Before rejecting a paid customer order, consult with the designer first

Discussion in 'Shapeways Shops' started by Oskar_van_Deventer, Jul 28, 2016.

Should Shapeways just reject customer orders

  1. Yes, Shapeways is acting right

    2.6%
  2. No, they should contact the designer first

    97.4%
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  1. Oskar_van_Deventer
    Oskar_van_Deventer Well-Known Member
    Shapeways just wrote to me (translated to English):
    "I flagged the issue again, and I am waiting for a response from the community team. We are working on this issue behind the scenes, but it would indeed be polite to respond to you as community. I shall let you know when I have more news".
     
  2. MikeyBugs95
    MikeyBugs95 Well-Known Member
    I completely agree with everything. The flagging of a product seems completely random and seems to vary day to day. It's almost a roll of the dice whether or not your order or a customer's order will be flagged. At one point, a customer's order was flagged for a product that had printed multiple times before. I recently reuploaded the file but I forgot what I changed - it wasn't enough if difference to warrant a cancelation. I was in contact with the customer, thankfully, but I told him that I wasn't going to edit the model because it wasn't worth the effort with a more inclusive version available in the shop as well.

    I saw a suggestion to assign engineers to designers to check specifically their work. This made me think that instead of assigning engineers to designers, which would then require people to assign new designers to engineers, why not assign engineers to oversee specific materials. Materials could be assigned to engineers, possibly, based on the number of average orders per week/month. I'll use FUD/FXD, WSF, Black HDA, Transparent Acrylic and Stainless steel. So let's say that there are on average 370 orders/week (o/w) for FUD/FXD out of a total of 1000 o/w for all the mentioned materials, so you would assign 1 engineer to oversee only FUD/FXD based on a high order rate. WSF receives 230 o/w and HDA 150 o/w so you could assign them to the same engineer based on a moderate order rate. Stainless steel receives 170 o/W while Acrylic only 80 so both of these are also overseen by a single engineer.

    You could assign multiple materials to be consistently overseen by the same single or small group of engineers so that the opinions of the engineers overseeing the checks stays relatively constant.

    One other possible solution is offering the customer a "Print-it-Anyway" option. If the customer chooses that option, a dialog bubble could appear saying "By choosing Print-it-Anyway, Shapeways is absolved of any defects as a result of printing and the customer accepts that the product is shipped to you even if it is in an 'imperfect state' (to quote Shapeways' own Print-it-Anyway info)." Or this warning could appear on the next page after the customer has clicked the option. This might help the rejection number.

    I apologize for any mistakes in grammar or coherence. I hope My point is getting across. Either way, the inconsistency in pre-print checks are annoying.
     
    Last edited: Nov 14, 2016
  3. railNscale
    railNscale Well-Known Member
    ... and still NO response of SW.

    This is amazing. Shapeways creates problems and a platform to openly discuss these items.
    It is certainly not good news.

    So probably we have to inform our customers that they should go for the Money Back Guarantee in all cases where SW rejected one of the ordered items....
     
  4. Andrewsimonthomas
    Andrewsimonthomas Well-Known Member
    We hear about this rejections loud and clear. We know its very annoying and are working on potential solutions internally. The Money Back Guarantee is part of a whole host of improvements remove/ mitigate pain-points around production. updates after rejections are also top priority.

    I do appreciate that you keep bringing it up and ask that you continue. That said, we'll respond with more when we have substantial updates. Right now we're focused on improvements to help you make more sales as shopowners and making this the best holiday season yet.

    That said the current answer is '"we are still looking into this"" and appreciate you enduring patience.
     
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  5. Model_Monkey
    Model_Monkey Well-Known Member
    Thanks for listening! Please keep rejections a priority.

    Happy holidays.
     
