Pricing Transparency Update #2

Using Rick's format for my shop:

Jan 15 '18 =>303
Jan 15 '19 => 288 = -5%
Feb 15 '18 => 548
Feb 15 '19 => 291 = -46.9%
Mar 15 '18 => 384
Mar 15 '19 => 239 = -37.8%
Apr 15 '18 => 455
Apr 15 '19 => 249 = -45.3%
May 15 '18 => 372
May 15 '19 => 187 = -48.8%

Pricing is certainly just one causal factor among many. Obviously, for whatever the reason or combination of reasons, this is a stunning trend.

I see it as a waste of time continuously providing SW with these posts, as they can see it in their revenue streams every day. My store is down more than 50% over last year's printings. My customers have flat come out and told me the prices are too high and they are no longer willing to pay for it. When a company loses 50% of sales, they won't last. Im still waiting for that email blast that starts "unfortunately due to the economic issues at hand our stockholders have decided...", well you know how the rest of the email reads.

We pushed our customers to order ships before the prices went up, so we only started to notice a drop in sales in March.

March sales were down 35%.
April sales were down 42%.
May sales were down 19%. (We speculate that many of our customers spend money on their spouses rather than their hobby.)
At this point in May, compared to last May at the same point we are down 70%.

We are going to experiment with spruing some ships and with making some ships to be assembled by the customer. Our customers are certainly experiencing sticker shock and say so on their FB fanpage.

This situation makes me very sad.

Jean

Thank you for sharing the sales. I can confirm similar decreases. 2019 compared to 2018 gives the following:
half January - half February: -9%
half February - half March: -57%
half March - half April: - 40%
half April - half May: -7%
half May - now: -50%

The lucky bit is that I sell items via DM-Toys as well. There the RAILNSCALE products sell a lot better than via SW.

Maurice

In a way it is "comforting" to see other figures like @Model_Monkey and @railNscale , because they are quite different markets but with similar trends, which means it's not the niche markets themselves going down but really Shapeways as a 3D printing third party platform.

What is astonishing me is the absence of follow-up after nearly 6 month... I mean, the figures are here now and we haven't heard from either product team or account manager on an action plan to counter this trend....
It's definitely concerning, or at least it should be for Shapeways, as in our case, I'm not worried about our company future, we'll go through other platform and will be pretty fine for the years to come.

You assume the SW team has the future of small shops in their masterplan! At the outset Greg Kress said they wanted to capture more of the "big" market of prototyping for engineering firms, and we the small shops were not paying our way. Seems to me the new masterplan has no place for us, and the silence is them letting us wither on the vine. They made it clear that it wasn't worth getting out of bed for less than $10 per item in FUD, and that they saw no reason not to increase their prices to just below the competition, regardless of the effect it had on sales. As Neil sang, "If the good times are all gone, then I'm bound for moving on"... Smart designers are looking elsewhere for their future.

That said, it still is striking that SW decided to go to an entirely different direction. I mean, the number one 3D printing service was Shapeways. Virtually the only 3D printing company with a known name and a proper platform and affordable printing prices. With FUD/FXD Shapeways offers a material that is not perfect but allows highly detailed models.
Now SW has turned their back to their basic customer base. In stead of improving the market place, they just abandoned it. It is hidden somewhere so no-one will find it.
Also the printing quality has not been improved over the years. In the meanwhile there are better printers out there form the same suppliers as SW uses. Why does SW still uses the old 3D System ProJet M2xxx series printers? The smaller 3D System ProJet M3xxx printers have the same output and is able to print parts over another without these terrible traces of support material! OK, the layer thickness is slightly larger than FUD, but man the consistentcy and detailing is a lot better. Why is SW still using the nearly white material that can hardly be cleaned? In the past 5 years SW shows no technical improvements in this area, and that is a shame.

It appears that bean counters rule the ShapeWaves instead of people who hacve an innovative attitude as in the earlier years of SW. That is a pity, because there are more alternatives than before and SW is clearly losing its USPs.

The Verse sales have nose dived 67% from this time last year. All slightly larger items, specially those in the smooth detail plastics, are dead. The only items that seem to be moving, are those that are tiny and less than 10 bucks. We dropped our markup to a point that we are barely going to get anything. Simply to try and keep some level of sales.

But as stated before by others. Shapeways does not care. Maybe in 6 months when sales have dropped to 80% for every shop, maybe. just maybe, Shapeways will decide they care. But I wouldn't make bank on it.

The only positive aspect we've noticed with our shop, rejections are all but gone. Models that have been up and working for years, that Shapeways knocked back down to 'First to Try", all seem to be getting "Successfully Printed" once again.

Maybe that's what Shapeways was trying to do all along, slow down sales, get printing back to actually working, maybe fire some people, buy some new machines while sales are in the toilet. But I honestly don't get why they had to crash sales site wide in this manner. 43% to 70% down from 1 year ago. That's not going to impress the share holders very much.

We too are waiting for that email saying that "due to their own ignorance of pricing, Shapeways will be..........".

And with sales way down like this, we honestly don't see how Shapeways can ignore this for very long.

But we won't be holding our breaths on this.

