Timescale:

I’m having trouble with timescales on my orders. I say I can print something in two working days, but the system’s deadline is always wrong. For example:

1) I received an order on Sunday and it said the deadline was the next day - Monday!

2) I get an order on Wednesday and it says the deadline is Thursday. That is one working day - not two!

When something says it will be delivered the next working day you don’t expect it to be delivered on the day you ordered it - this is also true for any example I can think of - but for some reason 3D Hubs operates in a different way.

3D Hubs, please can you change how the system works to how it is expected to work. I doubt I’m alone in thinking that this is silly and needs to be fixed.

Other Issues:

A) When I post an order or say that it has been picked up the order should stop displaying the deadline date in red and should maybe be green instead to indicate that it is taken care of. Just because the customer has not confirmed (which they rarely do by the way) does not mean it hasn’t happened, so I end up with a long list of red dates despite the fact I’ve done everything I should have.

B) When looking at orders, it’s hard to tell what stage it is at. Allow me to propose a system which shows exactly what stage the order is at.

New () - Shows an order that you have not responded to and how long there is left to respond (counts down from 24:00:00).

Processing - Shows that you have responded to the order and you are discussing the details with the customer.

Awaiting Payment - Shows you have accepted the order and are waiting for the customer to pay 3D Hubs before you begin printing.

Printing - Shows that the customer has paid and that you are currently printing the order.

Awaiting Pickup or Shipping - shows that you are arranging a pickup time / location with your customer or are in the process of packaging and posting the order. At this point the deadline should go green for items that are to be picked up as it is then the customer’s responsibility to pick up the order,

Picked Up () or Shipped () - Shows that the customer has picked up the order, or that you have shipped the parts to them. The time indicates how long before the order changes to completed. At this point the deadline should go green for orders that were to be delivered as the hub has done everything they need to do.

Finished - Either the timer has got to zero and the order has automatically been finished or the customer has confirmed they have received the order.

Completed - 3D Hubs has paid the Hub for the order.

3D Hubs, these changes would take very little to add and would improve workflow massively so please take a moment or two from stacking your five(hundred) euro notes and implement them.

Two final suggestions I have:

I) A notes section on each order page that you can store information in such as special requests from the customer or delivery/pickup arrangements. This should be visible only to the hub, and not the support contact or the customer. A character limit would be helpful for part II.

II) an information button on the order page next to each order. Here you can view the details of the order (printer, material, colour, resolution, delivery/pickup, and notes). This could be mouseover on computers and a button on mobile.

Thanks for reading this and please consider these suggestions. UI design is perhaps the most important part of a system and yours is really hard to get on with. If you are against any of these features, please tell me why and what you’d prefer / why the current system is better.

Hey Daniel,

I’ve read what you have said and it seems like quite an unusual problem that you are facing. This talk doesn’t seem to get straight to the 3D hubs team to easily so what I would suggest is that you go to this link on the site. https://3dhubs.uservoice.com/forums/212175-3d-hubs-forum

Here any problems that you have will have a better chance of reaching the 3Dhubs team. If that doesn’t work then just try to find the email to 3D hubs. You may have to do some searching though as there details can sometimes be hard to find.

just copy everything you’ve added here and send it.

Hope this help you out. I wish you good luck with finding the solution

Thanks for the heads-up and the suggestions @DanielDC88!

@Brian seen these suggestions? Some good stuff in here. Also, any idea about that deadline issue?

We here :wink:

Hi Filemon,

Thank you for having a read. The timescale issues have always been this way so I imagine this is by design.

Please can you forward my issue and suggestions to the relevant people at 3D hubs so that a solution can be found.

Thank you,

Daniel

Hey @DanielDC88 we were actually fixing the deadline issue last Friday, I guess it didn’t get pushed to production yet, but the things that were broken and we’re addressing are:

  • deadline not getting updated after the payment happens (causing unrealistic deadlines)
  • deadlines showing red while print was shipped or picked up

Your post does flag a few new items, as it seems that we’re calculating deadlines to short, e.g. also counting the day on which the order is submitted as a working day - that something that indeed should be addressed still (will put it on the coming sprint).

Finally for the order overview we have a lot of updates planned such as unread messages notifications, details about the material, color, printers etc. and more advanced deadline/countdown indication. We’ve now built the foundation on top of this we’ll be able to tackle most of the problems you described.

Thanks a lot for sharing Daniel!

Brian

I did a quick check @DanielDC88 and it looks like deadlines did get improved on Friday, just the red color needs adjustment after order completion. Can you confirm that the deadline is being calculated correctly based on your settings?

Brian

Dear Brian,

My first point appears to be fixed as of now. I received an order on 28/03 and it is now due on 30/03. I cannot confirm whether the due date is reset after the customer pays, but I will let you know when I find out.

My second point was not fixed as of this weekend, but I will have to keep an eye out and let you know if it’s fixed now.

Thanks.

Dear Brian,

Please can you detail your plans for the future and a ballpark of when you hope to implement them?

Which problems will you not be able to tackle using your planned updates and how will you address these in the future?

Thank you.

Hey Daniel,

We’ve planned to work on layering more functionality on the order overview in May/June. As we’ve got some big projects on hand now that will take up most of April. The Hub note on order sounds like a nice idea, it wouldn’t be a huge amount of work as we already have a similar feature internally (e.g. for our admins). This could also fall in the same timeframe.

Changing the statuses of the orders themselves is also something we’re looking at, but I think it’s a bit less urgent, so it should happen in June/July.

Brian