Ontogenie,
you are saying you are consistantly getting more sales from your Etsy store vs you SW store. I think the problem is that you are sending some of your customers from from Etsy to buy from your SW store (which is a bit strange), & the reason they balk at seeing products illustrated by renders is precisely because at Etsy people do not include renders to illustrate products, they only uses photos because the majority of products at Etsy are handmade handicraft, not sophisticated 3D printed objects for mass production. So I think it is not a good base for comparison IMO.
It's been my experience at Shapeways that my customers buy products illustrated by renderings, not photos. None of my products use photos of actual prints & yet that have never stopped people from buying. In fact all my customers are already quite familiar with renderings to illustrate new products since in my domain (scale modeling), injected plastic model companies, big & small, now all use renderings to advertise their new scale models on web forums because that's the technology they now use to produce their tooling : 3D CAD softwares. & small companies producing resin parts now also do the same.
But then I came to SW with a customer base already included (which I guess was probably not your case), & based on the examples I gave above & those you gave, that could be the other reason why you found it more difficult to sell based on renderings vs based on photos. It is not all client bases that are familiar with renders, some markets are more familiar with it & more willing to buy based on these. My guess is that jewellery is likely a harder sell if photos are not shown.
However I completely disagree with you that SW should discriminate against designers who use renders instead of photos, that would be an absolutely terrible thing to do & one that would make Shapeways lose an enormous amount of money as for practical reasons it is impossible for designers to order all or in other cases even a few of their own designs just to post photos of them on their stores because unless you make products of very small dimensions made with the lowest cost material you know this is not practical nor possible for a majority of designers, except maybe for those who only sell 2 or 3 products. If your products are made of gold or silver for example, you would have to be rich to afford printing them, & you can forget about printing them in everyone of your chosen materials, it would cost a fortune. One example : i have a small keychain the size of a door key, yet printing it in brass, a non-precious metal, would cost me more than 160$ Canadian... the result of SW huge price hike for cast metals. Idem for FED & nylon.
There is no reason for you to look down on your fellow Designers who 'only' use renders instead of photos, as if a 3D printable product did exist 'only' if it's already been printed & photographed. This is totally misunderstanding the technology you are using. The 3D models files at Shapeways ARE the products, in all cases, no matter if they have been printed & photographed before or not, it only depends on the buyer if they chose to buy this or that product, select the 3D file and pay for it to be printed. They are all products. The only difference is that once they buy it it becomes a printed product. But it is already a product before that nonetheless, only a product that's not been printed yet. When you go to a restaurant the meal you order does not exist yet. It is only a series of raw ingredients that need to be cut, prepared, & cooked. Yet it does not make all those haute cuisine restaurants any lesser than those ready to eat sandwiches you can grab at a convenience store. Same here for 3D printable products illustrated 'only' by renders. & also, the listed meals in menus are most of the time not even illustrated by photos but only by a name, & yet millions of people keep buying those 'non-existing' products.
And nobody is fearing a loss of reputation for both cooks & restaurant owners (clients justly assume that they are competent to do their job, instead of assuming wrongly that there must be something wrong with their product if there are no photos).
The real problem & cause of loss of confidence for clients in fact is the habit of SW to cancel sales for products that were well designed & that SW softwares as well as SW technicians block & cancel often due to ignorance about what constitute a valid reason to block a sale & what does not. In the domain of scale models on particular this problem is huge & have been causing massive loss of sales for both designers & SW. The main problem is that SW techs are unable to make the difference between what constitute an essential model feature & what does not, because SW techs for FED, FUD, DLP resin, as well as several other materials are generalists, they are not scale modelers.
SW should absolutely hire scale modelers to do the printing jobs of those parts purchased by scale modelers to stop the onslaught of lost sales & damaged reputations. People who design scale models are usually very precise & make their products based on SW feature sizes & minimum requirements for materials. Yet i have seen several of my sales cancelled for reasons as ridiculous as a copyright mark inside the model which will be invisible anyway once the model is assembled but SW software & techs tell me was 'too small to print sharply'... That's what you call a non-relevant model feature which if SW had technicians who were scale modelers would have understood right away & would never have cancelled the sales for. Idem for items with sprues 'that may break'. The modelers don't care if some of the sprue break during post printing manipulations because they will have to break them anyway to assemble the model. I can say that 50% of my sales were cancelled due to non sense like this & a lot of scale model designers here have lost lots of sales due to similar practices as well. In fact, unfortunately it is clear to me that the tendancy of SW to push us to use thicker sprues is a way to make more money. When we already struggle to make models with a skin thickness as close as possible to the minimum requirements to keep our models at least a modicum competitive in view of the huge material price hikes at SW & that even when we do that the prices before markup are already quite high for any product bigger than a finger ring, even thickening sprues a bit can make quite an increase in the cost of our products (some scale model kits are composed of more sprue then actual parts to hold them all together. You get the idea ).
Also: SW needs to create a Keychains category ASAP. There is none... How are my clients supposed to find more than half of my products if they do not know about their existence unless they were lucky enough to see one them the same minute I uploaded it before it got buried while they were browsing the Newest products category ? All SW designers of Keychains are losing a lots of money right now, & so is Shapeways...
Fix the customer service which is awful: when you have a problem nobody follows on your request or they give you the wrong answer & each time you send the next message you get answers from a different rep each time, forcing you to re-explain everything all over again which wastes an enormous amount of time because no-one is reading the content of your messages...
& fix the links, they never work, at least when i was still trying to generate some last year, before i stopped uding yhat tool as it was sending people anywhere but on my new models pages.
Finally & not the least: fix the FED & FUD quality problem (crystallization), not in 1 year, but now. It's been 1 year already (way too long). Stop it'ls production while you are fixing the problem otherwise you are deliberately selling a product which you acknowledged have a serious quality issue. Or simply replace the material by the better, more stable white material I indicated earlier on the forum following the info I found during my research when I talked to people who had been using the same 3DSystems 3500HD Max printer as SW & who have experience with the materials.