Selling on Shapeways - Anyone find success with this?

moondog760

Hey all,

I've been looking into possibly selling 3D prints using Shapeways:

http://www.shapeways.com/sell

Sounds like getting started is pretty low-risk. You provide the 3D file, they print and ship it to the customer every time it gets purchased. Has anyone found success selling custom jewelry/pendands/statuettes etc??

Spencer_Holmes

This is interesting!

So, if I understand it correctly. I can upload 3D models for sale, people buy them. Shapeways 3D prints them for me and ships the out to the customer for a 3.5% fee?

moondog760

That's what it sounds like, but there's got to be some kind of catch. I've never tried it before so that's why I wanted other's opinions. And I don't even know how robust of a market it really is. Like do a lot of people actually buy from this site?

RyanB

How do I make money?

Each object has a Standard Price that includes fees associated with selling. You simply set your mark up for each product. When you sell an item, we keep the standard price and we send you the markup. An additional 3.5% transaction fee will be charged on all markups.
For example, if you markup an item by $20, an additional fee of $0.70 will be charged (that is 3.5% of the $20). We charge this fee to cover our administrative costs and Paypal payment costs.


http://www.shapeways.com/support/pricing


Get price for your designs

By uploading your 3D model through the Create page, you'll get instant price for your 3D printed product in various materials.

So, their "standard price" is the cost of all materials, shipping, etc. They give you that price then you add a bit more for your "markup". You get nothing of the standard price portion. You only keep most of the markup.

moondog760

And for what they're doing that makes sense. They take care of manufacturing/shipping, so it's reasonable that all you should get is the markup as profit, minus 3.5% processing fee.

PyrZern

I dunno... Seems too.... niche. Most of them are some kind of accessories.
How many rings do people wear/buy ??

Can you print figurines with this ??

Anthony

You probably could, it just depends how complex you make them, like if you wanted to add articulation or just make a statue. Though you'll be surprised what you can get away with in terms of articulation:size ratio.

As for who uses shapeways, most of the people i've seen using it are people who collect and modify (and make add-on parts for) action figures, mostly in the Transformers community.

moondog760

It's not just accessories, they have different categories of items.

I've seen some cool mathematical pieces. Basically they create a 3D model from a math function and print it out.

Also there does seem to be a market on there for the more fun/creative stuff. I found this the other day

http://www.shapeways.com/product/MLX77XRTT/success-kid?li=nav&optionId=43341282


Also this one is cool:

http://www.shapeways.com/product/BPER6Q426/organic-oddity?li=marketplace&optionId=40918137


Apparently you can get them printed in full color sandstone, or a variety of different metals. I didn't even know it was possible to 3D print in those materials!

PyrZern

Do people actually buy those !???? OMG

Sukotto

I've tried my hand in it in the past, wasn't too successful, maybe sold 5 things. I tried making geek/nerd jewelry stuff, but I just couldn't get people to buy despite getting quite a few views on the page.

It is very niche and I guess like every business you have to develop it more and more to find your audience and actually put time into it. Something tells me the Shapeways market is a bit oversaturated now after an initial rush. You get a lot of similar items but most of the time you can never tell who is actually successful because it doesn't show their sales on their page.

moondog760

Yeah that's the thing, it doesn't show number of sales for an item, so there's no way of knowing. It does seem possible to get a good number of sales though, as I've seen people's comments saying things like "I bought it and it's great" over and over in the comments section.

For instance this dice set seems to be doing pretty well:

http://www.shapeways.com/product/T3ZY4LFDB/thorn-dice-set-with-decader?li=nav&optionId=40708059

And this mobius bacon strip LOL
http://www.shapeways.com/product/L2KKEMCSD/bacon-mobius-strip?li=search-results-1&optionId=6363101


The mobius bacon actually got featured on a number of different sites. So it seems like some items just go viral and get popular that way. But yeah it does seem a bit over-saturated in some areas. So it's kind of a lotto I guess.