Thank you for your feedback and your patience. We’ve been waiting to gain insights, data, and performance from the latest site changes so that we could provide a thoughtful, comprehensive, and data driven response. I do want to express how sorry we are when members of the community are frustrated, we are changing things at Shapeways, and we know that impacts you.
We are moving quickly to roll out new features, while understanding the discomfort of change. Change is hard, but it will create a strong company that is mutually beneficial to customers, our community, and Shapeways.
The Shapeways team is working hard to do the right things for the community and continue to make Shapeways a healthy, sustainable business. Our biggest challenge right now is that we can’t do everything at once with limited resources. The most feedback and questions we’ve received from the community are here on the Forum and specifically about the marketplace. So here we go….
- Why did we move it down on the homepage? Will that hurt my sales?
Marketplace traffic has not gone down since we relaunched the homepage. We are measuring it… daily, hourly. We want your products to sell as much as you do. We aren’t trying to handicap the marketplace. We redesigned the homepage based on users’ behaviors. The majority of customers who go to the marketplace do not reach it from the homepage. We know that, because our marketing leads people directly to the marketplace category and directory pages (for browsing and discovery) and product pages. Our traffic reports for your stores and product pages show this, too. We specifically did not make changes to the marketplace… customer flow, SEO ranking, categories, etc.-- it is all the same. The only changes you see are the logo and the color of the buttons.
The biggest change that impacted your sales over the past 12 months is when we stopped discount promotions, especially in the summer months. We have not run a marketplace promotion since November of 2017. Shapeways regularly ran high discounts that we paid for rather than funding it from the shop owner mark ups. Funding those discounts on top of our already low or unprofitable margins on many products was not sustainable, especially if you add on paid advertising to bring in traffic. Our marketplace platform in its current state is free to use without fees, unlike Amazon, Etsy, Shopify and others.
2. Are you committed to the future of the marketplace?
Yes... But we can do better. The marketplace will need to evolve and how we support our shop owners has to change. As tough as you all have been on us the past week, we are tougher. Shapeways infrastructure for 3D modeling and printing fulfillment is excellent. But while we focused and invested there, our marketplace technology is behind. Our search functionality, product merchandising, and more are not as robust as Shopify, Amazon, Etsy and others. Our biggest conundrum is this: many Shapeways shop owners sell on those platforms. For example, the biggest request we have been getting from all customers is ecommerce integration into third-party marketplaces. In a world where we can’t do everything at once, we prioritized fixing and building those integrations.
We are 100% committed to the customers on our marketplace. We are listening and working to prioritize the things that impact the most customers, their sales on or off our platform. It is going to take us some time.
3. What is going to happen next?
The most important thing on our mind right now is making sure we are all prepared for the holidays. It is 79 days until November. We want to have a great end of the year for the marketplace, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday window. We are doing preparations now. Our marketing team is going to jump into the Forum the next few weeks kicking off holiday readiness, including most importantly, asking you all for your advice, tips, best practices, and needs so that we get well ahead of them. We are going to send a survey and then we will package it and share it back with the community.
I want to manage expectations. We won’t be able to rebuild search or change any core functionality on the marketplace by then. We would never risk disrupting the whole marketplace or SEO history. We will be establishing a vision of the marketplace moving into 2019.
We will continue to look for ways to effectively boost marketplace traffic and shop owner sales. Stay tuned for more information from our marketing team.
Greg