This weekend marks the launch of our sister site www.rc3dmarket.com . Its been in the works for several months now and I'm excited and terrified in equal measure to finally unveil it!
rc3Dmarket is a community marketplace much like Cults3D. I wanted address the fact that whilst Cults3D is great, it is certainly not a place to browse 3D printed RC, to find exciting designs and designers. I think it works quiet well if you already have a link to a model but otherwise there are so many STLs that lots of great stuff just gets lost.
My plan was to create a site that was dedicated to community designed 3D printed RC model that was easy to browse and could have curated lists of models, designs and designers of the month. I want to make a site that can become the heart of 3D printed RC, and not just aircraft but also cars boats, you name it. I want to include How To videos for CAD design and 3D printing advice. And I want the site to also offer the hardware required, motors, filaments, carbon, etc.
Why am I excited and terrified in equal measure? Getting the site up and running was at times a bit of a task but it was something that I could control to some degree, even though I am not a web developer by trade! Now that its time to launch the site I am at the mercy of the community. Without designers out there taking a little bit of time to upload their models the site is really just an expensive lesson in Amazon Web Services for me!
I should explain a little about how it works. For buyers its as simple as you would expect. Find a model you like, buy it, and in your dashboard under 'downloads' you will find the download link. Simple!
For sellers, its also relatively simple. Sign up for a seller account and then create your shop. Because the site is capable of setting up shops to ship physical products there are lots of fields to fill out but the majority are not required if you are only going to sell digital downloads. Because of this I have created a User Guide to help with setting up a shop and showing which fields are mandatory and which are not.
Once you store is set up its time to upload a model, again a User Guide is provided to make this process easy, and if you have your model files all ready should only take 10 minutes.
Once your files have been purchased and downloaded you can request a payout at anytime, either a bank transfer or a PayPal payout, with both options your payout should arrive not later than 2 working days. Simple as that. And what's even better, the site commission is 15% compared to Cults3D's 20%.
In terms of the physical products side of it? The web platform is more than capable of offering this but my focus to begin with is to get digital downloads on the site. If anyone wishes to get set up as a store offering, filament of other RC hardware please get in touch!
I hope that in time it will become a one stop shop for 3D printed RC.
Happy printing,
Jon