    Andrewsimonthomas likes this.
  6. Strato
    Strato Member

    Hi Stonysmith, the problem with your first and 2dn statement is that say you are on Ebay and you are selling an item on Ebay, in all logic Ebay have to tell you who the buyer is if you are to deliver the product to them. Here we end up being in a situation where we are both the designers and sellers of our own creations, however we let the sub-contractor, Shapeways, handle the accounting and the shipping to the customers, and where this creates a problem is when they block one or several of our models, in my case and in the case of many other people here, due to errors, misunderstanding about the nature of the models, or due to unreasonable requests for redesign by Shapeways, who seem to care more about us fitting into their template without asking or without even bothering to take particular cases into account, and as i result, we lose our clients. I don;t know if you ever had some between 500 to1000 potential customers show up to your boutique after you finished all your hard work and announced it on internet forums, only for them to find a locked door, saying: Model not for sale... There is nothing like this sort of thing to ruin a market, and i am making it known to Shapeways loud and clear. I won;t go back to the technical issues concerning redesign just to "fit" into the box Shapeways want some of our models to fit into, because i already explained all that at great length to them in my emails and i am still negociating with them behind the scene. But if you had to spend up to a week just to repair (that is Before releasing your model for the first time on Shapeways) both the polysurface And the mesh (up to hundreds of naked edges and i will spare you the other issues, which are a given when you are dealing with complex fine meshes), while Shapeways just sits and wait and will thencashes in the money from my creations while i would have to spend days or weeks to redesign AND repair a whole new complex mesh (because each time you make a change to sprues, believe me, you will have to create a new mesh and you will have to repair the hundreds of new bugs in that new mesh). So i say no thank you, i don't want to spend my time doing redesigns and losing money (which i can;'t afford to do) just to please Shapeways so that i will fall into their templates when they make an unreasonable demand (in my specific case) (and they did forget that i had sprues that were even more fine last year and they pass the printing test last year and i got them and they were very nice). If this was a simple model and that i had actually goofed, i would probably have no problem doing this, but when i already made sure everything was fine in great detail before pressing "send" and that i know based on previous parts that the sprues will print perfectly, i say they are being unreasonable and don't care about how much money i will lose doing a redesign for sales that they have already ruined, since, as proved by others here, once you lost your sale, the client doesn't come back.

    I also do predict that i will most likely experience the very same problem again and again on 3/4 of my models because of Shapeways unreasonable demands, because, some of my parts will incorporate very small text, and even though it is clear that when you have text that in some cases will go as small as say 0.20 mm, it is a given that some of the text except for the biggest fonts and for the capital letters will be unreadable, but that's the kind of detail my clients expect to see there (not the readability of 0.20mm text, they ALL know they won;t read them and they don;t care, they just Want it to be there, that's all, regardless if it is readable or not. Obviously, the bigger texts like those at 1mm of height and so on will be readable, and they know that too. But my point is, even if some of the smallest text won;t be readable, i guarantee you that i will end up seeing Shapeways blocking my upcoming models, again, based on "text too small", even though me and my client;'s don;t care about that, as long as the bigger (reasonnably visible with naked eye) text is readable, they have no issue with the fact the smallest microscopic text won't (and as a matter of fact, this is exactly how the parts of my competitors are, because they are also 3D printed with the same technology, the only difference is that theirs are hand cast from 3D print tools, while mine are directly manufactured via 3D printing, bypassing the old fashioned hand casting manufacturing method. So i will still have to battle/convince Shapeways to leave those models alone and trust me about what i am doing. Me and my clients know how it works. It is only Shapeways which still don't get it, because they are not aircraft scale modelers.

    But to go back to the question of anonymity as you said, in my case it would not apply, because like i mention, i am bringing my own client base to Shapeways, and like i said, the client and the would be clients contacted me themselves at my email box, not via Shapeways. If this had been a new first time client howevver, the problem i also mentionned to Shapeways is that i would then have no way to know who tried to purchase my model that Shapeways blocked, and then i would lose all those sales (i probably lost all of them actually, since there were 5147 views for one of my models, for a average of 4-500 views per each of the 11 or 12 photos i posted on forums (from weekly statistics from my website, as i used links to pictures at my website (basically the same renderings i posted at Shapeways, since that way at least i am getting clear statistics for each of my photos), and all of those interested did hit a locked door when they showed up at my Shapeways boutique... thus after the first client tried to order then got his order blocked/reimbursed, nobody else was able to follow... Market lost.

    So, as far as anonymity goes, i do not see any reason for someone (my clients) to purchase my products anonymously, unless they were intent on committing piracy (recasting, i.e. to pour silicone on top of a 3D print of my models and then sell pirate copies of them with hand cast resin). My client's are usually not shy about buying my products, when they want something, they tell me and contact me via email (since i do not have "buy" buttons on my own website).
     
  7. Strato
    Strato Member
    That said, i am happy Shapeways is, i hope, going to address these problems and will, i also hope, implement solutions that will avoid us losing our clients and protect our existing markets.

    Otherwise, i will be forced to send in a matter of days (not weeks, as i cannot afford to wait for weeks for them to unlock my models) ALL my plastic FED & FUD models to be printed locally where i live at another 3D printing service (and i know those guys won't bother me whatsoever with sprue sizes and they will even do batches for me).
     
  8. railNscale
    railNscale Well-Known Member
    That sounds all nice and good.
    But here is a big BUT.

