If only they were legally liable… I have 3 Form 2 printers, resins and accessories that I bought just because of 3dhubs.
Its not useless inventory. Its still useable materials. Should never rely on only one place for business.
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So people should have turned down business from 3dhubs because they didn’t have more places for business? Of course 3d hubs can do what they want and have no liability for what anyone decided to do based on the work they got from them, but people can still be upset, right?
cobnut
September 14, 2018, 1:00pm
94
… but 3DHubs never gave you any guarantees of work, did they?
I’ve sold quite a few unused and even part-used reels online (usually via eBay), and they sell pretty well.
1 Like
mx20100
September 14, 2018, 7:24am
95
Hey guys, since most of you know, 3DHubs will be moving fully to B2B (business to business) meaning only businesses will be able to have a Hub. I understand the decision to that movement, so I am here to ask what will happen with us (3D printing enthusiasts)? Where will we be able to go to list our printers, to be able to provide cheap enthusiast to customer 3D printing services? This decision that 3DHubs is taking is making me think of selling my printer due to not knowing what else to do with it.
there are several options from making your own website or creating for instance a special facebook page where you represent yourself, a nice website to search services and presentate yourself is https://www.3dseeker.com/ a bit like 3dhubs in the early days, also it would be great if you join this conversation
https://join.slack.com/t/3dfabhubs/shared_invite/enQtNDM0MTEwMDQxNTg3LTc3OTIxZmJhNzJlNzEzZjExMjU5OGFmYzBiYjg5ZmQyODI3ZTc5OTRiODU2YWFlY2E3YTYxYWI3N2Y3ZThhMzM
I think most of your questions are answered with a no. The only thing 3d hubs will provide is the access to this forum. Everything else will be gone.
Aspects of what you say tally with my experience - far too many potential customers didn’t have a clue about additive manufacturing, so needed to be led carefully (for which see “free consultancy”). Then go to a hobbyist who undercharged on the actual printing… CF a lot of time spent back & forth on ring design (unwearable, unprintable) that needed significant CAD rework.
Worst I had was a customer who hid a couple of parts inside a larger object to avoid the per-object charge, then later contacted me to complain it had been received damaged but had signed for it as undamaged (insured shipping service). They complained to 3DHubs, who offered to refund the customer in full, but me on the resin only. Dug my heels in on that; it was also a prime reason why I shut my hub down a while ago. This latest move is little more than an extension of that attitude towards the hubs.
I agree. Hubs used to make it easy for community members to locate and screen services. It seems they’ve taken the Google model to heart and are focused on maximizing returns from their most successful members. Not what I’d originally signed up for, nor what they pitched to everyone.
Jupiter
September 13, 2018, 11:37pm
100
No, the impression I had is that they were going to have both peer to peer and industrial divisions for projects that couldn’t be done any other way. What this is in the end is an example of how companies these days forget that their employees are the customers, and the customers no matter how small are significant. If you noticed most companies in manufacturing do no cater to anyone doing one offs or small projects. This kills innovation and the small inventor. Kills small business and that’s really the point of all this.
I am going to cancel my FormLabs Fuse1 pre-order due to the non-existent orders that has become the norm around here. I used to get at least an order a day, and often more.
That’s unfortunate, and although before you could still maybe hold on to some hope things would get better, now you can be sure they won’t. From Oct 1st most of us will be kicked out.
So it looks like they have disabled the ability to leave comments in any completed orders. So now a customer has no way to contact us for repeat orders or to ask questions. I have previous customers sometimes message me in an old order to ask questions before they place a new order with me. Sometimes they had some issues with their design and wanted feedback to modify it and then submit new order also.
I dont really care about these upcoming changes since change is inevitable. But dont mess with our repeat customers. Thats a good precentage of my business on here. Do a good job and they come back to you. You piss them off and they just stop using 3dhubs all together. Then we both lose.
1 Like
bhudson
September 16, 2018, 9:42pm
104
Are you surprised? I don’t think they will even let customers know. I contacted the one repeat customer who had an open order with me and he had no idea things were changing.
It would give us a chance to pull those users from them.
I’m assuming it wouldn’t be good for business to let hubs try to “steal” their customers. Although I think we could all argue they were our customers, and that 3d hubs was just a facilitator. We made the invoices directly to the customers, not to 3d hubs. I’m very curious how 3d hubs “post apocalypse” will be like. I have some difficulty believing they will be as accessible to most of my customers as I was.
keebie81
September 16, 2018, 10:41pm
106
A properly designed system should allow them to monitor all conversations for certain words and flag them for staff to look over later to see if hubs are trying to move orders offsite. Only thing this does is inconvenience everyone.
Unethical hubs that are trying to move future orders offsite would just include a note in box when shipping order. So this does nothing to stop that.
So your complaint is that they weren’t smart enough in depriving the hubs of any future income from customers they had through 3d hubs?
Unethical? Are you serious?
Unethical is to build your entire business on the backs of the hubs and them kick them out when you think you can do better without them.
3 Likes
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?
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.
bhudson
September 17, 2018, 3:12pm
110
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.
