Pricing Update

Haha, no thanks.

Hi Ontogenie,
Off topic, but what shopify template are you using?
So far I have been unsuccessful in getting my shopify shop to work properly, using the 'debut' template.
Best Wishes,
Lawrence

Hi Lawrence, I'm using Brooklyn. I tried Debut and then went back to Brooklyn because Debut didn't have some functionality I needed (can't remember now what that was).

I've been working with Shapeways since 2009 to make products that I sell to customers (and stores) all around the world. My shop isn't on Shapeways...it's on my own website. Most of the successful people I know who use shapeways as a manufacturer do not use a shapeways shop as their storefront. This is going to hurt people who operate businesses most. It's a waste of our time to manually make all our production prints into for sale listings and it's going to be detrimental to the shops to have a huge influx of such models. Basically in the nine years I've been doing business with Shapeways I've never been so frustrated as with how this change is being rolled out. We are having everything upended right as we go into the busiest time of the year. I'm getting large orders from stores now for the holidays and we have NO IDEA what the pricing is going to be...

Here's a list of existing product/model combinations that might be subject to price changes on the 22nd. I underlined a NO for the ones that I'm pretty sure won't increase. Just to clear up any confusion out here what about the others? Can someone from Shapeways clarify which ones will get the pricing update Oct 22nd?

Price Update Scenarios
model not linked to any product YES / NO
model linked to at least one product for-sale-public YES / NO
model linked to at least one product for-sale-not-public YES / NO
model linked to at least one product not-for-sale-public YES / NO
model linked to at least one product not-for-sale-not-public YES / NO
models linked to products that have been linked to variants
variant is for-sale-public YES/NO
variant is for-sale-not-public YES/NO
variant is not-for-sale-public YES/NO
variant is not-for-sale-not-public YES/NO

also

any model update on or after Oct 22nd will get new pricing YES / NO

also

mark-ups will remain constant for any pricing change YES / NO
mark-ups will drop with pricing increases YES / NO
mark-ups will increase with pricing decreases YES / NO

Ohhhh.... SW is getting blistering feedback here. Should be enough to get a clue. Right?

SW response: <crickets>

That's nice Adela.
It shows that my bronze models will be unsellable. Price per volume unit for Bronze/Brass for example is still missing....
How am I supposed to give a realistic quote to a customer? It's impossible.....


Sorry but...don't you get it?!

On the upside: with this bit of gentle encouragement from SW I uploaded my 1000th (one thousandth!) publicly available product!!!
I never figured I would reach this number....

Apparently they figured out the bigger minimums were not going to fly. Well that's a start even if they didn't post about it. This isn't blistering by Sw standards ether. Looking back....

the last big repricing (about a year ago):
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/road-to-major-fud-improvements-starts-with-repricing.80212/

or the dropping of materials:
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/announcing-materials-updates.97245/

and more of dropping materials here (same materials different thread):
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/materials-change.97217/

or redoing the site:
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/lost-on-new-website-configuration.97763/

I think what really happened and why this change is coming is that Shapeways went and bought a truckload of those new Stratasy color printers, and now horrified that they're over budget and printing 1 color model a week, they've been forced to up the prices of everything in an attempt to dig themselves out of a 3D printed hole.

> I'm feeling very much like Helen Keller and SW just moved the furniture around the room.

Lel. That's very apt. While I always found the site mildly confusing, the latest redesign feels like a hall of carnival mirrors. And the thing is, it could be good if they'd just put a bunch of navigation menus back on the front page. Navigation is the only problem, but it's an obviously big one.

This from the email I got from shapeways:

"How does this affect my markup?

The pricing change on October 22 does not affect the markup. Shop Owners set their own markups."

What exactly does that mean?

Say I had a model for $5 cost with $1 markup (20%) = customer cost $6
and the new price is $5.50 cost, would my markup still be 1$ or is it now $.5= customer cost $6 ?

... Or is it somehow calculated to produce the same % markup as I had before the pricing change? So now at 20% markup $6.6 ?

It does not affect markup, so the markup stays the same but the base price changes. This happened with the Great Re-pricing of 2017 for FUD (nowadays Fine Detail Plastics I think).

Are you sure about that? If I recall correctly that wasn't quite what happened (although my memory is a bit hazy). The problem is that when we list something for sale we don't specify the markup, what we specify is the final price and the markup is then the difference between the price and the print cost. If the cost to print changes this means the markup changes rather than the final price. I'm sure last time there were people complaining this meant they sold items with a zero markup as the price change pushed the cost up to, or above, the full price they had originally set completely wiping out their markup.

Mark

so if you guys add the new prices the markups wil be un affacted by the change?

This is easy - sorry you went over budget - prices go up = we DON'T BUY. Get used to sucking it up in your loss. Charge it to your investors - that's what they're there for. You can run a business without stockholders, but it's illegal to run a business without customers. Simple.

I don't feel good about offering CustomMaker products for sale and public as long as CustomMaker is a mess. It makes everyone look bad, including and most importantly my shop. But should it start working between Oct 22nd and the end of the year those re-publicized products might become disadvantaged by the price increase (although we really don't know for sure). It seems most logical to have any product set as for sale and public OR not-public to retain the old pricing. Unless of course you're just planning on killing CustomMaker. The sooner we know what the heck is going on the better.