Dear Shapeways,

We at The Verse can understand a need to raise the pricing a bit. Costs go up, things change. But this ain't costs going up, this is pure greed. And now that sales have tanked, we @TheVerse have a simple question for you.

"How's the profit margins coming along, making Billions each month yet?"

Incase you couldn't tell, that's pure sarcasm. But we doubt you'll get it.

Signed, even more poor than last year. thank you.

I agree totally. When you also have had larger scale parts stop selling all together, it just confirms that I'm not the only one. I am now moving all large scale parts out of Shapeways to a Shopify store, where they will be printed on Formlabs Form2 and Form3 printers at less than one third the price of the Shapeways parts. It will take some time to get them all migrated, but at least we'll start seeing parts sell again.

It is a shame that that email you referenced "Sorry for our inconsistent messaging but..." it'll be far too late, as the parts will not be brought back.

Feb '15 sales: 1343 parts

May '15 sales: 315

June '15 projected sales: 166

Hey, so I have a question about all the people who have seen significant drops in sales year over year:

How do your traffic numbers look?
Do you have more, the same, or less people viewing your pages?
Are the bulk of them unique visitors or returning visitors?

Basically I want to see if your drop in sales is not only pricing related, but rather a combination of pricing and traffic. In my particular case, I have about the same number of visitors to my Shapeways pages but about a 5% - 10% drop in monthly unit sales, depending on which month you look at. I can say with confidence that the drop is related to pricing. But since I bite the bullet and raised my markups at the same time, I am not seeing a lose in the payouts from Shapeways.

OK, then this may be my mistake. Still it is remarkable that 'the other company' is able to print RAILNSCALE products without any trace of awkward surfaces as result of the support material (in other words they can print items upside down without any defect and they can stack parts over one other without negative impact of the print quality!)
Then why can this company clean the parts in such way that these items can be painted without extreme cleaning. Maybe you should buy some items from them so you can compare the quality to that of yours.

The traffic at my own website: https://railnscale.com/ did not really change. Here at Shapeways I don't know. I see less traffic from SW to my own website.

Some functionalities disappear over time. I really do not understand why SW is so inconsistent. To follow a shop used to be a simple and straight forward action. Nowadays people cannot find this function. As a consequence I hardly get new followers.

The same is true for the marketplace. It is near impossible to find this. So without raising prices SW is already losing customers I have compensated some price increases. This costs me mark-up. As a consequence the business model with SW does not work ideally. It used to be possible to buy prototypes here and sell the items. Since I have an alternative source, I receive the prototypes from this party. As a consequence I stopped buying items at SW.

Interesting how similar my answer is to the one above by @railNscale.
We also have a website with steady traffic, I didn't check SW traffic but it is not relevant as in our case we don't even have a marketplace category despite asking several times for it (we do movie props).

We also stopped buying our prototypes here at SW. The company doesn't support us and adds 2 weeks delay on our prototypes... or you can pay... it just cannot be...

I work for a large engineering firm. We have our own 3d printer, which we don't even use that much. (It's a shame I don't work in that office.) Seems to me that the sort of businesses which would not be bothered by the price increases (and inscrutability) here wouldn't be bothered by the capital costs of doing their own 3d printing.

A friend of mine works for an aerospace firm (a subcontractor to Boeing), and he told me that not only do they do all their 3D prototyping in-house, they would not send those designs out because of the potential for industrial espionage. So, maybe @gregorykress is betting the house on getting that kind of work, but if so, that seems ill-advised.

Hi Greg!

I haven't read the thread but I just had a few comments on jewelry pricing.

Your gold and platinum are too high. Look at the going rate for 3D printing, casting, and full finishing and you'll see. I can give you a good example if you contact me privately.

Your silver is great! You got everyone beat by far when it comes to small silver products. However, larger silver products are along the lines of the going rate. I've started an Etsy shop that will take advantage of the new integration along with the low silver price for small products.

Now here's the main point I wanted to make. Low priced jewelry sells like rocketships to the moon! When looking into it one finds that the price is strongly connected with sales numbers. If selling golf clubs, it's not like that because people just assume cheap is low quality. But jewelry, on the other hand, people don't think that way for some weird reason. They see a low price and they jump on it like hungry wolves! HAHA! It's like a price threshold that causes them to go crazy. So, with jewelry, the key to making huge piles of cash is shooting for low price high volume. It doesn't even need to be valuable either! Electroplated and gold filled are fine! The masses don't care as long as the price looks good.

I'm going to try a little of that low price high volume this summer and make some money. I don't want to because I'm lazy!! HAHA! But then again, I have like 26k in credit card bills so I need to actually do some work to pay that down. HAHA!

Now if I had employees. . . THAT'D BE DIFFERENT! I'D HAVE THEM WORKING THIER ASSES OFF RUNNING THAT LOW COST HIGH VOLUME!!! HAHAHA!

All the best,
James

That's all great info, @avim, but none of it helps us to optimize the prices of our models, because there are no costs shown. Again, this is the opposite of transparency. We still have to rely on blind experimentation to try to figure out the proportional relationships between those factors above and the prices of our models.