Dixit Offers a Quick Onramp to the 3D Printing Business

Cloud-based Innovana3D is a turnkey 3D printing front-end with instant quoting, viewer and e-commerce capabilities.

Anyone wishing to make money with their 3D printer after the heyday of 3D printing, when most personal desktop 3D printers were sold, was soon faced with the reality of running a manufacturing business. They expected to print the part, but they soon learned that they had to answer emails, estimate the cost of the part, and include a profit and deliver the quote. If the quote was accepted, they got to make the part but were likely interrupted by requests about its status. They had to ship the part and invoice for it. Finally, they had to record the transaction. That may be Small Business 101, but more often than not, it was more than they had signed up for. Personal attention to customers was a great challenge—especially if it was a side business.

The more tech-savvy entrepreneur may have attempted to cobble together a website that did most of the above business transactions. Thousands of WordPress sites offer e-commerce plug-ins with credit card gateways, alleviating some of the nonproductive chores of billing and the lags in payment, but good luck finding a viewer, a way to check that mesh models were watertight, add supports, check angles of overhang, and so on. Even if such plug-ins are to be found, you have to integrate them with the website. That takes testing, time.…

Even if you get past all this, you still have to manually estimate the cost of the build itself. You, with little experience, will resort to trial and error, quite possibly losing money in the process.

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody did all that? A turnkey system made specifically for 3D printing that you could install on your website?

Enter Innovana3D, a cloud-based 3D printing portal you can subscribe to (currently for free—more on that later) that checks off quite a few of the boxes. Except the one you signed up for: actually producing the part on your 3D printer.

The most impressive and most valuable of Innovana3D’s capabilities is instant quoting. Once a customer uploads a 3D model and selects the material and the finish, they immediately see how much it will cost to build it. If for some reason, they would like to generate a quote manually—let’s suppose they prefer to do this during regular business hours—the automatic quoting can be turned off.

Read the rest of this story at ENGINEERING.com