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Jun 2016

Brian I feel you don’t do very much shipping in general. At least here in the USA I ship all orders USPS as my orders generally don’t need UPS/FedEx handling. Many orders I can ship first-class due to weight and the customer is close enough that first class is still next day service. Some orders weigh too much and I ship them priority mail which is actually also a expedited shipping option. Point is first-class has variable shipping speed and cost varies by the oz. Where priority mail is priced different. Then some orders I can ship flat-rate but it’s not worth the cost unless the order is very heavy, but it’s in a price bracket of its own. All my orders I evaluate for best shipping option for the customer before even accepting the order. While I’m sure there is better ways to do it… the option your showing is not the answer.

Brian, not to be rude but your completely not listening to Peters concerns at all. Instead your undermining him and I find it quite rude. I echo Peters concerns 500x you need to start listening to your hubs before making changes or your best hubs will be gone. My hub isn’t even a year old and I’m pushing for “Professional” status here in the next month or so. My point I have a very active hub and even self imposed the limits of how many orders come in because I get so many at once at times. If 3Dhubs continues this route with updates. Your going to start loosing hubs and 3Dhubs will be the ones that take the loss not he hubs because the loyal customer will follow the hub. Your changes for address verifications you completely disregarded hub concern’s and it was eventually swept under the rug completely. Pay attention or your going to loose your hubs.

Shipping per state does not do anything but make even more headache… I’m not going to sit here and figure out 1000 shipping rates to cover all the region’s of every state…which is still subjective to size and weight. I would advise 3dhubs to not waste the hours paying devs to do this as it’s a waste of even 3dhubs time

We have shipping zones (9-10 of them) adding states is a waste of time. Ours and yours.

Hi Pete,

Just wanted to let you know that we’re working on a fix that will allow you to choose between ‘Flat rate’ and ‘Price per Order’. We’ll try to get it built tomorrow, that should allow us to still launch this early July, and learn from customers and Hubs working with the new service. In this way customers can see what shipping services you offer, without you having to predict the price beforehand.

I would still like to chat with you tomorrow, if you’ve got time as I think we indeed have rushed this shipping feature with too little US focus and learning from your experiences will help us make it better.

Best,

Brian

ps. no harm done on my side, better to speak up and be heard than let a issue linger on… hope we’re on track to fixing it with the above change

Hi Perry,

We’re going to add a 3rd option tomorrow that allow you to “Price per Order”, instead of the flat rate or free shipping. That basically allows all Hubs in the US to keep using the ‘legacy’ shipping but still provide more info about what shipping services/delivery times they offer.

Hope that is helpful, as this thread hopefully shows we do listen (although we should have consulted more US hubs upfront) and will make rapid iterations to the feature before it goes live.

Best,

Brian

The impression I’m getting from 3D hubs responses thus far is that because they are not an American company and the shipping issue for some reason primarily affects the US, they don’t seem to care at this point.

There is around 10K worth of development work required to build a P2P 3D printing service which would care about and cater to US based hubs. It would really take under 100K up front to get netfabb, cura or simplify, real time shipping, per hub profiles for material type, pricing that makes sense and advertising. If you didn’t waste money on full time lazy devs you could hit 10-20K a month in expenses for the first year.

Making a more sensible pricing model which offers per print fees or monthly volume fees would also draw in more customers who don’t like the massive flat rate surcharge.

I won’t be at all surprised when one of the Anti-US forced options causes new competitors to spring up to fill the void US hubs and customers now have.

I also wouldn’t be surprised to see several US states ban or file suit against 3D hubs over the whole “we collect VAT but not sales tax” issue that could be looming out there.

Hubs are volunteering their time, knowledge, expertise and advice on how to not turn this for profit system into a disaster. So far just looking through this and a few other threads there is a lot of insults and undermining of those hubs from 3D hubs support and admins.

All of this may come off as offensive or direct. I see no reason to beat around the bush here.

Many of us have managed, run, developed or created much larger platforms without running into these issues and many would charge consulting fees in the 5-6 figure range monthly for the kind of free advice being offered to 3D hubs for free and not being well received.