**UPDATE: NOW LIVE!! **First To Try & Beta Products**

Yes you are right. And it's maybe not the best definition (maybe bounding box is better).

But the more interesting question is, why should the possible seller be disatracted by a "First to try".

Is "First to try" more risky from failing point of view or is having less buyers more risky?
The risk with a small change is that is passes the manual test and results in a print failure.

Woody64
Additionally I own a shop at shapeways from the very beginning. The reasons for a new upload were numerous (i.e. as simple as to have a better render).

First of all I am strongly against "first to try", though I should make it clear once again that technically I should have no say in this matter as I do not have a shop.Now your suggestion boils down to "trust me, I know what I am doing" while shapeways seems to have come to the (temporary) conclusion that too much trust in the abilities and judgement of the designers has put them in an awkward position.
(I posit that it is actually "too much trust in their technology", hence my suggestion to show a disclaimer-like explanation of what can go wrong with print-on-demand and what state of finish to expect even in the best case. In my opinion that would also cover all the cases of imperfect polish of the metals, and variations in both bronze distribution and wear or corrosion resistance of the "stainless")

No my suggestion is not "trust me, I know"

It's:
- a design which was already printed successfully
- which has undergone an update
- and was checked by the automatic process against principle print ability and wall thickness
-- to restrict to harsh changes there may an additional measure make sense like bounding box, volume, number of points ... (not really analyzed yet)
- and still a manual check will be done by SW

=> so what is the risk of failing now (for sure there is one but is it that greater then having less buyers. Nevertheless SW will end in 99% "First To try" items based on the number of pieces in the shop. And there must be a difference between pieces which were sold a lot and pieces which were never printed or sold at all)

As you also stated you don't like "First to try" and a lot of designers have stated that so far the purpose is to at least save some already achieved results.

Woody64

How about we just have an "Recently Updated" status for those models which have printed before OK but now a new version has been uploaded?

Tom

This is a very good point. Would you, hypothetically, feel better if there was a visual indicator that "prior versions of this model printed successfully" that went alongside "First to Try"? I think there is a way we could perhaps all meet in the middle here.

To everyone's point that First to Try will discourage potential shoppers: 1) We genuinely hope not- we are tracking stats and behaviors of shoppers encountering these messages very closely. We have no problem modifying the program if we see negative impacts on the Shop Owners. 2) There is no more confusing thing for a shopper than a model rejection. Period. 3) The goal behind FTT is to eliminate the possibility of a shopper facing rejection. The only way to do this is to guarantee that we can print the model, a guarantee we can only 100% explicitly confirm if we have printed it before. 4) Also, using the example of the feather in the mini-figure's hat, lets say you made that change and we didn't indicate FTT. If in shipping that model the feather breaks off, the customer will be disappointed (and not return to Shapeways, likely ever), we will have to refund their total order value and you won't make any markup. This is a lose, lose, lose. At least if their expectations are managed, they can understand that as early adopters, they're apart of the design process and that can be hard sometimes.

I can't say for sure how this will be resolved, but I can assure you I've passed on this feedback and am here to listen, help & support.

Thanks, all

@MichaelAtOz you should set up a shop, it's a quick process and will give you access to all the tools

Then this means that a previously flagged model as "product" go ever to be printed, even if the printing team break it a thousand times to print one complete model. Isn't it?

And in this case, after this disaster, does the model loose the "product" flag?

Yes a lot.

First to try
First to try update

would also fit. Something that differs from items not printed at all.

Woody64

Has anyone else seen a dramatic drop off in their business after the updates?

I was comfortably making a sale every couple of days, and it's now a full 2 weeks since I sold anything. I thought that I'd built myself a neat little shop that could even make for a primary income, and now I'm feeling like either I was naive, or the changes that Shapeways has made to our pages have really impacted it's potential.

Not really. My rate of sales usually are one every two days too, but they go down two weeks before "the bomb" and this week has go up to normal again.

I thought this could be related to summer holydays.

I think (as I said before)that customers really don't understand the "First to Fail"-"Products" flags.

Some (almost all) of my models are in WSF, FUD and FD, and thus FD isn't ordered for any customer, in all my models I have both of flags. If I was a new customer, really I couldn't understand that.

Well my shop is quite new, so I guess my explanation is going to have to be that I was naive about the fluctuations in sales.

Hi.

My advice is that with a new shop, you can try google analytics to know how many customers really take a look into your models, and what are your more visited models

https://www.google.com/analytics/

https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/shops/setting-up-google- analytics-for-your-shapeways-shop

This could led you in a direction of work or another to improve your catalog.

Good luck!

Luis

I think only SW think that the ''Be a guinea pig"/"We don't know if this will print, you might be wasting your time" flag is a good idea. But then they introduced for their own reasons, not for ours.

I think @mkroeker is technically correct in that SW should really stress to potential purchasers that 3D printing can produce variable results, and it should be up to the designer to prove otherwise somehow. But this would not improve sales...

The only thing I can say to mitigate my concern over this annoying flag is that the area of the Model page where it is situated is so cluttered and confusing that I very much doubt whether any potential customer will figure out what it all means...

Agree...

What does Beta give us that we did not have before?

What happens when a Product goes from Beta to non-Beta (Gamma?)?

I would like some help in understanding this concept...

I don't understand it neither. But don't affect me.

When Stony wake up in the Texan morning, may be he can put a light on this. He has a model in "beta".

What I did understood it is : Beta it is a way to make the product with feedback from clients. After that you can change it to finished product , beta stage means client that wants to print first time and a photo and give feedback and refine stuff...

But some Tequila can solve the confusion ... ))

(Not stony but hey they made me a Guru too - and do I love walking on high street now with the doves calling guru guru from the rooftops)
My understanding is that Beta is meant to provide an easy means to ask for customer feedback on unfinished and/or fragile designs (probably in exchange for lower markup) rather than having to write a lengthy explanation on the model page. Not sure if this would appeal to me as a generic customer unless I already know the designer or this model was created specifically for me - the pessimistic interpretation would seem to be that this is just another kind of "models to avoid".
Going from beta to non-beta would hopefully just entail that the designer unchecks a box on the model page whenever he sees fit, keeping the printability history of the last iteration.

Hey guru ... do you smoke some plants ?

I`d rather see instead of "guru" something like "expert support" or "expert" ..."trainer" ...

There are so many other words that does not imply a religion one.

On topic

Beta = iterations = cracking = other bump stuff ... you don`t want to deliver straight to not knowing client. lol