Picking winners and losers is dangerous. Just let price, quality, and proximity rule the day. Ebay style sort by (price plus shipping). I understand you have too many hubs and not enough demand but the “chosen 50” concept is hard for me to accept. I’m in Pittsburgh and I’m probably the highest volume hub in the market (or at least close to it) and yet if someone with the exact same zip code as me is looking for a print they are going to be charged $7 in shipping for their order. Many orders aren’t even $7 in total value. There are more than 50 markets in the US that could support a small hub business with $20-$50/month in sales. Personally a totally transparent market like what is going on at Treatstock is the way to go in my mind. I’m not saying that 3dhubs<Treatstock, I’m saying let the hubs compete openly and nationally and only the strong will survive. I would imagine their transparent market makes it so that less than 50 “hubs” are fulfilling close to 80% of the orders. The other piece of the puzzle to solve to stay competitive is their shipping system. Being forced to pick a shipping cost isn’t the best way to roll. I have $7 selected as a CYA but if some thing is less than 16oz you can use first class and then it would be $2-$3 but if it was a huge order it could cost $15-20. I have made 3Dhubs around $1600 in revenue ~$200 in profit and have been good about pushing customers back into the tool even when I didn’t need to in order to boost my rating. I was all excited when I hit intermediate status. I just bought my 5th printer. This feels like a slap in the face.
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TypeR
22
That is a very good suggestion. BUT of course, this will only work with existing customers.
And even then, that customers needs to remember where to click, where to look etc.
Customers can select any given hub as a “favorite”. When searching for a hub manually, you can use your “favorites” filter to find specific hubs. However, this still requires the customer to find their way to the manual hub selection interface. If your customers are ok with saving your hub page as bookmark on their browser, ProtoCulture’s suggestion of giving your customers a direct link to your hub would probably be easier.
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Hi Jatmn,
We are preparing an email to be sent this week with all the information about the Checkout Experiment. So in the next few days, all the Hubs will receive this update.
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I had a discussion with someone in customer support a few months back, asking for control over hub filtering (like price, delivery times, color, rating etc). They said a new interface was in the works. Well here it is, and it doesn’t give me any of that. In fact by default it gives less then we had.
*And* the old way is still just that, w/o any of the aforementioned filtering. The lack of price filtering is the worst. I may not want the cheapest, but there is quite a distribution on the prices sometimes, as much as 5x.
Way not to listen.
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JATMN
26
Its nice that you are working on an email to be sent out. but that email should have gone out… over a month ago. BEFORE phase 1 of this express checkout. Way to drag your feet, it literally shows how little 3dhubs understands the impacts of their own choices… more so as this response comes 4days after my own post. I understand “it was the weekend” but its now Tuesday… someone (or some team) should have been on this response ASAP and had it out first thing monday morning. How would you even think that the initial post by ABram would have been sufficient enough? Curious to see how 3dhubs chooses to continue forward from this point as its clear there is no one driving this bus and its coasting down the freeway.
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JATMN
27
I don’t honestly care about rolling changes back at this point… The damage is done to be honest and those that no longer trust 3dhubs wont magically change their minds if 3dhubs rolls the changes back. Not to mention its been too long for them to roll the changes back without flack with the customer base which by now is generally use to dealing with the changes on the site. They just need to learn how to communicate with the community they have created and start caring about what hub operators say. They need to be more transparent about changes and TELL the hub operators what the changes are or are going to be. Does not really matter if they care what the response is from the hubs they still need to SAY SOMETHING about it. So that hub operators can prepare to adapt to the changes or to start packing up and leaving. Instead of being blindsided by the changes like a deer in the middle of the freeway.
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"As this is an experiment, these criteria will continue to evolve and the number of Hubs will probably increase based on the data that we collect. If a Hub has been left out of the initial Express Checkout experiment, this may change as::
- We optimise our Express selection criteria
- We expand the total # of Express Hubs to keep up with demand
- Your Hub Score improves
- Your Material offering expands"
Since this experiment includes 100% of US orders, this means the remaining hubs that aren’t in the experiment are left with a very small number of orders that ‘may’ get to them if a user can figure out how to navigate the manual process. The only way to ‘possibly’ get in the express subset of hubs is to enable Express checkout, with no guarantee of even being selected for that pool. Currently, there are no timelines for the experiment, no roadmap of where 3D Hubs wishes to go with the experiment, no statistics for hubs, the hubs are pretty much in the dark as to where this is headed.
To make an analogy, this is akin to Uber rerouting ALL requests for trips to a small number of drivers with a Lotus Evora GT430 that also has class 5 autonomous mode. Then telling existing drivers, this is only an experiment with no defined timeline or overall plan, leaving existing drivers in the dark with no work.
What is the incentive to stay?
This seems like the business model is headed toward making a second Shapeways. Shapeways already exists, and there were numerous reasons people use this service instead of Shapeways. Please give us some clues as to what the endgame for all of this is since people generally do no act as you assume they would when left to their own devices.
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I brought up the “Shapeways” clone idea also! The 3dhub website is even starting to mimic the Shapeways site.
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Well this explains why I haven’t received a single order since July. Thanks a lot 3DHubs for turning this from a fun rewarding experience to sh*t! To say I am unhappy doesn’t even begin to express my disappointment and frustration. I echo all of the other frustrated comments posted by the rest of the group. I have talked to several of my (previously) regular customers and your “experiment” has added time, cost and frustration to their experience. Instead of allowing them to chose a hub as the “opt out” it should be the other way around. This really sucks!
