Road To Major Fud Improvements Starts With Repricing

Dear Shapeways,

Given the potential dramatic consequences for shop owners, it would be fair that you would provide:
1. Exact data to all shop owners. Appearently nobody gets proper information about the price consequences of both FUD and FXD.
2. The exact implementation date is unclear. 'In the week of may 22nd' is too vague.
3. Given the fact that the amount of price changes and the lack of information the timing is extremely short (as usual).

Please INFORM the shop owners adequately.

Given the potential outcome it makes sense that already uploaded models would remain calculated according the old way, for at least a number of weeks. Only new uploads, or after clicking to implement the new pricing strategy the new way of calculation should be adopted. The motivation of SW is not to make parts more expensive, so why the hurry to implement such drastic changes?

Some things appear strange to me. The new calculation systematics support people to add sprues and to decide to orientate a model the wrong way around. Sprues are a source of rejections and printing problems. I thought SW was striving for better printing quality. The so-called upside-down bathtub orientation is suppose to get the best printing result. This costs more support material. But isn't a high surface quality one of the USPs of FUD/FXD? Why do you support to cut models in two as you showed here: https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials...ium=email&utm_campaign=20170510-FUD-Repricing See: make a design short.

In my understanding you get:
1. warped monoparts that will not fit correctly
2. a very bad surface quality of the roof portion (why on earth would you confront customers with a hell of job of cleaning and sanding?)
3. you get a split line were you wouldn't like one (what was the good thing about 3D printing?). I split parts because you can otherwise not clean and paint them properly, not to save support material costs. I understand that you cannot reuse the support material, but I also understand that customers are often willing to pay a bit more for better quality. Once you open the gate to design products wrongly to save money you'll get designers who want to save money. Once such cheaper products a bought by customers, they will experience that SW is maybe not a good 3D printing facility.

I thought SW was trying to get the best results. The pricing mechanism does in my opinion not support this. It may be a better reflection of the cost base on first sight. But if you add the added costs (reprints due to broken wires), the rejection tragedy you still have, and potentially worse product surface quality you will end up as a discounter with little added value. It's penny wise...

If you want to sell more products you can lower prices, but it's better you increase your performance. Especially as important forerunner of 3D printing techniques it make sense to do this. Another thing still lacking here is the multi language platform. Please add German, French, Spanish, ... A small guess is that it will easily double the sales of the model rail road stuff. The English-only approach is a huge roadblock for many customers. We've received zillionj times questions by our customers asking how on earth the Shapeways-shop works. That's a real missed opportunity.

Regards,
Maurice
RAILNSCALE

Hi,

Although the price changes might be fair & useful in the end for most, announcing this now, without knowing what the exact impact on your products is NOW, is not very useful...
(the pricing csv at the moment doesn't show the new prices yet ! neither does the model edit view at the moment)

I predict already that all of my models will fall in the 20% category that will become much ore expensive (as they are all multi-part without sprue, as that was to expensive currently), but I know only for sure on 22nd, and only then I have the tools (I hope) to figure out what I can do best to bring back the cost to similar levels as current (I don't even think of making it cheaper currently).

So why not launch the changes TODAY/TOMORROW? (hoping your tools are ready too); at least we know the damage...(but that doesn't seem possible, as your still processing all the models I understand from previous post).

So what's the use of this pre-announcement then?
Is the intention of waiting until 22nd so that I can advertise 'hurry up, order your models now, before they become much more expensive' ?

I do recognize that having an old and a new pricing structure in place in parallel for a certain time frame (~2-3 months) is more difficult on your systems & processes side, but at least it would allow your designer community (without them you wouldn't exist!) time to adapt.

Shapeways, your roll-out of changes is yet again causing headaches...when will you learn to do it better?
(so it's not about the 'what', but about the 'how').

Here an actionable suggestion:
only roll-out the changes for the 70% of products that become cheaper plus for any new products,
and allow the 30% of products that would ~remain or become more expensive for 2-3 months (or until model update) on the old structure
...that would make you a lot more friends...

So you basically say that the 'new' proces are actually based on the principle of wrong orientating products?
And in order to get things correctly you can (later on) try to fix problems by rotating it back?

Have you ever tried to clean and paint FUD and FXD products? Areas that were covered by support material are a lot worse in quality.

Simple question: how are currently products being printed? All of our products we've been printing? How were they printed?
As far as I understand the top side of our car models were not covered by support material: hence they were printed in upside down print orientation.

If the default will be do the print work the wrong way around and save some money doing that, than you're really goning the wrong way here!

Hm, that means that for the time being we would be 'lucky'. But in the near future we have to determine the orientation, and then do hace to pay for our preset orientation? So price increase in the future?

Does this mean that we have to set the print orientation in the future for all 800 products? Or can we leave it the way it is without the penalty of quality loss?

It sounds to me that the 'road to improve the FUD quality' is a bit of an apple to pear comparison (current pricing based on proper orientation vs. new pricing based on cheapest orientation* and then claiming 70% of all products become cheaper).
Later on, we can set the proper orientation as fixed and then have to pay the price of course. Lots of work again (800 models) and more costs. What happens if we refuse to set any print orientation? Will we then still be saved by the tech people? If so, can somebody confirm this in writing? Or do we end up with horrible printing quality, bad reputation etc?

It is really not good that we do not get the complete story. Misleading is a word that pops-up in my mind, and that's not very good sign...

* = quality loss = less value = ofcourse you need to lower your price + current customers get disappointed = not good

Regards,
Maurice

Obviously only time will tell exactly how things shake out but things look promising for me, Already try to Sprue/Orient my parts myself anyways so an added per part cost isn't a huge concern for my type of printing although I will probably have to wait for Orientation to be enabled to really make the most of it.

