'll handle it.

Is there a workaround for the bug that doesn't recognise the file of the submitted JPG for shop banners? I see that woody and daddymack have banners up.

I feel like i'm the only one without a shop banner.

*cry*

-Whystler

That one is strange, have you tried just another random JPG to see if it works?

Joris

ad IV.

When the description handles normal web links then anybody can do it the way he likes and there's no additional work for you to do.
Using the forum for this is only a proposal from my side,

VII. Is there a reason why you don't use subadressing like
<shopname>.shapeways.com
for the shopaddress.

Andreas