Comment on Has anyone sold or otherwise handed off their 3d printing business?
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In my experience selling it as a whole never happens outright. Buying someone out goes the other way around. I’ve owned my own business twice.
You will honestly be better off holding your accounts if you ever change your mind or direction. You will get stuck with junk or make selling off stuff your career for a time. If you cannot keep your tools, make some impossible to pass off deal in bulk lots divided so that there is a good distribution of value.
If you placed everything on eBay piecemeal, you will never sell your last item before you die. That is the case on any single platform. I was the buyer for a chain of bike shops for several years. I have sold over $136k on eBay, and I uses swap meets to offload overburden too. If anyone consigns for you, if their business model is viable, they will take at least 40% out of the gross margin.
All of eBay’s fees, shipping, taxes, all combined with an account in perfect standing came out to 39-42% of the total sale price. So with consignment, you will actually get around 20% of the total sale price or a little less. It is not at all sustainable and why no one runs successful businesses doing eBay consignments. eBay should be less than half their present fees, especially considering the poor quality of service.
Think of offloading stuff from the perspective of the interested individual, not like a business. Part out and sell your excess tooling while still running your business with what you have.
Personally, I don’t paint cars any more and if I could physically do the work, I still wouldn’t want to. However, many of my tools and stuff are still kicking around and something I do not regret keeping. Quite the opposite, I really wish I had kept what remained of my mixing system, and all of my welding and polishing gear.
mortalic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is really thoughtful advice. I super appreciate it. I don’t know what to do, I’ve had a lot of fun making stuff to solve peoples needs, but this year it’s all dried up and I’ve been spending the reserves to get into shows, pay for marketing etc…
Maybe I’ll just put everything on pause for a long time.
Test_Tickles@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Everyone is bracing for the economic free fall that is going to be the next 5 years. We are still at the upper end and it’s only going to get worse under this administration.
So, I have no doubt that people just aren’t spending money on the kinds of things that they were even just last year. I wish I had something better to tell you, but it is going to be a while before we see people having the money to spend on custom designing anything. As the previous poster pointed out, you need to either decide to get rid of stuff and then sell it like you want it gone, or accept that now it is just a hobby that basically paid for itself.
mortalic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, I know you are right. Just makes me sad.
Test_Tickles@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I fully understand that feeling. Of course there’s nothing that says you won’t be able to start it up again at a later date. 3d printing is seeing a seismic shift right now with cheap and reliable multi-tool systems showing up, by the time the economy recovers, efficient, fast, multi-color, and multi-filament will be the norm. And with some of the more industrial plastics and even metals available through specialty printing services, I think we were already going to see a bloodbath amongst the smaller printing services out there no matter what. So maybe right now isn’t the worst time to dip out of the market anyway. I would suggest that you take this time to hone your design skills or focus on the more niche aspects of the market. You got the opportunity to learn and sample the market while money was gushing into it market, but it was a bubble that was never going to last. So, now you have the choice to take what you have learned and find something sustainable, or just run the other way and do something different.
I can personally tell you that having the market you are in ever so slowly shrink and die under you while you try to squeeze just a bit more out of its husk all the while feeling trapped because you have employees and customers depending on you… it’s fucking brutal. My family and I are doing well these days, but I can only imagine how much better I would have been doing if I had just called it quits much earlier.