Porcelain Price Change

At Shapeways, we're always innovating in the materials and processes we use to bring your products to life. Innovation and experimentation go hand in hand, and that’s why every material offering is a work in progress. Today, to support the sustainable development of our most innovative material, Porcelain, we're undertaking a one-time price increase that will allow us to continue offering the material.

As we have evolved the Porcelain manufacturing process, we have invested more handcraftsmanship than initially assumed. This has come at a cost to Shapeways, warranting a review of our Porcelain pricing. To enable us to continue to offer what we believe, and hope that you will agree, is a truly special product, we have set the pricing of our Porcelain to a market-competitive $15 per part and $0.13 per cm2 (surface area), up from $9 and $0.10. For comparison, some other services charge more than twice as much for similar offerings.

We are currently updating all models. Effective Monday, if you're a shop owner, you will need to adjust your markups. Feel free to use the Pricing CSV tool for easier, bulk pricing updates found here. This price increase will automatically cause your markup prices to be recalculated. It will not be reflected in the final cost of your items to shoppers, which will remain the same — unless the new price of an item exceeds its markup. If that is the case, the price will increase and your markup will need to be reestablished. We recognize that this imposes an additional burden on you as shop owners, and we apologize for any friction this might cause. Having said that, this price will allow us to continue to make this truly special product available to our entire community.

We developed our custom process for 3D printing-enabled Porcelain completely in-house, creating a totally unique Porcelain compound which can be cast using 3D printed molds. This has opened up new possibilities for creative textures, surfaces, and geometries, while providing a extremely dense, strong material with low shrinkage — unlike any other 3D printed ceramics on the market. Our Porcelain is food, dishwasher, and oven safe.

Although each piece starts from a 3D printed model, your product is handcrafted throughout the rest of the process. Each product is given so much love and care by our ceramic artists that it is truly unique. We believe that this high-touch model produces the best 3D printed porcelain available.

We hope you’ll agree that this innovative, unique material warrants the competitive pricing we’re introducing today. For more information about how porcelain is made and for any questions you might have, please visit our blog post on the price increase.

Is it just me, or do both this post and the blog entry omit the date on which this change is to take effect ? (And I also fail to see the "evolution" alluded to in the title of the blog post explained, apart from the price tag growing bigger than before)

@mkroeker the change is effective immediately. The blog post is giving more detail to explain the what goes into the production manually from the team to help illustrate why the increase was necessary.

I see the posting has been updated now, thanks. And (third rhetorical question) I trust that you did inform all affected shop owners in advance so that nobody will be surprised by the change.

Yeeesh. I understand it's a lot of work and you need to charge enough to make it work, but at almost $90 for a fairly small object (up from an already pricey $65) it's going to prevent me from making anything more. Hopefully process optimizations allow the price to come down significantly in the future.

Please check the pricing on this model. It went from $40 to $3,205.69!!

Let me start with: I fully respect your need to adjust prices to meet costs.

My suggestion/request is that you stay focused on improving the process so that someday you can bring the price back down.

My opinion only.. Shapeways should shoot for a target price such that a standard nondescript 3" Coffee Cup costs around $30. The current price for a plain straight sided cylinder is upwards of $90. If they could be offered around the $30 range, I think you'd see a major uptick in sales, especially for customized cups. There's a market there.

Ummm, so if I understand correctly the markups are still what were set, but production prices have been increased, and on Monday the markups will change causing us to likely need to change them? Or are prices and markups presently being changed as we type?

Why in the 21st century you folks can't increase production prices without changing mark-up values is still a deep, dark mystery of the universe. It's more mind boggling than what happens when black holes merge.

If only there were a way to search my shop for all models that are available in porcelain.

We certainly hope and will work towards bringing the price back down in the future to make products more affordable.

@seriaforma I will check on this model for you as it certainly sounds like a mistake.

@MrNibbles Product prices and markups are being updated over the next few days.

@Bathsheba - you can always use the the Pricing CSV tool for easier, bulk pricing updates found here

So how much time do we have to download the csv file before markups start changing so we have a record of what they were set to? Not that I have a spreadsheet program anyway but at some point in the future I'm going to need to sift through all porcelain offerings and change markups manually.

I realize this isn't the thread for it, but it's still true that CSV tools are not an acceptable alternative in the 21st century. I'm at a loss why Shapeways is so reluctant to implement complete search tools. We should be able to search by material, tag, title, description, filename, upload date, etc., but it's not even on the radar.

What happens if I set procelain product offerings as not for sale, let the system change prices, and then reactivate those products for sale? Would doing this prevent the system from changing markup values? I'm hoping this might be a work around to the problem and be less of a hassle in getting things back to normal.

If you search "porcelain" and sort by price high to low, you'll find a lot of very expensive models.

I'm rapidly not-for-sale-ing my porcelain products. Some have increased in price by $1000 or more.

Ironically even with the large increases the markups have dropped to zero. Basically it's a replay of the SF pricing increases of the past but with more bugs.

@Bathsheba - Thanks for the feedback. I'll keep this in mind as we continue to upgrade our tools.

@MrNibbles Unfortunately, the markup will still change for products set as "not for sale".

@seriaforma - We're are implementing a fix right now for these models that have incorrectly calculated new pricing.

Let us know if we will be able to download uncorrupted csv files with the original markup values, perhaps an older backup file from a day or two ago. I'm assuming anything that was set to those crazy high prices has caused original markups to be permanently lost in products.

Oh this is such a shame really. I have been specialising in porcelain and about to launch my store next month but this price increase is yet another obstacle. A very big issue. If anything I was hoping the price would reduce one day a bit. Anyway, you guys can add more glazes now or offer products without glaze to us, so we could glaze ourselves, then as you wouldn't spend time glazing and firing, and just charge for 3d printing part of the process, it would be cheaper to order. I would prefer to have control over my glazing anyways. Or at least to have the option. Also, what about if we were to bulk order our porcelain products, would Shapeways reduce the costs for us?

No. That won't work.

A couple of years back, the decision was made to store the COST and the TOTAL price. Effectively, they do not store markup(s) in the database any longer. If the cost goes up (or down), they don't alter the final price, unless the cost is higher than the final price (negative markups are not allowed).

Go back and read the old forum threads.. I did not then (and still don't) agree with the decision, but I can explain.. the decision was made because so many people wanted prices that end in $x.99 and/or step pricing - even dollar amounts such $10, $20, $30 regardless of ring size, etc.

The thought was that the COST/TOTAL method (as opposed to COST+MARKUP) was the more popular or "commercial" choice.

Simple answer: use the CSV. It's a touch inconvenient, but you CAN apply your own hyper-complicated pricing method with it quickly.

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Pro Tip: Download the CSV and sort by "For Sale". Delete all rows (except the header) that are Not For Sale.
Then, sort again by Material. Delete all the rows that are NOT Porcelain.

You'll be left with a much smaller number of entries to deal with - only one per model in your shop.

Set your Markups, then upload the (tiny) CSV. There is zero requirement to upload ALL rows back to the system. Just deal with the rows that are changing.

i was planning to request 2 more models in this amazing material but with this high prices ill wait a little bit more.... not to mention one of my designs, the tulip cup increased from 71.90 to 95.90 wich is really a high price almost 100 dollars for a cup, not good at all, and the other one you should check it here maybe there is a mistake 7,287 dollars, with no markup, that is really absurd. unreachable. hope this change in future and get a reasonable an affordable price soon.