    If you're able to get customers in your shop. Why would you kick this customer out of your shop? Why is SW doing this? The customer should be treated correctly. Currently this is not the case. In stead of eeping your clients (happy) your marching to get new (frustrated) clients.

    I'd rather would have less customers than having an increasing number of disappointed customers. The worst advertisement SW is creating is based on the Rejection systematics.

    For a start: can you please change the title of the rejections. "Help us resolve issues with your customer's order" suggest something very different to what you are actually doing.
    [to help] = to make it possible or easier for someone to do something, by doing part of the work yourself or by providing advice, money, support, etc.
    That's not possible. SW has already rejected the order. If your customer is a guest. There is nothing more to do than praying. Appearently you're not looking for any help.

    [to resolve] = to solve or end a problem or difficulty:
    Again this is not possible. The order was already cancelled by SW. And even if the model is repaired (or proved printable) the order is not reinitiated. No: all actions are to the customer.

    Based on the e-mail title alone I expect SW to act as a co-solver.

    Regards,
    Maurice
     
    Last edited: Dec 5, 2016
  9. railNscale
    railNscale Well-Known Member
    ... In the meantime I will advise our customers tthat are affected by a Rejection to use the SW Return Policy.

    Reading this policy there seem to be some points that are applicable (printed in bold for the ease of reading)

    About the Return Policy (quoting SW):

    "Our main goal at Shapeways is to bring amazing products to life with 3D printing. We're 100% committed to your satisfaction, and if for some reason there is an issue with your order, we'll do our best to find a good solution.

    If you have any issues with your order, please contact our Customer Service Team, and they'll be happy to help you. In order for us to resolve your issue as quickly as possible, we ask that you describe the issue in detail and, if possible, provide pictures. This will make it easier for us to help you, and to help us improve the quality of our products.

    For quality assurance issues, we will work with you to either manufacture your product again, or provide a refund.

    If you're unhappy with a product designed by someone else on Shapeways, we will work with you and the designer to make it right.

    [...]"

    So, towards the customer SW is using a very different interpretation of resolving, helping, etc.? Interesting. Should be applicable to the 'rejections' too.


    Regards,
    Maurice
     
    3401_deleted likes this.
  10. << THIS! The negative buyer experience impacts the Shapeways brand more than the designer. Some of my buyers now refer to the random rejection risk for previously printed models as "Shapeways drama". There have been so many improvements by the Shapeways team in other areas over the past few years, I look forward to their efforts to improve here also.
     
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  11. Model_Monkey
    Model_Monkey Well-Known Member
    This week, in an all too-common event, a "guest" placed an order for a product that had a 100% print success rate in two materials, FUD and FXD.

    The order was canceled for thin wires within hours of the order being made.

    The good news is that designers can now contact guests directly (brilliant step in the right direction - thanks!). I notified the guest that the design would be updated and be ready shortly. The feature was thickened in about 5 minutes and the updated design uploaded the same day I was notified. When the design was ready, I contacted the guest again asking him or her to please consider re-ordering. All of this happened within 24 hours.

    The bad news is that the guest has not re-ordered the product, or any other product. Lost sale, probably a lost customer.

    Stop the madness. Give designers 24 or 48 hours to adjust a design before canceling an order.
     
  12. Hi Steve, thank you for sharing your story.

    This happened to me as well over the holiday sales. Several buyers had been on the fence and it was the promotional discounts that encouraged them to try Shapeways and my shop. My experience was mixed. Some cancelled buyers were patient and re-ordered, some did not.

    I believe the idea of a "48 hour hold" is a great one. It's plenty of time to make a tweak if needed. If the model will take longer to fix the designer has an opportunity to reach out to the buyer and set expectations. The buyer is safe either way knowing they can just cancel the purchase immediately or let the hold expire if that timeline won't work for them.

    I realize there are unseen challenges or this would concept have already been implemented in some form. I strongly believe that the broader Shapeways culture appreciates the truly powerful moment when the stars align and someone makes the decision to spend their hard earned money on:
    A) a new technology like 3D printing
    _and_
    B) a new manufacturer like Shapeways
    _and_
    C) a new designer


    Josh Kopelman refers to this event as crossing "the Penny Gap". His research indicates that the hardest part for a consumer considering buying something new or different is going from paying you nothing, to paying you anything, even a penny. Marketing leaders, departments and firms spend a tremendous amount of time, money and effort setting their companies up for that moment.

    Here's to this being the first big win/win/win in 2017 for the buyer, the designer and Shapeways.

    Cheers!

