Thingiverse Orders - Feature Requests

[marcnicol]

Hi @xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @support @Filemon,

I’ve been working through a few Thingiverse orders and generally they’re fine, but I have a few feature requests that would make for a better experience. (In no particular order)

1. A link to the original Thingiverse item or at least the item number. This would help as there are often comments or instructions on thingiverse that could be useful.

2. Ability to communicate with the customer. I’ve just had an order where the customer hadn’t ordered all the parts he/she needed and there is no way to let them know. I end up doing these for free as I don’t want the customer to have a negative experience, but the margins are so slim I’m losing money on these orders.

3. Ability to upload pictures of the printed parts for the customer to see or to link back to “I made one” on Thingiverse. This would require your Thingiverse account to be linked to your hub.

4. Allow the customer to order parts in multiple colours/materials. The same order as above also needed some of the parts printed in flexible material which is impossible to offer. The parts would not work any other way so, again, I did these for free.

5. Allow us to offer additional services. I get parts that need modifying as everything on Thingiverse is not perfect.

6. Allow local pickup. This is core to how 3DHubs is meant to work.

7. Ability for the customer to leave feedback/reviews.

Thanks for the work you’ve done on integrating 3DHubs to Thingiverse so far. I can’t wait to see what happens in the future.

Cheers,

Marc

[Joerg_4]

Hi Marc,

after some Thingiverse offers I had pretty much the same thoughts, here are some additional ideas / thoughts:

#1: There is a workaround: Just enter the file name in Google (before you do remove the “netfabb_mm” part). This way I always found the correct file

#2: I also think it is important to communicate with the customer, regarding model problems, colours, etc.

#3: well, it would be a nice to have but not “that” important IMHO

#4: Correct

#5: Yes, also support removal can be such a service

#6 + 7: not very important to me, but may be for other hubs

Additional points:

#8: Please add the Thingiverse badge to the hubs site soon

#9: Optimize the software that decides if a part is printable or not. currently parts that need to be rotated on the printbed are marked as ‘not printable’.

Finally a big thanks to 3DHubs for the integration of Thingiverse. This is a huge opportunity which can lead to a significant increasement of orders. So let’s improve it

Cheers,

Joerg

[marcnicol]

Hi Joerg,

Thanks for the reply. I had figured out the Google search thing, but when the filename is something generic like “new.stl” things get a bit more difficult.

Not all the things I listed are super important, I just wanted to add as much as I could think of to start a bit of discussion.

I had completely forgotten about the badge! that’s pretty odd for me as I’m a bit obsessed with collecting badges.

Cheers,

Marc

[Joerg_4]

I had completely forgotten about the badge! that’s pretty odd for me as I’m a bit obsessed with collecting badges.

Me too

[Brian]

Hi Marc, Joerg,

Thanks for the feedback and ideas, it’s much appreciated. We’re currently still focussing most of our effort on the checkout improvements on the Thingiverse side to further improve conversion, as there is a lot of room for improvement and thus more prints for you guys

Quick response to the 9 items so far:

1. we should be able to add a link to the Thingiverse thing as we know what thing being uploaded, I’ll add it to the planning

2. for this integration we explicitly decided not to have any communication as it greatly simplifies the checkout experience and opens 3D Hubs up to many more ‘e-commerce’ like checkouts in the future. However it does lead to some complications, we’ll try to handle these through customer support who have access to the users on Thingiverse for now. Eventually we want to track printability and make the ordering as seemless as possible. I really appreciate you going the extra mile for the customer and adding those extra part is on your own account, for future cases you can also ask support to adjust the order value to accommodate for this.

3. this is something we (and thingiverse) would also like to add, however there are a few more pressing items that we want to tackle first regarding the checkout and issues users are experiencing on the Thingiverse side

4. we’ve already prepared the integration for multiple color selection, multi material is something we have to think about as we like to keep the checkout simple for now, we’ll add the color per part feature to the Thingiverse backlog

5. I understand where you’re coming from, while it would be nice it would take away the pre-payment possibility on Thingiverse, unless we add these services to the checkout, we’ll keep monitoring how many files need extra work/services and try to understand what would make the integration better, lets wait for a couple weeks to collect data and tackle other issues and see what makes sense to add, ok?

6. of course this would be a great addition, with the select Thingiverse locations I feel there is currently little need for this, if the volumes go up and we need more local coverage we could consider it

7. due to the current setup customers don’t have a 3D Hubs account so they can’t leave reviews, we could look at doing ‘blind reviews’ but it’s not the top priority at the moment

Then to cover Joerg’s 2 points:

8. This is coming soon, sorry for the delay, our Badge crafter was out for a bit

9. We can probably improve the print bed checking for different rotations and make it machine specific, we’ll add that to the backlog

Thanks again for the feedback guys, super useful and great to see you’re really thinking about solution to make it better!

Best,

Brian

[marcnicol]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your quick reply. The Thingiverse integration is definitely a good thing and I’m enjoying having the extra orders. Keeping it simple helps on my end too

Cheers,

Marc