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From what I can gather the business model just didn’t work. Or, they couldn’t make it work. So they’re essentially changing into a black box service bureau.
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@ABram
Is 3d hubs ever going to be run like business or is this just a perpetual experiment? My BUSINESS is trying to do BUSINESS on your platform and you are constantly making changes that sabotage me and my customers. I offer over 30 materials and now you only let customers choose between 11. PEEK was my most popular material until you removed it. I don’t even know why I bother to complain anymore. You don’t care and you make that obvious. I haven’t seen you address a hub’s concerns in any meaningful way in years.
-Jesse
****update: now my hubs page doesn’t load “The requested page “/service/MindFuLL” could not be found.” Literally no way for my customers to access my services and they are emailing me to complain. Beyond unprofessional. These are customers I acquired from your platform. Should I advise them to just start paying me directly for my services and not involve 3dhubs? Serious question.
******Update: My hub page & the “Search materials” feature has returned. Still, it is constantly getting harder & more confusing for my customers to find me and this had been a trend for some time. You got me these customers and I don’t take that lightly but I have built the relationships and you don’t seem to have any respect for that at all. Many of the people I do business repeat business with on here, DO NOT want to place orders on 3dhubs anymore. They find it annoying and often frustrating (mostly because it’s constantly changing, and not in anyway that benefits them). I make them anyway, out of loyalty. In return, me and my business are used as lab rats.
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They never fully embraced the original business model. The hub operators were the customers, not subcontractors. 3d hubs was providing a platform for you to offer your services. Before they even started to flesh this out they decided they wanted to be shapeways instead (after lots of investors got involved). This could have been the UBER of 3d printing right now if they would have stayed on track but they gave up their unique and brilliant idea to peruse an idea that already left the station years ago. Very sad.
I still get a lot of orders because I offer unique services but 3d hubs does nothing to promote them (and these are the only things I get orders for anymore). Someone has to search for them specifically. That “search” disappeared for most of the day today. I feel like one day my whole hub is just going to disappear.
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I think it’s inevitable that our hubs will start to disappear. Remember when they used to brag that they had over 30,000 hubs? Take a look at the number now. Those went somewhere. Maybe they just deactivated idle accounts, but that seems pretty nasty.
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Hi guys,
A little update: we’re working on the final touches for the new Hub dashboard which will give you actionable feedback for what the “Express checkout” will mean to your Hub. Some technical details delayed the release, but we will be sending the email first thing next week.
Best,
Arnoldas - 3D Hubs
1 Like
Is the intent to keep the express checkout as the default cart for all future orders?
Will all hubs not enabling express checkout only be able to get new customers from the confusing and limited “Manually Select…” button?
I only get orders from repeat customers at this point, and I am a well ranked hub. Why don’t you enable a secondary market under a different name using your existing framework with the old functionality Call it 3dMarketplace.com or something. You created a platform for a specific market segment, and got people within that market segment to join and it became functional from the hub and advanced/skill client prospective. It seems that you are now enforcing a market segment change on everyone to cater to the new users that do not understand 3d printing, which may be logical from the business/profit point of view, but you are leaving a large gap for the segment you initially attracted.
Currently, I do not understand why your typical hubs are here. I no longer understand why I am here. 3D Hubs needs to provide their roadmap and vision of where the service is headed.
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We are a relatively new hub. How will hubs like ours be chosen for orders? How will new hubs have any opportunity to grow if they can never receive the orders to improve their business?
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"Hub dashboard which will give you actionable feedback for what the “Express checkout” will mean to your Hub. "
I have read everything, and I am still not clear what Express checkout would mean to me. I seems that since I am not registered as a business, I will be outside of the order pipeline except for the few people that go through a painful process to locate me.
From the Manifesto (that needs to be updated to the current business oriented/corporate theme):
"Now imagine a world that runs on local products. Electricity comes from solar cells on your roof, food is grown in urban farms, and everyday commodities are made on machines owned by someone in your neighborhood. "
This reminds me of the Makerbot fiasco.
If you are looking for local, or seemingly controlled and/or repeatable prints, why not just open your own regional hubs with 3D printing hardware and run it yourself? You are handling ~2077.375 print jobs per day globally, while I don’t have the breakdown for what % are US orders, a central Hub near a regional/national USPS distribution center somewhere in the central US would allow you to start migrating everything internally. You have built a very nice front end interface to help with the order processing which helped my order acceptance rate spike upwards since it showed customers what will not print up front. The platform was working quite well and continually improving while helping both sides of the platform model, until the ‘experiment’ that started a few months back. It is no longer a ‘platform’, but a Managed Services interface for customers, Hub identity is being eradicated in the process.
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Some of these guidelines seem to be very exclusionary. Ex. Since the implementation of the “express checkout”, my orders have completely disappeared despite having a 4.98 rating. Beyond not being listed as a business (Wasn’t the idea of this place as a way for hobbyists to support their own printing?), my dashboard says that only 68.5% of my orders have been completed. This metric is flawed in that, all my orders have been completed successfully. It factors in jobs I didn’t want to take at all instead of the two jobs that didn’t work out after I accepted them. Compounding the issue is, now that I have no incoming orders with the new system, there is no way for me to increase this score because it is purely a numbers game at this point. It seems that this new system will make this site no longer viable for anyone who isn’t producing prints as their primary business.
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I am seeing very similar things. Even though I have completed every order they claim my completion rate is 71%. It just defies logic.
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