How to Sell Your 3D Printed Products Online – Part 1

Welcome to my weekly series on tips to help you sell your 3D prints.

Having sold my 3D prints for a little over a year now, I thought I would put together some tips on how to sell your 3D prints and some of the pitfalls you should watch out for.

Understand your market when selling 3d Prints

It can be quite tempting to just sell anything, but I have found that “niching-down” has always helped when going for successful sales.

Some people believe in the chucking mud at the wall method, but I have always found that it will pay off if you focus on one part of the market and are consistent.

So choose your niche and stick to it!

Research your competition

Make sure to take some time and have a look at what others are doing.

Make a note on how the competition is wording their descriptions, and what keywords they are including in the titles.

But remember not to copy them, you should be looking at them for things to do (or not do) and use this as a foundation to make your listings better.

While researching your 3D print competition you should look at prices and get an idea of how much people are charging for postage and packing.

Make Your 3D Prints Perfect Before Putting Them Up For Sale

Every model you print should be as perfect as YOU can get it, you should be very critical because negative feedback can really hurt a sellers account.

Never sell a model that you have not yet test-printed.

It has been known that some people have just put the STL file up or a render of the finished product, but then when it comes to printing the model they have had major problems.

Make sure to always quality check before sending the model off to the customer, better to have a delay than the customer receiving a bad print.

Pricing Your 3D Prints

When working out a price you need to factor in a couple of factors, these are material cost, electricity cost, time, packaging and postage costs.

Material Cost

This is pretty easy to work out and most printers now have a function to work out the actual cost in filament.

To work out your filament per gram cost, simply divide the cost by how many grams the new filament roll weighs. eg. $14/1000(1KG)= 0.014/gram.

If your 3D printer doesn’t have this feature then simply weigh your spool before the print, then weigh it after. Deduct the amount from the previous and that will give you how much filament you have used.

So using the example of the $14 1Kg spool if your 3d print has used 50 grams of filament it would have cost you 0.70 cents in filament.

Electricity Cost

This one is not as easy to work out because it depends on the amount you pay per KW for your electricity supply. 

A 3D printer typically runs at between 50 – 300 watts so you could work out the cost by multiplying the average consumption by the amount of hours printing and then divide that number by the cost per KW. 

This should give you an approximate electricity cost for a typical 3D print

Your Time

Often overlooked is the time it takes for you to design the model, prepare the model for print, remove the supports after print and package and post it.

Time is very hard to work out as it depends solely on you.

Some things you should take into consideration when working out the cost of your time-

• Is it in leisure time?
• Are you having to travel to post?
• Is this your income or a hobby?
• Does it take a significant amount of time out of your day?

By thinking about these things you can make a conservative decision on what your realistic cost /hour amount is.

Post & Packaging

This part is relatively simple as the costs are governed by other peole.

One way to keep the costs of packaging down is to reuse. I often use the filament spool holders as boxes to send out smaller items and whenever I receive any packages in the mail I always keep hold of the packaging and boxes.

Whats Next?

So I hope I have given you some insight into the things you should be thinking about before getting into selling your 3D prints.

Next week we will talk about the legal implications and how to set up different selling platforms optimally.

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