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/ 36 a bit like 3dhubs in the early days, also it would be great if you join this conversation
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could agree a hub was unethical if they were trying to move customers out of 3d hubs 2 years ago, but certainly not now. No one in their right mind is thinking if it’s correct to take customers from 3d hubs when there’s a knife stuck in their backs.
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.
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.
Don’t feel bad about it. There was no guarantee you wouldn’t be kicked out if you had better scores. I don’t trust any hub that has 5.0 scores, there’s no way that’s legit.
@JDMusicLabs I have 409 reviews, everything but print quality is listed as 5.0, print quality is 4.9; my last 50 order average is 4.97.
My completion rating is 89.6% because I had to turn down weapons orders, because I had four users who stopped responding to questions about their orders, and because I had customers request a material that was inappropriate for the use, not to mention the users who expected me to somehow complete a 5 day print order in two days. Requests for review of my completion rating went ignored.
Clear opaque, seriously? Isn’t that just white?
I meant with all scores being 5.0. You always get penalized on something, even if it’s just someone placing a duplicate order.
Clear opaque is like dry water.
Is it really a loss though to be removed from the platform for you? Looking at your screen shot you have only had 3 reviews in last year, so maybe around 6 or so completed orders. Obviously 3dhubs wasn’t doing much for you.
this is ridiculous…
3D Hubs doesn’t give any shit on the hubs which made their business even possible…
this list here is nuts, as no one would ever find it…
and: it’s way more complicated than the old system was…
no private user would ever use it, as there are no securitys…
neither for the hub nor the customer
No, it’s not a big loss and you’re wrong about your estimate of orders. I have been active with 3D hubs from the day they opened up Houston,TX and had a lot more orders in the past. They dropped off significantly this year and last as things changed on 3D Hubs end and, IMHO, as some hubs likely lowballed/tuned their pricing. I’ve been moving from counting on them as a significant and growing part of the business to seeing them as a declining source of marginal revenue.
But that is not the point is it?
They are free to change their business model and we are free to be pissed and to vent. That’s what we are doing here. It won’t change anything, but at least it lets us feel better. I am sure that is why 3dhubs set up this thread in the first place.
I do have one question. If an existing business with 50 or 100 or more printers or 2 or more large HP printers, wanted to participate, how would they qualify to be added? It seems like a catch22 looking ahead unless 3dhubs will be changing their process for adding partners.
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.
