One of the top questions we get from prospective customers looking to get into the 3D printing business to sell 3D printed portraits is how to price their products to ensure they run a profitable 3D printing business. It’s a tricky question since the answer is going to vary based on your local market, business model and who your core customers are. In this post we’re going to do our best to breakdown all of the main factors you need to consider when setting up your business and setting retail prices to ensure profitability. Here is what we’ll go over:
As you’re thinking about what you need to charge it’s really important to understand the costs of the locations/events you intent to set up your 3D printing business for 3D portraits in. When prospective customers come to us they often have a particular use case in mind as to how they want to use our full body 3D scanner for 3D printed figurines. Here is a list of common use cases we hear:
As you can see the possibilities are endless and there are likely many more use cases that aren’t covered in the above list.
We even hear an increasing number of customers with use cases for 3D scanning in augmented reality and virtual reality.
To prevent this post from becoming too long we are going to focus on how to price for just 2 use cases for 3D printed figurine businesses: tourist locations and miniature conventions. For use cases we aren’t covering you should be able to extrapolate out yourself or get in contact with us. If you want someone to work through numbers with you, we’d be happy to help.
Examples of good tourist locations to locate a 3D printing business to sell 3D printed figurines include: New York City, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco, Orlando, Miami etc. Even if you're not near one of these major cities, it's still very possible you have a local attraction nearby that would be a great fit for a 3D printing business selling 3D portraits.
Want to know where to find miniature conventions? Follow this link for a directory of shows to figure out event pricing. They are held in all different parts of the country, so chances are there is one in your area.
The costs to fulfill the 3D printed portraits you sell at your location/event are thankfully a bit more straightforward than the prior section. If you haven’t viewed our fulfillment price sheet already, click the button below to download the most up to date fulfillment pricing. There are a wide array of products you can sell with standard 3D portrait sizes ranging from 3 inch to 9 inch and oversized 3D printed portraits running up to 14 inches. There are also 3D crystals and digital files optimized for AR/VR you can sell to customers.
*Introducing full-color resin 3D printing*
For shipping and sales tax, the majority of our customers just pass those directly onto their customer. For reference the most popular sizes our customers sell are 6 inch to 8 inch sizes.
*If you’re looking to set up a 3D printing business to sell 3D portraits internationally you can leverage our bulk shipping program where we batch ship the ordered 3D portraits to you and then you ship directly to your customers or have them come pick up their order. Doing it this way also helps with import duties since the duties are only calculated on the 3D print production cost and not on the full retail cost the customer paid for their 3D portrait. If this is something you want to leverage, please get in contact with us for more details.
A common rule you’ll hear in retail sales is a 3x markup on your cost of goods. The 3x markup is meant to cover your location/event costs and leave you with enough left over to make a profit. Keep in mind that this is merely a guideline and not a requirement. The amount of markup you need for your business will vary depending on how much your location/event costs are relative to your fulfillment costs for the 3D printed figurines you sell. To get a better idea of this, let's dive into our tourist location and miniature convention examples:
*While these retail prices may look high, keep in mind that in many tourist destinations, these price levels are fairly inline with what people are used to paying in expensive destinations. You can also experiment with lowering the price points for different sizes to see if a slight loss in % margin is made up for in increased sales volume.
Don't think this is enough profit?
Try increasing your retail pricing by $10 or $20 and see how close you get. It’s very possible that your customers won’t care about the $10 or $20 difference because the 3D printed figurine product is that cool to them. You can also try other tactics like selling 3D printed figurines as a package or investing money into display cases. Display cases and boxes can be $1 on Alibaba and you can sell them as an add-on for $10. If you're still stuck, feel free to reach out to us for more tips on how to make tourist locations more profitable.
*While you can use the above numbers as a starting point, please do not solely rely on them. Make sure to do your own research on whether you think a particular tourist location will work for you and check the latest versions of our fulfillment price sheet to ensure you have the most up to date pricing.
For selling to the miniature community we recommend utilizing our new colored resin 3D printing.
Don't think this enough profit?
Like the tourist location example, try increasing your retail prices by $10 or $20 and see how close you get to your profitability goal. People in the miniature community are extremely passionate about their scale models and are usually willing to pay premium for the right product. Get in contact with us for other tips on running mobile events.
*While you can use the above numbers as a guide, please do not solely rely on them. Make sure to do your own research on whether you think a particular miniature convention will work for you and check the latest versions of our fulfillment price sheet to ensure you have the most up to date pricing.
We hope you found this post helpful as you’re planning your 3D printing business. Setting retail pricing for any product is always tricky and it's important to as much research as possible as you assess the viability of a new business venture. Whether you're planning on getting started in the next few weeks or just doing general research please keep in mind that 3D portraits is still a very new technology and you should expect a lot of continued product innovation that open up new use cases in the years to come.
Curious about how the 3D printed portrait industry could grow over time?