Policy Updates

Today we announced updates to some of our site policies in a blog post. The biggest update was to the Shop owner Terms and Conditions, which had last been revised in 2012. Almost all of the updates are probably fairly categorized as non-substantive (all of the references to "Terms of Service" have now been converted to references to "Terms and Conditions"!), but there are two related things that I wanted to flag here in the forums.

Currently, Shapeways pays markups to designers even if there is a problem with the print and we have to reprint and/or refund the customer's purchase price. That means that there are times when we refund the total purchase price to a customer and also pay the markup to the designer.
Sometimes the refund is due to an error on our part. If the refund is because of a misprint, a blown deadline, or some other mistake that we made, we are happy to refund the customer and pay the designer their markup.

However, sometimes the refund is due to an error on behalf the designer, like not designing to proper guidelines or failing to size the piece correctly. In those cases, we do not think it is fair for the designer to get a markup while we refund the entire purchase price to the customer.
The policy update allows us to start addressing that. For the next few weeks, we will be sending designers warnings that we believe refunds were due to a design flaw of their making. At the end of this initial warning period, we will roll out clear, public rules about what types of situations would result in a designer losing a markup. Only then – when we have clear rules for everyone to work from – will we start withholding markups.

One of the ways that a designer might not get a markup is if their design does not comply with our content policy. In order to make it easier for designers to avoid this situation, we are now officially taking the content policy pre-check out of beta. Any designer can now email content-precheck@shapeways.com to see if a design complies with our content policy. As with before, we encourage designers to do this before they have a finished design in order to avoid spending time on a model that will run into trouble.

In the long run, we hope that both of these changes give designers more feedback about what works and what does not work with their designs. That will lead to a better experience for everyone.

All that being said, let me know your thoughts and concerns below.

Dear shapeways team,

While this update has sense, I find a few aspects on them not clearly explained.

On our experience so far when one of our designs was rejected in the manual checks
the customer got the refund and the sale of the rejected product was removed from
our sales thus we should not have got the markup and if we did, it was not reflected in our
sales figures.

So the case of customer being refunded and us getting the markup has not taken place so far, at least for us.

If I revert to your post, more precisely to the sentence quoute below:
"Currently, Shapeways pays markups to designers even if there is a problem with the print
and we have to reprint and/or refund the customer's purchase price."

I find something a bit worrying in this part "even if there is a problem with the print and we have to reprint"
Since the beginning of my experience in Shapeways back in 2010, I have gone through a learning curve
in order to optimize my designs to be printed flawlessly in the first try.

Still from time to time something gets overlooked and I get the odd rejection when manual checks are being carried on,
I never get paid for that.

What I consistenly get is a number of reprints due to "cleaning issues" more precisely models broken
while being cleaned.

This impacts me in two ways, lower customer confidence and "back to First to Try" due to lower print success ratio,
this policy update could be the third way, I get impacted by the cleaning issues.

I have models broken in cleaning that were just a solid cylinder of WSF, 10x the minimum wire thickness
and I expect this not be seen as "not sizing the file correctly".

So before this policy update takes place, I would welcome a few actions from Shapeways end:
1.- Review and update the minimum size guidelines for the materials, in order to ensure that minimal reprints happen
(Good for you less reprints, Good for us less frustration when something is broken)

2.- Establish a tracking protocol of the print process that isolates Shapeways (or Shapeways partners) faults
from designers faults, I can isolate most of the reprints on a certain geographical region so I was wondering
what type of QA was being carried on over there....

3.- Consistent manual reviews, as I had a model in WSF that a particular piece was considered embossed detail (0.2mm)
passing the manual tests and in a second print it was considered wall (0.7mm) failing the manual test.
This detail had always being intended to be an embossed detail being 0.2 wide x 0.2 high.

I always try to track why a design of mine needs to be reprinted in order to ensure the best experience possible to
our customers, so far I did not have any design related issues reported.

Hello Shapeways team,

The suggested markup philosophy does not sound strange.
There is unfortunately one big but: your often very inconsistent and error-prone manual checks.

Over the past years SW proved to be very poor in consistency. Printing orientations are not cleverly mastered, parts are sometimes hideously packaged, or prints get mixed up. In some cases customers received partly prints of others.
The manual checks are often faulty. At least 9 out of 10 rejections of SW proved to be faulty. Well as long as SW admits this, there should be no problem. However in some cases it took a LOT of effort to convince SW.

In some cases we simply lost a sale. What would SW do in those cases?

Regards,
Maurice & Joris
RAILNSCALE team

Thanks Carlos. As an initial matter, it does seem like you have not run into the problem that we are focusing on with that part of the update (which is great). That part of the update is mostly focused on situations where the model was shipped but ultimately refunded due to a design flaw. Something like a phone case that doesn't actually fit the model phone it is advertised to hold.

That may also address part of your main concern. We are focusing on problems that flow directly from design, not problems that are the result of our manufacturing process (broadly defined).

All that being said, your points are well taken. We are always working on ways to make our design guidelines more clear, easier to use, and more reflective of the actual limitations of the process. That means that they take into account more than just print resolution, and include the impact of polishing. It also means that they can be improved.

As for your three points:

1. See above
2. That is part of what the review process over the next few weeks will include. As I said in the post, we will make sure that we have clear, public rules about what types of things will result in a designer losing a markup before we start withholding them.
3. Also something that we are striving to improve. As you correctly note, consistency and clarity around rules are a win-win for everyone.

Hi RailNScale. Thank you for also flagging the manual check inconsistency problem. As I mentioned to Carlos, this is something that we are aware of and working to improve. I know it is only one thing in the list, but hopefully the new set orientation feature addresses some of your concerns and shows to you that we are working to improve the friction points in the process.

As for assigning blame for errors, this is exactly why we are taking some time with these rules. We want to make sure of at least two things: first, that the rules address most of the situations that we run into, and second that we are communicating them as clearly as possible to the community. If the rules fail on either of those counts they won't be particularly useful to anyone.

Finally, on the lost sale front, what Shapeways does is works to improve our processes to minimize those types of errors. Your lost sale is our lost sale, so it is in everyone's interest for us to reduce hiccups that result in bad customer experiences.

Hello Michael,

Thanks for your answer on this subject.
I welcome all the new initiatives carried on in order to improve the
experience of our customers, as you probably know a happy customer
will be a customer again in the future.

For us the orientation selection has been a major improvement
as a good share of our reprints were due weird orientations chosen
while printing.

I have a particular example of an aircraft printed tilted 45 degrees side ways,
where the layers are extremely noticeable and several others with different
defects due to the orientation chosen at print time.

Now I set the orientation in each new model being produced to ensure that
the first print will be the good one, and avoid frustrating experiences to my customers
involving complaints to customer support.

So as you can see we the modelers follow the same goals as you,
if we have consistent and clear rules, we will follow them and
we will get the prints right the first time (leaving aside the odd error from time to time).

This will save time, material, electricity, labor, stress and money to everybody.

Regards

Carlos

Thanks Carlos!