3DHubs is charging us (the hubs) a fee by subtracting it from what the customer pays, instead of adding it to what we charge to the customer for our 3DP service.
I recently joined as a hub and I’m seriously wondering how other hubs have been dealing with this:
• Have you included the service fee to your material cost and thus appear 15% more expensive than hubs who don’t do that ?
• Have you added the service fee as a miscellaneous extra cost and had to explain the customer why they had to pay for it ?
• Or have you been losing 15% of your revenue since you joined ?
the service fee is something that we all have to live with. So how you actually incorporate it, is entirely your thing. You’re not really losing 15% of your revenue, everyone is. I personally have put together my own parametric script that works out the baseline pricing of my materials based on purchase cost, shipping, density and a bunch of other things, including those 15% service fee. Then for each ordered part I use the sliced (extruded) length of filament as an input to get volume and price as an output based on the desired material.
I have to disagree with you (and OP) in that I don’t see how we are losing 15% of our revenue. In the end, the service fee is something the customer pays, not the hub! And since it is incorporated into every order, it is fair business. When 3D Hubs started, the service charge was added after pricing calculation by the hub. That had the big disadvantage for the customer that the price would suddenly go up by 15% in the order process, which is a very frustrating experience for a customer. To improve that, 3DHubs added 15% to all Hub material pricings and is now calculating the fee by subtracting 15% afterwards (as it is now).
In the end, imagine the fee as a tax the customer pays, to keep this community alive. You are not losing money, there is no Hub who does not have to pay it. You just add 15% to your pricing and you are done.
The fee is actually 12,5%, including payment fees (you always pay these) which are about 3 - 4%. So the share we actually get comes down to a bit over 8% (almost half of the 15% I see a lot of Hubs talk about).
This is how we run the company and do customer support, refunds, web hosting, development, marketing etc. Let me know if any other questions! Cheers
I really wish there was an option in our account for customers to eat the fee so that we don’t have to manually add it into costs and resend a new quote. Can we make that happen at all?
It’s still not possible to actually type in “I want to receive $150 as the total payout” without any quirks and -12.5%. It then calls for unnecessary math that shouldn’t need to be added in that step. If a hub wants $150 total for the print as a payout, that sound be a UI addition to make it happen vs what it is right now.
Adding the fees doesn’t have to be a disadvantage or frustrating for the customer, they don’t see the total before it’s shown to them, and after they upload their files, so it’s just a matter of presenting the detail of the invoice.
Adding is much simpler for the hub and more transparent for the customer than subtracting.
Anyway, I wasn’t aware the fees had been added to the material cost. I noticed a price increase but I thought it was the VAT that was added.
Can anybody show me where it is explained how and where the service fee is already automatically included ?
I cannot see why you would want to do that. Approaches like this would compromise transparency for the customer. If you have additional costs, add them as service charge.
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve been working hard on professionalizing some basic platform features over the past weeks. Today we’re making another good step which I’m happy to share with you.
Until today, we were adding the 3D Hubs service fee on top of your Hub price at the time of customer checkout. We learned that this is quite confusing for customers and results in fewer orders for our Hubs. Therefore, we’ve decided to move to a solution where all prices on the platform are including our fee, right from the start. See below an example of the old and new check-out.
To make this work we’ve slightly reduced our fee (jeej!), which is now 12.5% of the amount the customer pays. To show the new prices including all fees, we automatically recalculated your Hub price to include our fee. The resulting price wil look a bit random since we didn’t round it off, so please check your profile and round off your prices if desired.
It’s important to note that this change does NOT negatively affect the amount you earn.
Oh ok, turns out I have this email but never read it. I suppose lots of other hubs (like Jonas) didn’t pay attention to it or weren’t subscribed to the newsletter. And since it’s not explained on the website (is it ?) new comers like Machina can’t be aware of it.
Oh. I see. Is there away to set it to say, “I’d like to get a total payout of $150” and have the system get the math done for you (part + fee calculation) so it’s UI friendly? Right now it does the calculation on screen and the display is misleading. Sorry if that was confusing – the way the UI shows and displays the calculation makes it look like it’s taking directly from the honey pot. If I was confused I surely can’t be alone
It matters when you’re dealing with high cost material such as Resin on larger scaled prints that sometimes come up as orders. If you add them as a service charge you have to do the math in your head in order to get the payout you want taking into account the 12.5%. If you just add a final payout it’s much easier on consumer UI and for invoice purposes. This process would need to be reitterated on from a business standpoint (ie. adding additional charge - how much excluding 12.5% fee - calculate - add 12.5% fee - result) but it’s doable.
I think you misunderstood me a little. I fully embrace the service charge, which is actually 12.5% nowadays as it turns out. I actually see it as an insurance towards us Hubs that stuff gets done when something goes wrong.
But my point was, that I will price my material based on purchasing price plus my “proprietary 11 herbs & spices” and then add the service charge into the prices. The reason I did this are actually the 3DHubs perks. I started out as a Hub way back when the 15% were still up to date and was able to decrease my prices numerous times since. So the automatic upgrade was not really something I trusted in.
In the end I feel like we’re all on the same page here.
