Plenty has been said, but I just want to add my voice to those saying this is wrong. WE made you, and now you just kick us out. How can you do this? How has there not been any response from the 3DHubs team here?
Skip to main content
Wow, and you took away our ability to contact our customers? So we have no way to continue our business relationships with those people who found us through 3DHubs? That is really messed up.
While we allowed 3D Hubs to operate for its first several years, there have been several announcements that they would be working toward a business-to-business model. They just didn’t state clearly until now what impact that would have. I am not surprised they are eliminating as many contact methods as possible; it means they can continue business as normal without contacting customers, so the customers don’t know anything has changed, which is helpful for 3D Hubs.
I agree that it is a little underhanded and I have asked them for transparency on how things will happen moving forward and asked for a time where our Hubs stay active but unable to take orders so that we can answer any questions, but they have of course not responded. Makes me a little disappointed that I spend hours working on their knowledge base with no reimbursement.
I doubt they are monitoring these threads as they have no reason to do so.
Ditto @bhudson, 5.0 on all scores apart from print quality at 4.9, and that’s almost entirely due to unreasonable expectations, average 4.98. it’s totally achievable, if you never send out substandard work, meet your deadlines and are always prepared to go the extra mile to make the customer happy.
I had one print quality of 3 that was totally absurd as I’d warned the customer about supported surfaces, they’d ok’d the warning AND I sent two copies of the print, trying to make the best of it. Contacted 3DHubs & they talked to the customer and they agreed to revise it as a 4 (though that was still unfair).
Yeah, I had that also, multiple times. I am not eligible for the Fulfilled program because the quality of orders on Instant Order was so poor that it tanked my completion ratio. So I stopped using Instant Order and still can’t recover the completion ratio because of the stupid customer orders.
If I were to organize a replacement for 3D Hubs I would put a lot more emphasis on customer education at the start of the order instead of having it buried in the help files.
@bhudson same here. The instant order feature was hopeless for me, just way too many unprintable orders (at least via FDM). I also turned off the student discount as it seemed a lot of student models were also unprintable.
. 3dhub is turning their back to the very people who made the business. Alright they build the website, and it is right to pay the fee on each order. Without the single hubs they would not exist. Customer come to 3dhub because they can find my, our hubs to get their part printed not because 3dhub prints it for customers. Based only on the latter their claim is false. For it to be really fulfilled by 3dhubs they should print the orders themselves, full stop. But that is not the case and by shutting down non qualifying hubs they are playing a dirty, unfair game, and I won’t be surprised if they were to lose the market in the future. They will never be like Shapeways, and others similar platform, unless they shut down everything and buy their own printers.
@secliways you know Shapeways uses “manufacturing partners” as well, right?
“Fulfil” simply means “satisfy”, in the sense of a need or requirement, there’s no more to it than that. People want something 3D printed and 3DHubs (or Shapeways) makes that happen, they’re “fulfilling” that requirement. Where and how the part is actually produced is irrelevant in terms of that definition in exactly the same way that Amazon doesn’t need to own an electric toothbrush factory before they can “fulfil” your order of an electric toothbrush.
Partners network is an extra on Shapeways, their service does not rely on other people printing their orders. If all Hubs drop off 3DHub.com 1, they are finished. That’s my point, DUDE! They have made their name using somebody else hard work. And Amazon is a place where people can sell stuff. Always being that way. They have expanded and never kicked out the people who made it happened for them. And not all orders are marked “fulfilled by Amazon”. But it does not mean you cannot buy it anymore!
@secliways not sure what you mean by “partners network is an extra”, do you know precisely how much printing is done by Shapeways’ own factories and how much is done by their partners? Does it matter? It’s still possible that a 3D print delivered by Shapeways was printed by a 3rd party, just the same way that 3DHubs prints are. DId you not read this part of the linked page?
“As a production partner, you are integrated into our materials offerings and ordering processes, and fulfill orders placed on Shapeways.”
Oh look, there’s that phrase “fulfil orders”. It’s spelled incorrectly, but I’ll let them off.
