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I received an order request at 12:25am. It is Sunday. I then received an email from 3D Hubs at 4:26am requesting for a response and saying this will improve my hub ranking, implying that it would decrease my hub ranking if I did the opposite, to not respond within 4 hours.

I received these emails at 8:57am, again to reiterate it is Sunday morning. I was not even awake to get the hint from the 3D hubs digital night owls.

My suggestion to 3D hubs.

If an order comes in anytime during “out of hours”, for example let’s assume those hours to be 7pm-7am (but these could be set by each hub individually). Then the response time should increase until at least the next morning around 9-10am or if the order was received at 1am at least give the hub a realistic time respond.

Most customers use 3D hubs because of locality to their nearest hub and most customers are likely to be within the same time zone at worse +/- an hour. Sure, some customers work late and submit orders in the middle of the night, but I doubt they’re expecting to get a response within 4 hours, even if the “auto message” by 3D hubs (that shows as coming from the hub) says:

“Thank you for your order. I will check your requirements and the manufacturability of your designs as soon as possible, on average I get back to customers in X min(s). In case you have additional questions please reply to me here.”

Instead

For any orders that are received during “out of hours” an alternative message informing the customer that the hub will respond “in them morning” should be shown.

What does 3D Hubs have to say on this?

I see this as an important and urgent improvement to the platform and one that in theory from a development/technical perspective to be easy to implement as a lot of the code is implemented it’s an adjustment to the current “4 hour” codebase.

The result of this change would greatly improve the experience of the platform for both the customer and the 3D hub.

What do other 3D hubs users think, any improvement/amendments/alternative ideas on this suggestion?

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I agree with you.

I try to respond to customer orders, requests or message as quickly as possible, but one cannot expect me to be available 24x7 all the time.

I am pretty sure that if I would send 3D Hubs support an email at 03:00 hours, I would not get (nor expect) a response until the next morning.

And sometimes, I have gotten orders that were submitted at night, off which, since 3D Hubs stops sending text messages after 22:00 hours, I am not aware until I get the final message at 08:00 hours, or when I have check my email in the morning.

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Hi Josef,

We are aware of this and are working to figure out a solution. We initially thought this should be a fairly simple feature. However, given our global reach, we need to build something that understands localized time changes (i.e. PDT -> PST) and then translate these to other time zones if necessary for an international order.

Rest assured, it is still on our roadmap and we are trying to find ways to simplify it for an initial implementation. We really want to make sure what we put out there works for the hubs.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any suggestions/questions.

Best,

William

Product Owner @ 3D Hubs

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This has been an issue for a long time and brought up many times and it’s just another item in a long list that seems to not get any attention.

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I agree. The majority of my orders are placed between 11pm and 2am, and they are usually local.

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It is not hard, no need to reinvent the wheel, a million businesses who work across timezones have done this before.

You use a common system time in your servers and backbone, like ex UTC time. And then you let the UI convert the time to the local timezone of hub or customer.

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