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Mar 2017

I was going to mention it to you when I looked at your hub earlier, I noticed you had a lot of exotic (prototyping) materials.

Check it out for yourself, play Customer and see if you can see any of those materials from the front-end without knowing the name of them.

I already raised the issue with support@3dhubs and was quite bluntly shut down. Not sure if someone was just having a bad day or who knows. Before giving up completely, I thought I would give it one more try by asking @Filemon directly.

I am not trying to be unreasonable, I understand the goal is to increase conversions by not overwhelming the customer with too much information, but by the same token, I feel it is a gross error to completely eliminate materials that are available. Add an options button just for those customers that want to look, or just put them back in the drop-down again after they’ve selected a hub to let them see what is really available.

The downside? None, they’ve already converted from upload to material to hub selection. The upside? At that point, they may actually decide to choose a material that (usually) yields higher revenue for the Hub and 3D Hubs. Win-Win.

Hi guys, maybe best to start a new thread for this.

I’ll very quickly respond here, although I’m not sure I completely understand. None of the materials have been removed. Especially for the examples you give, e.g. Woodfill, search has always been the only option to find it. Or is that not what you mean?

Having that said, we’re working on a BIG improvement of our material database we plan to put live in Q2. It will be a very comprehensive index where customers can search amongst all materials. I expect a lot from that. The goal is exactly what you mention, to make it easier for customers to search and find what they need between all the different (exotic) 3dp materials.

@Filemon I mentioned this before. The materials are still there but the customer can’t see them…

Previously the listings stated “General Purpose Plastics from £???” and “Other Materials from £???” (or something similar). The customer could then click on a hub and see all the materials you provide.

Now the listings states just certain materials such as ABS and PLA. Now when the customer clicks on a hub it only shows some of the materials (probably the ones you have classed as prototyping plastics?). For example my hub shows ABS and PLA but when you click on my hub Polycarbonate is shown but no others (such as PolyFlex, PolyWood, Taulman T-Glase etc).

Like I said, maybe this is because they are not classed as “Prototyping Plastics”. This was one of my arguments to change back to “General Purpose Plastics” that cover all FDM used materials (so they are all shown).