    Pat
     
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  13. Model_Monkey
    Model_Monkey Well-Known Member
    I'm sure SW will fix this issue, as Amazon and eBay did a few years back . I hope it comes soon.

    Being able to contact guests is a huge improvement.

    I know I get pretty excited about canceled sales (each one stings when one is trying to put food on the table as a designer) and I get sporty with the Dev Team about product description coding changes introduced during the Christmas holidays. But I do wish to say that I am very grateful for all the successful sales and acknowledge the very hard work done by very smart SW employees who make great 3D products and do provide superb customer service routinely.

    Please find a way to give us that 24-48 hours to make a fix before canceling an order. We can then push 90% success to 100% this year.
     
    BattlegroundModels likes this.
  14. Great point, I forgot to add a +1 to being able to communicate with buyers. That has made a big improvement and I've met some great people to boot! :)
     
  15. Model_Monkey
    Model_Monkey Well-Known Member
    Today's sales cancellation comes just 4 minutes after the customer placed the order. Pretty astonishing considering the cancellation form letter I received reads in part:

    "Despite our best efforts we've only been able to successfully print this model 0% of the time."

    One wonders how many printing attempts were made in those 4 minutes.

    I'll thicken the part in less than 4 minutes.

    Let's hope that we didn't permanently lose a customer for 4 minutes of design time.

    Come on, now.
     
    Last edited: Jan 18, 2017
  16. Oskar_van_Deventer
    Oskar_van_Deventer Well-Known Member
    Today, the same happened to me. In the past, I added a little break-off thingy as instructed by Shapeways, so my model could be printed successfully. Now Shapeways has chased away yet another customer of mine/Shapeways, because Shapesways does no longer like the break-off thingy. I could have corrected that break-off thingy in four minutes.

    Come on, now!

    Oskar
     
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  17. Oskar_van_Deventer
    Oskar_van_Deventer Well-Known Member
    P.S. Here is a simple suggestion to the Marketing department of Shapeways
    -Check how many orders and $ are rejected on a monthly basis
    -Check how many of those paying customers never returned to Shapeways
    -Share the analysis with the community

    One hypothesis is that Shapeways has a positive business case by chasing away customers, if the numbers are limited and the cost of communication and resolution are higher. I hope that this hypothesis is incorrect, but if it happens to be true, I prefer to hear that in my face.

    Oskar
     
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  18. NimlothCQ
    NimlothCQ Well-Known Member
    Hi guys,

    I wanted to take a moment and chime in on this subject. The first thing to note here is that we absolutely do hear you, and that there hasn't been a week that's gone by without either this thread or the subject of rejections being mentioned in our planning and problem statements meetings. We feel this pain just as much as you guys and we're terribly sorry that this has been such a hard (and sometimes emotionally painful) subject to deal with for so long.

    Secondly, regarding allowing designers to update and replace the file before issuing a permanent rejection. The short answer: yes, we're going to try to make this happen and we have some plans for how we can make this work.

    The slightly longer answer requires sharing some backstory and insight.

    When we first started tackling rejections a few years ago, they accounted for some ~23% of all order lines placed. Since then, we've been able to lower total amount of rejections down to about 8-9%, where only some ~1% are Shoppers purchasing a designer's product.

    In other words, the large majority of rejections occur for designers who are purchasing their own products. We've tried to make this problem less painful for those designers by introducing instant refunds for rejections and by adding the ability to combine new orders with ones in progress.

    We've also needed to improve the processes throughout our supply chain and internal/external manufacturing partners. Every time we bring on a new manufacturing partner, production engineer, checker, planner, etc, there's a lot of training and education that needs to take place in order to maintain a high level of consistency and quality. Efforts that keep increasing in complexity as we grow and scale our operations and footprint.

    Which brings us back to the subject of enabling designers to replace the model file when there's a rejection.

    We've had to be careful with not implementing this too soon, because it's likely that by doing so, we could have masked and hidden away the many deficiencies and process optimizations that first needed to be addressed. Our top priority is that we continue to offer a consistent, high quality service, even while greatly expanding our material portfolio and service offering.

    Now that we have the right teams and processes in place to support the proposed workflow, it's next on our list. Our goal here is to try to make rejections not be an "end state" for as many cases as we can.

    This process is broken down into 3 (possibly more) phases, and there are many things that we need to experiment with and learn from together with you, our community, for this to work properly.

    Note a caveat here is that the order and contents of these phases may change depending on what we learn in the process.

    Phase 1 - Customer Service initiated model file replacement

    We will first establish a test group consisting of designers spanning many different categories of products and materials.

    Designers in this test group who experience a rejection when purchasing a print of their own designs will be notified and given the option to contact our Customer Service with an updated and revised 3D model file.

