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Jun 2016

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.

Hi @JATMN you’re right, I’m not very familiar with shipping in the US, thanks for sharing your shipping experience.

I’ll investigate with my team if there is a shipping API we might be able to integrate to make shipping prices dynamic in the US. We looked at existing API’s but there is no service available to has coverage that matches the breadth of our platform (158 countries). Lots of Hubs indicated us that they prefer using local postal solutions over standardized services like UPS as they are often priced more competitively (at least in Europe).

What’s important is that we’re building a foundation that allows us to build additional services on top of and over the coming weeks we’ll learn what it takes to get it right. This is just the first step, and hopefully with the super useful feedback from your guys we’ll make it work.

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.

This is a terrible idea for US customers, and completely unworkable.

Right now, I calculate the weight and package size, and that is what the customer pays.

It is impossible to offer a standard rate. Impossible by region, zip code, state. Just impossible.

A 4 oz print is a different shipping price than a 5 oz print. A print sent to a house a few blocks from another house can be a different price.

There is no way to do this fairly to the customer or the hub.

This leaves two options

1.free shipping, which means changing the pricing of my hub, which is perfectly honed, and I do not want to do, and screws with my margin in a possibly terrible way.

2. flat rate shipping, which is unfair to me and the customer. Flat rate shipping caclulations in the US ALWAYS is more expensive than calculated shipping based on package and pricing.

This is truly a horrible idea to put forth in the US. Now not only am I trying to offer profitable services in a competitive market, I now have to start dealing with shipping charges on quoting, NONE OF WHICH will be correct when quoted.

I want to print things, charge for the printing, and have the customer pay for the shipping.

Now, I am dealing with how to price shipping into a quote. Ridiculous.

I understand you have received input from customers. But what customers? I run the hub, I am your customer.

You are confused if you think the person ordering the print is your customer. They are my customer.

You say “Finally, we would like to stress that this is by no means the final shipping feature, but the starting point to make ordering a 3D Print a better experience, by creating more clarity about what a customer can expect from different Hubs that are available.”

I recommend you do not put it up, until it is the final version, a version that works for all your countries.

“Hi, I’m quite surprised at how violent this thread turned out to be. As I see it, the new update is not an insult but a step forward to a clear pricing in which the client is in control and knows from the beginning what to expect from each Hub.”— In the US, the pricing for shipping that is quoted will not be the price the customer ends up paying, unless I either overcharge the customer for their shipping based on the quoted shipping, or take a bite out of my thin margin when the shipping is quoted and is less than what it ultimately costs.

If you don’t set up shipping options your Hub will not be shown to non-local customers. — Please define non-local.