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Not sure where all this is going but I am finding the constant changes to the ordering process and the way hubs are ranked or displayed very frustrating.

I have just noticed that once again the ordering page has changed - now there are only three groups of interest to the world apparently - prototyping plastic, High Detail Resin or SLS Nylon.

Now if a customer selects prototyping plastic, all materials that don’t fit into this made up category do not show in your hub. Apparently no one prototypes in TPE, or high temp PLA etc - which will be a shock to a couple of my customers - I will have to let them know they are doing it wrong.

Poorly implemented changes seem to be the order of the day - same with the change to showing how quickly can you send a response to a customer to say you will get back to them. You better be ready to answer emails in the middle of the night as you will be graded on your dedication to the hub.

No doubt the next measure will be how quickly can you accept an order - regardless of issues with files, timing, changes by customers etc.

Is it too much to ask for these changes to be carefully considered, communicated, tested and then implemented. 3D Hubs has a huge community at its disposal willing to review and provide improvement suggestions but seems determined to go their own way.

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It only shows your two cheapest materials. If they click see all other materials they can then see the rest offered

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I’d like to know why there is now a tolerance on the SLA prints and the tolerance on FDM has apparently changed without any warning. Don’t get me wrong, I can hit both of those no bother but once again I’m going to be held to standards that I wasn’t aware were on the cards but 3Dhubs just decided to throw out there.

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Thanks for the reply, unfortunately it only shows the materials that are “prototyping plastics”, I can’t find a list anywhere on hubs as to what this category is but is certainly does not include all the materials. For example I offer TPE on my hub, this does not show up if you select prototyping plastics and then look at other materials on the order page. The issue I see is this is dumbing down the order process - why I don’t know, but is in fact just hiding options from the customers.

What happened to all the other materials like carbon fiber reinforced nylons, or other high end processes, are these not welcome on 3D hubs anymore. Glad I didn’t by a Markforged machine - no one would ever find me.

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Now I see what you mean. Im missing 10 materials if they click that. There should be an unselect button too.

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Hey all - If you agree with the problem pointed out by the original poster, which I certainly do, please up vote the post so 3d hubs notices.

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Hi,

Agree with the original post.

I had a email exchange with 3D Hubs on the ranking and there is some weird way of making it nowadays : the acceptance rate is done in a way we must accept everything in order to improve our ranking.

I mean :

if a customer wants a part, nearly non printable in FDM (designed against FDM rules, even the ones given by 3D Hubs), you’ll be blamed for declining

if a customer declines because he changes his design and recreate a new order with the adjusted design, you’ll be blamed for the customer behavior as there is a declined order.

Not fair !

On the other hand, the new KPIs are showing some discrepancies, like customer rating which is different between your hub page and the new one in the dashboard. 3D Hubs agrees on it, but it takes weeks for them to fix the issue …

They should revert back to the previous dashboard until they fix it if they want to look very professional.

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Hi Kerry,

I totally agree with your comments and here’s what this has done to me :

I was receiving 2 to 3 orders per week since the last few months mainly from the US because the Canadian dollar is so low. My prices are better than most hubs for Polyjet HD printing. Since they changed the visibility, I stopped getting orders completely. They killed my Hub with their Fu*?$ng constant changes!

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Yes it’s your sort of service that I instantly felt sorry for - it’s like all of a sudden all the high end printing processes suddenly got wiped off the map. I see Filemon saying that there is a new order system coming in the second quarter but that is a long time to wait.

There is a definite push for all Hubs to operate as a business which is fine and is how I see myself - just that they want the business to respond 24/7 to any and all customers, justify why you are not accepting an order or even why a query is coming to an end but as a business you have no control over marketing, sales or how your business is positioned in the market. More like a sub-contractor to a large organisation under the illusion of self determination. Doh!

I am getting a strong sense of deja vu - I went through the whole Makexyz experience where it went from an open community all trying to run little businesses that suddenly had new and interesting requirements to meet and got offered to pay a fee to be ranked higher up the list. Jumped ship after that.

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hi @Kerry, sorry to hear your problems.

Admittedly, you’re not the first posting a thread on the recent changes.

Here’s my response to a previous thread which answers part of your question:

“For Q2 we’ll do a major overhaul of our material database, where customers can choose from all available printing materials. So, for what it’s worth, the current checkout changes (there’s different versions) are temporary and all serve to measure different aspects of the checkout we’ll use in optimizing the new material selection flow. We need this results as input for the new design.” I’m aware this doesn’t solve your objections directly, but hopefully it explains why we’re doing this.

In response to your “poorly implemented changes” about response time, I do not completely agree. Conversion rates have skyrocketed since the change (>25%!), which is something that significantly benefits all Hubs. I do agree that the fact we don’t have Hub business hours yet is a problem. We’re working on fixing that. As part of our development process, it is needed to first test the assumption that “speed matters” before being able to set aside significant dev time in optimizing it.

I also agree that we should seriously improve our communication on these changes to all Hubs. I’ll personally invest a lot of my own time in that over the next couple of months.

Hope that explains. Please let me know if you have any other questions

Best,

Filemon

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The changelog has been a great addition to keep up to date of some changes.

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That answer from Filemon was given to me on a thread that they blocked.

I wanted to start a thread to try to find other hubs that have the same problems I have and get them to also complain and they refused to publish my thread.

…

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Hi Filemon,

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated and it is good to know that you are working on solutions.

I think the key item for me and it may not have been worded well is that change management comes down to one key issue, communication, the better we communicate change the more successful the change.

Case in point is the response time, I certainly agree that response time is very important, the reason it is important is because it is good communication, the customer feels engaged and they are encouraged that someone out there is listening and responding. My response times have always been quick for this very reason, in fact I had to slow down my response times as Hubs was telling customers I normally respond in less than 2 minutes. This was setting them up for disappointment for when I couldn’t respond in under 5 minutes.

This is why I made the admittedly sarcastic response about response times, implementing this without an out of business hours type of system in place means customers are going to be disappointed and poor hub is being set up for failure.

Testing and change is good and vital to improvement, my main point in starting this post was to ask, please communicate with this community you have built and possibly do some testing with smaller groups that know what is happening to their hub and can be prepared and give more constructive feedback than this has post has probably been.

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thanks @Kerry, clear.

Your point on communication is fair. We’ll set up a much clearer communication process over the next few weeks.

Best,
Filemon

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Hi @plvcpt, some threads are delayed because of our spam filter. Unless a thread is clearly abusive we never block a thread. Let me know if your thread is still not live.

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It seems to me there is a group sitting around dreaming up new ways to measure things then implementing half baked ideas that really make no sense.

Did 3dhubs just hire someone who is taking a statistics class?

There are a lot of things being implemented that are not being thought through and it mostly is causing confusion for the customer.

I also feel that 3dhubs is looking for ways to penalize the hubs or drive out the small ones since they don’t make 3dhubs a bunch of money. Why should a hub get penalized for declining an order that is obvious spam of a fake?

On poor change management - changes are either not being thought through at all or are being way over thought.

Maybe 3dhubs should focus on fixing current issue (and hub complaints) such as business hours and inaccurate response times rather than throwing all of these metrics up and also complicating the ordering process for the customer.

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