Update On Fine Detail Plastic Pricing

I suspect Sw is well aware of the situation, with many of the changes seeming to do nothing but drive down business and from publicly available information the business is in the tank as far as site visitors, the lower the visitor count the lower the sales both though the marketplace and direct got to be taking a hit. Also notable is many of the employees that used to hang out on the site in their spare time seem to have dropped down to 0. I'd like to see the open honest communication that we had a year a go come back but its staring to look like management has bailed from the site. I'm starting to wonder if Sw will be around in another year, as they seem to have made all the wrong moves and have show no intention of backtracking on mistakes.

I haven't left Sw, Sw has left me.

My Shapeways store is no longer a relevant source of income. After 3 years, this month was the same as my 3rd month. I no longer spend any time working on the store adding parts, as its a total waste of time. My customers have adamantly told me so.
Shapeways has become irrelevant as a company to us. We have moved on using other sources and printing our own parts.

June 2016: 220 models sold.
June 2017: 396 models sold.
June 2018: 321 models sold.
this June 2019: 160 models sold.

Numbers say it all.

The other day I saw and advertisement on a web page for SW items using "AdChoices" whatever that is. I assume they are trying to bump up store sales in some ways, or at least as a test.

It is about time that Shapeways is fixing their website and put the marketplace directly visible on their home page on spot 1 (top of the screen, om a prominent spot).
To me it is clear that all excersises of SW have reduced the number of visitors to my SW-shop significantly.
It appears that all other shop owners with significant sales claim similar issues. That means that the past changes did harm businesses.

So please get the marketplace visible. Put the 'follow us' link back on the place it should be. And please fix your website, as it does not function properly in some browsers. All this is costing too many sales.

Sales numbers, well, this is pretty abysmal.. this is a graph of a failing company, solely based on pricing change alone. No longer relevant as a sales outlet for me.

I think the decline goes back a lot further than this, to be honest. The first sign was the loss of the 'news feed' and the ability to follow other designers. Without that, I have to manually go in and check to see if there've been any releases by people whose designs I've liked and ordered in the past. Which is an incredible hassle, and SW has provided no alternative for this information feed.

Every single change on this website seems to be for the worst. I've lost all hope in SW and any want to continue uploading models here.

i wonder how many people give up simply waiting for the checks to complete? By the same token, i wonder what percentage of the "rejection lottery" results are from folks trying to print stuff that is "ready to print" inspite of the checks not being done and no hint of that fact on any page except the 3d tools page.

still waiting...
little wonder SHAPEways is dyeing. Ill try back tomorrow otherwise its off to try another company. i didn't leave Sw, Sw left me.

Nevermind, not what I thought it was.

Using 20/20 hindsight it appears the end goal of the pricing was to drive the price up to the point were the new SLA is competitive.

Regardless of ther rational, my customers have overwhelmingly shown me they will not pay those prices. Sales have plummeted from 2000 posts per month to around 200 per month. Customers are also only buying 1 or 2 parts in an order as opposed to pages of them at once. Many of my customers have gone back to cast parts.

also no helping anything is the lack of assurance the price is not going to move down again and folks are stuck paying too much particularly for parts they don't need today. All the repricing the last few years has definitely left people sitting on the sidelines.

I've been away from the Shapie forums for a while as I was getting wound up with all the changes and FUD repricing, sales dropping, renaming, grandfathering, toolkit moving....ya know, usual game of musical chairs we have all reluctantly been playing for years and logged back in yesterday hoping for some positive improvement.

Nope, seems to be the same issues.

Now as to rising costs and dropping sales read months ago of a few people/companies here struggling and moving on. I saw the writing on the wall a good few months ago and brought the Anycubic Photon 3D printer due to my own sales drop and lack of climbing. Since then it's helped a lot as it has been a lot cheaper printing and testing my own prototypes and sold a few directly too.

It is a small print bed so can't do everything but It has been a good move not just for the extra sales and larger cuts at cheaper overall price but due to the fact I don't have to keep getting infuriated redesigning everything multiple times and piddling around with buggy ever changing workflows. It's a lot more relaxed.

Now my original hope was for Me and Shapeways to grow by the usual mthods of growing the product range to a high number that your shop is more visible and there is more items that people may want thus more sales, plus on here that's passive income - the best type of them all.

But I don't think this will work anymore. Things have to GROW for that to work, so although I'm still happy to be here and still hoping to sell things here, (especially in the larger scales I can't currently print) I can't see it growing to fulfill the original vision.

The only way forward I can see is to incrementally wean off and do more myself - a strategy I didn't want to walk down.
Really see no other option though.

Here's hoping Shapeways can dig themselves out of the hole they're in. With more and more designers (some of which helped build this place financially) eventually walking away to find new pasture I can't see it currently. Is my hope in vein?

Hello!
I 'm one of those that had put a solid model like a car, then made it so it was hollow and had open windows and It did bring the price down the same way with more then one part connecting them also bring the cost down! I like detail but can on pot so much detail then the price really goes up mostly with buildings always costly if the a large even in the scale of 1:220 Z scale!

Meanwhile, my commission last month was $36, which is the worst I've seen in 8 years, and because of Shapeways' deliberate lack of transparency, I have no idea how to make my models more affordable other than through blind experimentation.

As for my shop, the recent price changes have killed off the market for any model in Detail Plastic that is roughly 4" (10cm) wide or larger, which includes most 1:144 scale models. Many of them used to run $15-20 and they now run double that price. That's beyond what customers are willing to pay, especially in relation to Versatile Plastic pricing.

Models at smaller scales, e.g. 1:285/6mm, are still economical in this material, though I had to double up several models to make economical sense for the minimum prices (usually $7.50).

If the new prices truly reflect Shapeways' costs, then larger models in Detail Plastic were never practical in the first place, and we were just living in an ephemeral time when Shapeways was willing to eat losses in this material. That party appears to be over.

It's now been a month of silence.

After a flurry of well-known members post their dissatisfaction with the most recent price changes, ask for more information, and provide pretty persuasive (albeit anecdotal) evidence of declining sales— nothing.

I'll give Mitchell credit for actually responding to questions and trying to be clear about sprues, splitting and orienting models. But no word from on high? No polite commiseration over sales figures? When the only reaction to feedback on the pricing is from Avim trying to police civility rather than responding to what caused customer anger in the first place? Something is amiss. And then to see new materials and new finishes rolled out at even more outrageous price points, the weird Etsy sales tax issue, it really seems like SW no longer cares about the makers.

So can we get two minutes of attention?

• Have you heard the complaints?
• Do you care about the impact of your changes on us?
• Is there any progress being made on transparency?

1. I'm sure they've heard our complaints.

2. But they have demonstrated that they don't care.

3. Until @gregorykress and/or @avim leave Shapeways, I don't have any faith that we will see any real effort being made at transparency. Since they won't even tell us the proportions involved in the pricing formulas (price = height + 2*width*length + 1.3*machine space + 2.2*material volume, for example), I doubt they will ever give us any more transparent info on any aspect of the pricing formulas.