Road To Major Fud Improvements Starts With Repricing

User Mel_Miniatures clearly said that he had the chance to compare prices before & after new FUD pricing policy and later Shapeways employee HenrikRydberg said that new prices will be available only after May 22nd.

Since the above mentioned quotes are quite confusing and one cancels the other, is it possible somebody explain HOW we can compare prices before & after the upcoming FUD pricing changes, into our own shop?

Regards,
Anyuta 3D

@Anyuta3D

We don't yet have all of the data for the over 4 million products in the marketplace, but for what we do have we are pulling and sharing with shopowners manually. Pulling this data is extremely time consuming so it would be impossible for us to share it with each and everyone in the marketplace. Because we don't have the manpower to manually generate these, we'll be automatically sharing the results with everyone once the system is done recalculating on the 22nd.

If you want to inquire about an analysis of your personal shop, you can sign up here. Because capacity to do so is extremely limited, we unfortunately can't guarantee that we will be able to give you a response before the official repricing but we will try to accommodate as many requests as we can.

The problem is that you can't have a hollow model, the wax is there to support any over hangs. If you were to try and print a hollow sphere without an support material inside the sphere you simply wouldn't be able to print the top half.

I'd like to be excited about this change, but at best, I'm wary. The WSF change was a nightmare, and the BHDA rollout was also extremely disappointing, since its pricing model and build requirements were contrary to many other materials (sprues were somehow deemed to be evil and models with sprues, even those oriented to sit flat on the print bed, were automatically rejected). This new change means that the same item will have to be designed and uploaded as separate products depending on the intended material, since we'll need to optimize them for each one (thus negating the efficiency of having a single model able to print in multiple materials). I will admit that I'm still embittered by the blasé attitude displayed by SW during the Great BHDA Caper, when it became clear that techs would reorient or separate parts at will, no matter how carefully the designers tried to make them meet the guidelines while minimizing cost to the customer.

With 400 products in my shop, I'm exhausted by the very thought of having to go through and optimize all of them (for the second or third time for many of them, since Frosted Detail disappeared and WSF changed pricing structure). I do appreciate the heads-up, but I wish it had come with the 3D planning tools that would have allowed us to forecast problematic products and take early action to correct them. Without those tools, we will (again) be in a position where prices on certain models will skyrocket, leaving us scrambling to fix them while unhappy customers wait on the fixes or just take their business elsewhere. My own area, wargaming models, is very price-sensitive, and an increase of even 10% in price can break the deal. As it is, I gave up trying to make my models printable in BHDA because it would have required significant rework of hundreds of products.

Please, in the future, before you announce a rollout of something like this, take the time to put the analysis tools in place that shop owners can use to determine the impact on our shops and get ahead of the power curve in resolving issues before engendering more bad will with dissatisfied customers.

I hesitate to get excited here. The reason I use FUD/FXD is to get the support on fragile horizontal pieces. If I have to break things apart, they get even more fragile and I end up with more parts. I tried BHDA and had zero success because even if I build everything on top of a flat surface I get an piece printed at an angle. When I redesign/reposition for an optimal angle, I get told I'm not smart enough to how to make this work and I still get a crappy piece because they print it the way the "engineers" say to. Now I'm afraid of what is going to happen to FUD. Getting closer to buying my own machine.

Oh boy.

Just when my current range has finally become stable and printing reliably it seems I may have to redesign the whole sodding caboodle for probably the 8th or more time (no joke) tell me I'm wrong please otherwise I'll shoot myself with a bananna.

Seriously. Is the redesign good or bad news?
My shop is mostly railway models with low part count.

Price drop sounds great though.

This is confusing... the full processing has not taken place, but the first post in thread says 70% models go down, 10% stay and 20% go up in price. The 70% part in bold.

Not confusing... it's called "sampling".

Then maybe the first post should be less eager to push the numbers? And declare it was a sampling of X products across Y shops, or whatever method was used? It is in bold, with exclamation mark and "will" as verb, affirmative style, not like "could" or "estimated"; nor any clues about how the numbers were reached. Others phrases also give the impression of certainity, all done and settled. When doing sampling, reporting the method is basic.