My example of Amazon was in respect of your definition of “fulfil”, not how they treat their sellers, but regardless, if you think all Amazon sellers are happy and satisfied with how they operate, you should browse through their seller forum sometime. Take a read of this, seems oddly familiar, doesn’t it?
ALL businesses have to make tough decisions from time to time, and occasionally those decisions impact the people that were there at the start. It’s not ideal, but often the only alternative is that the business fails totally and then everyone loses.
“Fulfilled, or not fulfilled That is your question”. And you are totally missing my point of view. Peace out!
There is a new invitation link for the slack (valid for 30 days)
https://join.slack.com/t/3dfabhubs/shared_invite/enQtNDM4MjE5NDY2ODM0LTFjYmRhOTZlMWI2MmVmMDNiMDAwNTNjNzgxYjAyODViZGVhZjg0Njk4YmM3NjRmNWU2NzVjY2Q0ZGM2NmUzMzA 23
I felt this coming from soooo far away. When they were starting “Fulfilled by 3DHubs”, adding CNC, adding Metal 3D Printing,…
I began on my own next to 3DHubs by starting a website, Facebook page,… and I get more (and higher value) orders through that than I ever got through 3DHubs. I’ve had a lot of customers complaining about Shapeways prices, this is going to be the same with 3DHubs. Businesses will find other partners, other manufacturers.
This is an insane backstep to all the Hubs, and I’m convinced that they just signed their own death by making this move.
Bit confused at the new pricing. Will the Manufacturing Partners still set their own pricing or will 3D Hubs have standardized pricing across their different regions?
My understanding is that all pricing, including postage, will be set by 3DHubs.
I have no problem doing B2B, but I don’t have enough time to fix my “Response Time” for stuff sent over weekend/overnight… This seems like arbitrary parameter which does not makes sense since I cannot set schedule of any kind for my 3D Hub.
So what happened now ? My hub 5.0 star hub with 50+ orders will just disappear ?
Your response time needs to be yellow to apply. If your statistics are yellow or green you should be fine, especially if you let them know that your response time is because of the overnight orders. You also have to have the “instant order” option enabled for all printers.
If you do not apply to the Fulfilled by 3D Hubs program or if you are not accepted, yes, your Hub just goes away.
What makes you think manufacturing partners aren’t already selected? Would it make sense to send emails to non-selected hubs telling them they were not selected and would be removed from their platform, risking all the issues with people trying to take customers away from 3d hubs, only to still be looking at hubs and see if they can get in the green before Oct 1st? This is starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.
Get your facts straight before saying this is a consipracy theory. 3D Hubs DID send an email out to people that would be kicked off the site. I present exhibit A -https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tBYMn4AhatU1BHcWVo11xaVROXbqBo48/view 18
You misunderstood me. The conspiracy is that hubs still have a chance to be selected to be manufacturing partners. If you got the email you’re gone. Even you get 100% metrics now, it’s done.
It’s interesting, I received the ‘getting kicked off email’ whenever it was sent out. But yesterday I received an email saying my request to become a manufacturing partner was still being reviewed even though I never requested to become a manufacturing partner.
Customers are still reviewing 3D Hubs. If 3D Hubs sees you are receiving poor reviews, they will remove you from the program.
I got some additional information directly from 3D Hubs today:
-
There will be no restriction on who can order from 3D Hubs.
-
There will be a 20.00 minimum order requirement.
-
They are not interested in working with anyone to license or sell the 3D Hubs technology.
-
They will be working on bad file rejection.
What I read into this - this is my own opinion:
There is no “business to business” model. This is only focused on weeding out Hubs that don’t meet their arbitrary and somewhat counteracting requirements.
Pretty underhanded to me.
I asked them about five times for an explanation of the ratings. They outright refused every time because they were afraid the Hubs would abuse the rating system. What I can tell you from my own ratings is that one decline, for any reason, dropped my rating about 0.6% and a completed order raised it by about 0.1%. This is all based on their dashboard. If a customer cancelled the order it might have been a lower penalty. If you cancelled due to a machine error, it was a larger penalty and they would automatically take the printer offline.
Amusingly, I am still getting orders in my queue. Admins are also manually declining and immediately archiving them.
Really?
So 3DHubs admins are removing those orders from your queue?