Pricing Changes

Hi !
Iam absolut with you !
I make Parts for classic Cars.
And i Ordered often from SW.
Little Parts, mostly steel.
But after the pricechange, all my models are
now nearly 100% more expensive than before. This is a price rising i could not give to my costumers...
It is a absolut Desaster!!!!
So i have to move to a other platform as soon as possible. Anyone here that could help me to find another 3D Printing plattform, with fair prices ?
I really think shapeways deserve to lost all their long years costumers...
I have ordered parts the last 4 years with nearly 15.000€ overall...
A price ricing about 10-15% would have been acceptable. But this is...i could not find words for that. Iam soooo pissed, i could not tell....

Joey

Shapeways: You should really consider a series of discrete and simplified menus, starting with top-level buttons, like such:

All the buttons would remain on the left sidebar while the workspace would open to the right. "Upload/Replace", for example, would include all the current options for uploading/re-uploading a 3D file, including resizing, setting 3D printing orientation, category, version history, product dimensions, volumes, part counts, etc. "Sell Product" would take you to the page where you enter the product title, description, materials for sale, renders/pics, markup, etc.

Why are you making this process so hard? If you don't want to support storefronts anymore, just shut them down and go do rapid prototyping for big corporations, which seems to be the direction you're heading. This isn't Office Space; you don't need to "fix the glitch" and just hope we all go away.

The big corporations are buying their own machines and don't need to worry about a 30% surcharge to get parts made in a week. There is no rejection lottery or bounding box just what will fit inside the build platform as well as support of larger files. all I can figure is Sw only wants to print wire frame cubes for hipsters with more money than brains.

One thing that would be hugely appreciated would be a way for stores with temporarily "grandfathered" pricing to be given official previews of what the new costs of their products will be in 2019. I've been trying to re-upload my existing models in an effort to predict what the 2019 prices might be, but the process is slow, confusing, and the new design of the "Bring your product to life" page makes it harder than ever to compare prices. This is due largely to the "tiers" of materials that you now have to select to see a price, instead of seeing all of the material prices laid out at once, like they once were. The fact that that page also now lacks a side menu makes it even harder to navigate amongst multiple working browser tabs.

Or am I perhaps missing an easy way to compare the "current" prices with the "future" prices...?

Knowing what you're going to be up against goes a long way.

One option would be for the CSV files to include the old and new prices. I think they did this for the previous price change so it shouldn't be impossible,

Mark

If you create a product page for each duplicate upload and activate materials, you can more easily compare prices by looking at the two product edit pages side by side in different windows. You don't even need to make the duplicate models public.

Thanks for the suggestion-- it is what it is I guess. I think it's time for me to hit my re-design desk.

So just a general question about these changes. Was there a problem of confusion for general users (ie not experienced designers or shop owners) in terms of menus having too much information that was limiting sales? Are the changes being driven because of there being more iPad finger pushers and fewer people using desktops and mouses? The result is somewhat dichotomous in that the menus are seeming simpler and perhaps better for swipers and finger pushers but also more confusing in that features/information are spread out into a more diffuse state on different pages. I'm not even talking about pricing but just the yearly whiplashing of the user experience.

We've gone round and round with these types of things with Shapeways. For example it's happened with the product page material selector. First there was a pull down of material names and prices for a model, then it changed to material icons that needed to be clicked on to see the price, then finally it evolved to a more useful hybrid showing material icon and material prices without the need to click. There must be a couple of different camps at Shapeways. One being the "parallels" that prefer a lot of information being available at a glance with a minimum of clicking and easy navigation, and the "serials" that just love clicking through menus to get to different pages to create an adventure when trying to accomplish a task. Someday Shapeways is going to be a great study for university business or web development classes as a classic case study of early 21st century online shopping and site development dos and don'ts.

Indeed. I work in a big corporation (and worked in another even bigger before). We got machines in-house, plus a super-hefty budget for 3D-printed protos (from B2B prototyping companies). There's a world of difference between a B2B prototyping company and Shapeways (or other online printing services, i.e. SW's competition)., this world just got bigger with the recent SW update. B2B cannot be the direction SW is heading .

Uploaded a modell today ( Oct. 23 spin 8269626 ) set for sale, after that the 3d tool is not available, after i set the model on not for sale, it works fine. I can save the model in the right orientation, but i got the same price in all posible orientations.


Uploaded a modell today ( Oct. 23 spin 8280486 ). I can save the model in the right orientation, but i got the same price in all posible orientations.

• The file history is gone.

• The file name is also gone. I do have files with version numbers at the end for knowing which file is succesfully printed.

• The sucessfully print rate is also gone.

• A few of my files are gone, i can only see them through "my orders" after once clicking on them they are back in "my models".

In general, the new page structure is a big step back and so not practical. With the previous version you could work properly. It does not work anymore, everything takes much longer and is very illogical and cumbersome.

Gregor

Somebody must be joking and have fun with us - I cannot explain otherwise. So here is what happened: I have an item, a scale figure actually - let's suppose its the blue sample object as seen into following screenshot - and I like to print it with “Smooth Fine Detail” (aka FUD) plastic material. So, I upload and check cost to get it built. Its $99.80 which sounds OK for me.

Since I liked the price for one object, I thought good idea to also add another one exactly same item next to the first one - let's suppose its the pink sample object as seen into following screenshot next to previously mentioned blue - in order to print both of them into same session. Well, as most of you might think the price for both should be around double - so plus minus approx $200. Right? Wrong!!!!!!!! Shapeways surprised me again and offered me the $1200 for both.


So, I ask: Why not buy the single item x2 times and pay 2 x $99.80 = $199.60, instead of combine both objects into one session and spend $1200? Obviously, it doesn't look normal and there MUST be a bug there into pricing algorithm, but anyway, I have to say "Congrats Shapeways! Once again, great policy!"...

...not!

After the last great SF/alumide repricing the crowd sourcing power of SW users managed to dig up several pricing calculation mistakes. Some were advantageous to SW and others were were advantageous to users. Guess that won't be as much of an option this time without algorithm visibility. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The joke is on you. They are charging you for the gap in between then adding the 30% hidden fee to that. The SW management is laughing all the way to the bank.

Not to mention that if you want to switch between "Edit Product" and "Open 3D Tools" you have to go through the whole click path through the model "Bring your product to life" page once again. It seems that in honor of Halloween, the developers have decided to make the designer UI a friggin' nightmare and the "bring your product to life" page is fittingly named because it's the zombie in this haunted house. It. is. Completely. Useless. Placing it so far away from the pages we need (Edit Product, Open 3D Tools) and making us go through it to do what we need to do is a horribly inefficient work flow.

Add to that, I can't find the raw file names of my models. The simplifed for sale version of the file name is there, but the actually behind-the-scenes file name that I use to track development of a product is totally hidden. I've looked everywhere. So frustrating.

Hmm -- Okay, I did a few test comparisons. Yes, my dyed plastics went up quite a bit, but the natural white might have gone down a smidge. The steels went up, but I was expecting that.
The interesting thing is that some of my sterling silver items went down in price! My silver pieces that decreased in price are medium sized pendants. So, for you sterling silver people out there, you might get a pleasant surprise.