    The actual rejected order-line will remain "on hold" until either the order is cancelled, an updated 3d model file is sent to the CS team who will manually replace the file using our internal backend tools, or a maximum time duration has passed and the order line is permanently rejected.

    When a model file is updated from our side, it will go through all the normal model processing checks. If it successfully passes all checks for the purchased material, the order line will move back into the production queue as normal. If there are significant volume discrepancies (we will have to discuss together how much difference this exactly means), there may be a need to completely cancel the order line and re-order manually.

    Lastly, designers will notice that the model revision/renders have been updated when visiting the model-edit page after it has been replaced by a CS agent.

    Please note that it's likely that some materials might be excluded for this initial test phase, such as Gold and Platinum. We have not yet determined the list of which materials will be excluded from this phase.

    For PIA (Print It Anyway) enabled materials, it's possible that we'll give the designer the option to ask the CS team to convert their order for that model to a PIA order, depending on the type of rejection in play.

    Here are some of the most important things we're looking to learn from this initial phase:
    • What is the average response / fix time per model file rejected?
      • Does this differ for different materials or categories of products?
    • What is the average model volume size discrepancies?
      • How does this alter the price/cost of printing the design?
      • Does this differ significantly across materials and categories?
    • How does this process affect lead times and on-time delivery?
    • Are designers happy with the results of this service and is it solving their problems sufficiently?
    • What types of rejections are best solved with this process. What types may need additional work to resolve?
    We'll use the learnings to roll out phase 2 to the test group once both Shapeways and you, the designers, are confident and happy with the results. We'll also likely expand the list of people who have access to this feature at this time, although we don't yet know exactly who and by how many.

    Phase 2 - Designer Facing Model File Replacement

    This phase involves providing a user-facing interface for designers to upload a new file for rejections they experience when purchasing their own designs. Depending on the learnings from phase 1, this may come with some requirements and restrictions such a maximum on 3d volume increase/decrease, and/or an additional payment requirement of some form, etc.​

    Once we're again confident that this is working as intended, we may roll this out to a greater audience, or possibly even open it up to everyone. We'll then kick off Phase 3 to the test group.

    Phase 3 - Designer Facing Model File Replacement for Shopper Purchases

    This phase will involve the ability for designers to update 3d model files that have been purchased by others (shoppers). Right now there are far too many open questions as to how this should work or what the criteria and conditions will be to go into any further details here.​

    And there it is: the future of rejections means everyone working together to make the Shapeways experience the best we possibly can. We look forward to rapidly receiving feedback and learning about what does and doesn't work.

    Regarding the timeframe for when this project will start, the answer is soon (tm).

    There's a few projects already in flight that we first need to finish up, but after that we'll start working on the software tasks required for Phase 1.

    In the mean time, you can expect to see planning/outreach/communication as we prepare taking on this project.

    Lastly, thank you all for having been extremely patient with us, and for trusting that we'd do our best to solve this for everyone. Please don't hesitate to keep the conversation going in this thread, or to ask questions or provide thoughts and feedback that will help make this project successful :)

    Best,
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2017
  19. Oskar_van_Deventer
    Oskar_van_Deventer Well-Known Member
    Hi Christopher,

    Thank you for the detailed explanation. The break-up in phases sounds excellent, and I would be happy to volunteer for each phase. However could you please include a Phase 0.

    Phase 0 - Rephrase the rejection message to the customer

    Now, the Shapeways rejection email to the customer effectively communicates this:
    "Dear Customer, the designer made a stupid mistake, please piss of with your money and order".
    (I apologize for the negative paraphrasing, but this is how the text in your automated emails comes across).

    I propose that Shapeways reformulates that text more constructively, e.g. more like this:
    "Dear Customer, thank you for your order for <Distorted Cube>. Could you please contact the designer <OskarPuzzle> about this order? At this moment, Shapeways is not sufficiently sure whether we can print the model as is, and there may be some minor tweaks needed to the model to assure its quality. Therefore we cancelled your order and we made a quick refund, so you can place your order again once the issue has been checked with the designer. Most likely, the designer will try to contact you too, so please keep an eye on your Shapeways inbox this week".​

    My assumption is that Phase 0 could be implemented within a week (no software changes, just simple editing of some text), and that it would solve 90% of the negativity that you are experiencing in this Forum thread.

    Thank you!

    Oskar
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2017
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  20. NimlothCQ
    NimlothCQ Well-Known Member
    Sure thing; I've had a chat with our UX team and we'll get right on this one. Stay tuned! :)
     
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