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Hi there, I just have a quick query about my hub. I registered on 3D hubs a few months ago and was getting a couple of orders every few weeks, but now I have had nothing for around 3 months. I’m not sure whether something broke or not, And I’m not sure what to do or how to check if there’s something wrong with my Hub? I had to fix up a PayPal issue a while back so had to redo the PayPal account check on 3D Hubs, maybe that has done something? Other than that I have not touched anything major in my account. Any help appreciated.
Thanks!

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Hi Alexis,
This is Nahla here from 3D Hubs. I have had a quick look at your Hub and the main reason why you might be seeing a decline in orders is because of the Completion rate. Declining too many order can take a toll on your Hubscore leading to a decline in orders.
What I can recommend is trying to better your response time as well as completion rate for new orders. In addition if you can add any new services, material or even colors that might help get more orders your way.
I hope this helps! Please feel free to reach out to the support team should you have any questions.
Best,
Nahla - 3D Hubs

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You only have 4 colors. Look at the report 3dhubs puts out about most used colors and such and try to keep the main colors stocked. 3D printing trend report | Hubs

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The real reason you have been getting less orders lately is because of 3D Hub’s new Express order system. Most orders are now being automatically routed to a very small number of hubs (the “Manufacturing Partners”). These are usually the ones with the lowest price, even if they have a lower rating than local hubs, or are far away from your location and require extra shipping time and cost.

The other reasons listed (completion rate and available colors) probably aren’t the true factors, since these have probably been the case for you all along, and you were getting orders previously. As you said, you haven’t changed anything, and the 3 months since you’ve had an order coincides closely with the implementation of the express system. This is likely the real reason you (and most hubs out there) have seen far fewer orders lately.

It’s not going to get any better. For now, customers can still manually select hubs to avoid the express system, so you still have a small chance of getting an order. However, recent experiments by 3D Hubs show they are in the process of getting rid of the manual selection option soon. Once that’s gone, your only orders will come through someone who links directly to your hub.

The problem then becomes that almost all orders funnel to only the top few Express Hubs, until they get overwhelmed, their quality ratings suffer or they shut their hub down. You can listen to the December 13th 2017 issue of the Fargo 3D Printing Show podcast for an example of this happening to them.

Eventually even the smaller and midsize Express hubs will be forced out, with all orders being routed to a handful of larger commercial service bureaus. Without all the other hubs as competition, they can raise their prices. The original vision of 3D Hubs providing distributed manufacturing utilizing down time on local printers will have become just another version of Shapeways or iMaterialise.

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You are incorrect. The express checkout is USA only currently. His hub is not in the USA.

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You should really add black filament to your hub. Grey doesnt hurt either. But black is a major seller and without it you are going to lose orders for sure.

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Hi Nahla,

I think it should be more obvious to the customers they have a choice to choose the hub, It been awhile since I visited 3D hubs and I wasn’t sure I had the right site, because I wanted see the list of hubs near me. The whole list should be visible with ‘Manufacturing Partner’ at the top. but putting a mono tone button ‘Manual Select…’ at the bottom, barely noticeable is just WRONG.

I surely will on the lookout for a better, more fair website to take my business to. Good while it lasted but this change will choke out all those trying to start out.

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Hi thanks for the reply Nahla

I thought that might be a possibility and I didn’t realise it affected my hub that much, in reality only 2 or 3 I had to decline due to not being able to print it and the others were sorted out with the clients for example they changed their minds or wanted it sooner and just left the order pending rather than cancelling on their side (which I assume they can do) so I cancelled the order on my side. Is there any way I can start getting orders again to fix this because I was doing really well with customers and prints and ratings?

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