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.
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.
I have not seen that on my hub. I have got a few orders overnight before where the customer requested to cancel immediately after and they archived it before I got up. Those were typically because they didn’t get the hub they thought they were, or misunderstood the site and just wanted a price estimate and not place an order.
I have also seen where a completed order from months ago somehow gets moved to top of my list as a recent order. Maybe same thing happening with your archive page. Look and make sure it isnt an old archived order.
I just got a call from a nice older sounding woman who happily asked me if I got the email about the changes to 3D hubs yesterday. I told her, “No, but I did get one several weeks ago about being thrown off October 1st.” Her reply, “ Oh, you’re a supplier?” Me, “I was a supplier and I was a customer.” She said she was sorry and did not know how those decisions were made, we talked a little longer and I finally told her, “I know this is uncomfortable, i’ lol let you off the hook and we can end the conversation.” She thanked me and wished me good luck. We hung up. She was a very nice person on the phone, put in a tough spot. I guess her call list did not show people who were both customers and suppliers. Oops.
It looks like the ability to manually choose a hub has now been removed from the order page in the USA. Even though the new system is not implemented yet.
Not only are they shutting us all down they are attempting to stop us from continuing to communicate with long time hub customers that wish to follow the private hub instead of use the “manufacturing partners “ scheme
I was communicating with a customer who is not interested in the new program, tried to give my email adress and they redacted it repeatedly, fortunately my customer got it in the end but they try to stop us
But trying to prevent your customers to communicate with you (especially your customers from the hub days), and force them to use 3DHubs new platform, comes down to commercial abuse and stealing your customers. That fact on its own can be used to file an official complaint with your national competition regulator, or with the EC in Europe.
It is borderline illegal in most countries to have a practice like this
Anyway, not a big thing but I have been on there for a while and have never been able to actually get a job.
Either I am not understanding how it works or nothing has come in that I can get.
I have never received an order on XYZFabs either. I am getting 2-3 a week from Treatstock, but nothing from any of the other services I have signed up for.
I just had another customer ask me today how they could place an order with me again. I really hope 3dhubs rethinks the decision of removing the ability for the customer to reorder. I get customers asking often how they can reorder.
I looked over my orders for just this year. Out of 432 I had 335 unique names. 54 customers placed multiple orders. Those 96 extra orders accounted for 1/3rd of my sales(ie 33% of income) . It seems customers will sometimes place small orders at multiple hubs and then place large orders at the one that had the best quality or service.
Even though all hubs agree to the same standards there is always going to be some variation. I could be printing my parts slightly under, but still within tolerance. Now the customer needs more parts to work with previous orders. So he gets a new hub, but that hub is printing parts over but still within tolerance. Now the customer could be stuck with a pile of useless prints they paid for. Or the color variation could be different and they cant sell the product.
Yes there is a lot of orders that the customer doesnt care who prints or if a different person does every time. But the ones that do care are the ones placing the larger orders in my experience.
I don’t know i this is allowed os not, but one way to work around this is to have some combination of material and colour that no one else on this site is offering and tell your repeat customers about that. That way they can at least be fairly sure that they are ordering from you.
But given the recent developments I guess there is something in the fine print preventing this.