Month: April 2017

New updates to 3D Hubs is giving some hubs the shaft.

Ok this is going to be some what of a rant, but follow me.Recently I have noticed a decrease in orders to my hub and had a customer that I have printed for before no longer able to find my hub. (He contacted through previous order. This might not be effecting everyone.The first thing that is effecting it is. Potential customers no longer have the ability to search for hubs without uploading a file. Now this might not seem like a big deal at first. However, we have had a lot of people file inquiries asking for model work or questions about the different printing technologies that we offer that often turn into orders.When asked about this. I was told that they want hubs to start promoting the link to their hub. Now I feel like this was the great thing about 3D Hubs they advertised all the hubs in the open. This really helped me swallow the 12.5% service fee. I thought about it as a advertising cost. 3D Hubs does a good job of promoting the service. Now if I am going to have to promote my hub link on my own why would I pay to advertise a link to a service that is going to take 12.5% when I could just drive them directly to my site. Am I looking at this the wrong way?Next thing is hub ranking. Recently 3D hubs started to factor in returning customers to help determine hub ranking. Now, I am not a 100% sure why this should be considered but ok. What I can say is. I think their algorithm for this is a little botched. In my area my hub use to be #1 now I have fallen to #5. I currently hold a 5 star review score and have 93 reviews and have completed 150 orders. I understand that not everyone is going to leave a review but lets give a quick look at the stats for the top 5 hubs including me in my areaNot that all hubs get their first review when setting up their hub1 Hub since Dec 2016 Responds in 1hr 33min 6 Reviews 5 Star2 Hub since Sept 2015 Responds in 27min 42 reviews 5 Star3 Hub since Nov 2015 Responds in 25min 24 Reviews 5 Star4 Hub since Mar 2017 Responds in more than a day 1 Review and 5 Star5 Hub Since Jan 2016 Responds in 5min 93 Reviews 5 Star (ME)Now the best I can tell is that this new system doesn’t take into effect the amount of orders in relation to the area? If one hub has done 10 orders and had 3 repeat customers yet another hub has done 100 order with 5 repeat customers. The hub with more orders is still going to have a lot less percentage of returned customers yet has more repeat customers.I like 3D hubs some of the changes that they have made have been good. However these 2 in particular SUCK. Like I said I know that there are users rolling in orders still however there are a lot were orders have fell off.Thoughts?Rant overedit for format http://ift.tt/2oTMf79