I understand that this calculation was based on models that HAVE SOLD in the past 18 months. A full 1/3 of my 650 items have never sold a single unit... I don't truly care whether they (the ones that have never sold) go up or down in price. if they come down in price such that they start selling, great. if they go up 300% or more, well, they never sold anyway.

There are only two out of the 650 that will go up enough to be a problem. I'll have to do some thinking on those two.. both of them are essentially long tubes.

When I multiply out the quanity sold by the price change, my customers would save a net of 25% across what has sold in the last 18 months.

I hate to argue but I'm afraid I have to say the changes combined with current sprue requirements will be the end my entire line of 1/1800,1/2400 and 1/1250 aircraft models in its infancy because the $1 per part cost means prices of these models will shoot from 9-15 to a whooping 26-47, and I can't really sprue them.

Take this model for example:
https://shpws.me/NY9d
The 1mm sprue is simply too big that putting it anywhere on the model will not only ruins its shape basically but also presents a significant risk of breaking the model when the sprue is to be removed with a clipper (note that at this scale the sprue is bigger than every feature of the model). If sprue requirements are reduced to 0.6mm for such small models then there's a chance to connect them all with the sprue through the already thick "gears" at their bottom. But with shapeways decreasingly willing to print parts with delicate wires and walls, this simply won't happen.

Honestly the loss of the entire line due to a 50USD price tag itself don't bug me (the 10ish products presents like a 2% of the product composition and maybe 5-10% of my avenue), but I was almost as excited as I first played with 3D modeling on shapeways when I first started this line with the thought that finally this is something that none of the injection mold people will do for a long while. Seeing it being crushed this way, feels rather sad. I actually do have a few modeling requests on these, or even smaller aircrafts, I bet now I can tell them "Sorry I can't do this without a 50USD price tag because I can't sprue them with a 1mm wire which is like a square/circle of 20% of the projection area of the entire model"....

As for my fellow shop owners who have 400-700 products to sort through, I have more like, 1100...

One other choice you have would be to wrap them with a cage. I've done that with a number of models.

However.. airplanes.. can almost always have a sprue on the bottom...

Shapeways: I'll pitch in with many other shop owners here in saying you should finish the pricing tools, then give us several weeks to make changes (if necessary), then make the change "live". You're creating an artificial emergency by finishing off the pricing tools and then immediately throwing the switch. Surprise! This model is 4% cheaper but this one is 400% more expensive.

I think caging is kind of my last resort, note that the 1mm sprue requirement is bigger than most features of the model, it's almost easier to slap a feature than the sprue while separating the model.

This gets a lot worse with modern carrier aircrafts which don't exactly have flat bottoms.

Actually what I'm most afraid is, that this "70 % of cheaper models" was achieved the way, SW has optimalised printing direction thus lower the quality (it is the problem decribed by earlier - if you have model train = "bathtub" you can either printit "roof up" - lot of support, wax inside, higher surface quality, or "roof down" - fewer support wax "ouside", lower outside surface quality."

So this 70% - were calculated in the direction that was printed before (usually "unoptimised" - with wax inside), or "new optimised direction" (which means "worse surface")?
That is for me the important question!

Another one is - imagine two designers making the same model (not problem with model trains). One will decide to go for better surface quality = higher price, one for lower quality = lower price.
Customer will never know before he get the package. He can't know, if the higher price is because of higher markup of designer or "intentionally chosen" better quality.
Visualisations will be the same ... and photo of test print? The test could be printed in different direction (which would something like "fraud") or _before_ the change_, before the "optimalisation" ...

No you've got that backwards. If you read back through the previous messages you'll see that currently models are printed in bathtub fashion so without supporting wax inside them. This should be the same as the new "optimized for price" option so surface quality should be the same as it was before. If you want to flip the model over to get better surface quality on the roof then you will now be able to do that (yay!, thanks shapeways) but you will have to cover the cost of the support material. To me that seems fair.

Mark