Not this one, but I've done so for other models. The sprues do not add accessive costs in my opinon. But I already conisder them necessary (I do models with over 250 parts). I already used sprues to make sure the orientation of parts is correct. Shapeways' technicians usually understand how it needs to be printed, so the entire sprue is correct. Most of my designs are probably well suited for the new pricing system because I already put the effort into them by adding sprues.
It are the remaining designs that concern me and these happen to be the most expensive ones. However, if overall prices drop by redesigning them I'll do that. Test prints of $100 models are difficult to compensate through sales. I have succesfully done so, but I fear I have to do it again, but with less remaining customers.

As we no pay for the support material, will there be an option to make models hollow without escape holes? I printed several starship models without sufficient escape holes through the print it anyway program. As i paint these models i don't care about the remaining wax inside, at least much less than two uggly escape holes in the model. It even helps to keep the models sturdier.

But you are paying for the Support Material under the new pricing structure regardless if you left escape holes or not.

I'm a bit concerned about how orientation is now up to us, I do a lot of solid, humanoid figures. Am I going to have to rotate all those models to be laying on their backs for optimum use? Just from a standpoint of product display that's going to be an issue, since I use the same models for multiple materials and lets face it, the render options are buggy and uncooperative at best. Every time I have to rotate a the camera and rerender my product pics, it usually takes several tries to get it to take and actually re-render.

I have more than 500 items in my store. My models are oriented to display properly to the customer. You can see why I'm uneasy.

If it's anything like SF orientation you set it on the website itself, it's defined separately from the orientation in the model file.

This is correct -- the FUD User-Set Print Orientation tool will work exactly the same way the xSF one does.

It's a sad day! When I think of the many hours I spent when S&F-pricing changed, I see a very big lot of work comming my way to have reasonnable model prices again. I have optimised models for the current pricing and doing this again is not productive work.
Questions:
1) Can you 'freeze' prices of current models for existing customers und adopt the new sceme only for new models? This would apprechiate a bit your current customer base....
2) Orientation may have a big impact on the price of models and quality of surfaces and we will have the trade off, ok. But will you introduce other new rules for thes materials? (example: I disslike very much, that you do not accept sprued models for HDA, because you impose, that only you can position the models individually correctly. This material would be of much more use, if you would accept sprued models!) You will not impose such rules for FUD and FXD, will you? I need a lot of very small parts for my models and I cannot handle them individually if I would have to leave away the sprues! Please do not change this!
3) Maybe I missed the point, but is there a way to precalculate allready now, what the cost for an existing model would be after the change? Could you (for developpers only) add two 'dummy' materials VFUD and VFXD in the lineup, which can not be ordered, but would show the prices calculated along the new sceme? Checking some of my major models would take away a lot of the perceived stress I currently have, because I do not know, whether the models are absolete after the change, because anybody would be able to pay the price any more!

thanks a lot for considering my proposals!
André

So... I finally got my CSV with the old and new prices. Apparently in my shop I'm getting 54% of my models cheaper and 43% of my models more expensive. Percentages alone, it's not even as nice as the expected 70%-20% but it still looks like a nice thing right?

Well, the problem is when I do a mean of all the price reductions and price increases. Overall ALL my models increase $12 mean.

Typo It should be now

OK, I've been away for a while ( not being able to use my right hand has restricted my computer use somewhat ) and I might have missed something during the website changes, but how do you find the pricing CSV tool these days ?

I don't seem to be able to see before-after pricing in model edit either - Where exactly?

Tom

To add some color to Mel_Miniature's price changes. If you dismiss one outlier, the $12 mean average drops to $8.50, two and now it's $7.80. Median average across the whole inventory is -$0.83.

Mel's shop if full of awesome sets, and so the per-part pricing creates a bigger impact than for most.

You'll find the Pricing CSV Wizard under your shop settings. However, the new prices will only start showing when we launch the new prices, start on the week of May 22nd. This is also when we'll introduce the new Model CSV tool.

Hi all

Can I join the party?

This is all very interesting and I guess we can only wait and see how this will effect all of us. I for one dread the thought of going through over 400 products, repricing and re-orientating. The fact we can set our own orientation is a major plus as some of the parts I've seen from customers photographs have quite frankly been atrocious (really bad striping). If this cost slightly more then unfortunately our customers will have have to pay slightly more and we'll maybe have to take slightly less per part. Ultimately as Shop owners we're all creating amazing bespoke parts that no one else does so the the hobbyist will have to accept this.

On a more technical note however then would Shapeways think in the future of some way to improve the UI and editing functions on their website. Especially for multiple items that share common information, classic example: in my models page having to delete models one by one... surely a check box next to the item so that you can select multiple files and then delete! crazy I know. I'm a graphic designer by trade and I know that these functions could be implemented, give those coders something to do other than play Warcraft all day
These multiple edit functions would be very useful giving these changes.

Overall though thank you Shapeways for trying to improve your service...

Now if you could only resolve the crystallization issue... I've had prints from the same material by different vendors with virtually no crystallization on them... suggesting... that's right a manufacturing process at Shapeways. Someone mentioned earlier Recycled Wax support material? surely not Shapeways, recycling your wax is just plain mucky
And now we'll potentially be paying more for it, there's no excuses for recycling it.

I sincerely hope this is a positive change for all of us (Shapeways included) as I have already been auditioning other printers looking for other options.

(and sorry for straying off thread for all you thread police, but all of these points are valid for Shop Owners)

Many thanks

Simon