6 Figure Home 3D Printing Business- How to Take Time Off AND Increase Sales!
I wanted to share how I was able to vacation while making MORE money.
I wanted to share how I was able to vacation while making MORE money.
Picture this:
You’re running a thriving 3D-print business from the comfort of your own home. Maybe out of your garage, or your basement; whatever workspace you have.
It’s earning a full time income, but you are only working part time — especially if you pay attention to the optimization ideas found in this video:
Sounds pretty sweet right?
But have you thought about this…..
Like any other business, your customers have an expectation on turnaround times.
You have set this expectation.
You want to take a vacation, only…. how in the world will you keep your store open, and keep production running, while you are away for more than a week?
How can you commit to those turnaround times you promised, when you intend to be gone longer than your stated turnaround time?
You think…..”Maybe I won’t go for an entire month. Let’s just do a week this time”.
Only, that doesn’t solve the problem. It just pushes it down the road.
Wait a minute here……I wanted to OWN my time, and now my time is owned…. not by a boss….. but by my customers?????
How can you possibly take longer vacations and not experience a disruption of my business OR the dissatisfaction of your customers?
I have a plan for you.
Here is how I handled it:
I place a banner on my website about a week before I am planning to leave.
It reads something like this :
“The shop owner will be on vacation in July. All orders received starting June 28th-July 20th, will be delayed. While I am away, I am offering a discount — everything in the store is 15% off! The catch — none of it will ship until I get back! Thank you for understanding!”
I then also put a little pop-up reminder on the shopping cart, telling people that they were getting a discount because orders wont ship again until after July 20th.
Not only could I increase my sales this way, but this set an expectation that allowed me to vacation without stress, and without worrying that I am disappointing my customers.
I set my email autoreply to have this same message, both with my email marketing system (at the time I was using Mail Chimp), and on every channel that had this setting available.
In over 5 years of doing this, I only experienced two customers who wanted a refund because the turnaround time wasn’t going to work for them.
And both of those customers continued to place orders later.
Sometimes people and businesses have their own deadlines, it is what it is.
You won’t avoid loosing a few orders this way, but over all — what I am suggesting is FAR less disruptive than closing shop for an entire month, OR just letting it run without notifying customers, and having to deal with the aftermath of unmet expectations.
Guidelines for Implementing the Vacation Discount Shipping Delay Sale
Announce your departure at least 1 week before you leave, and at least a few days before your delayed shipping kicks in.
Offer a discount while you are away — this incentivizes ordering while you are away, while setting the expectation that the exchange going on here is a shipping delay, for a discount.
If you have large repeat clients who might experience disruption because of this, reach out to them a month or more in advance and let them know what you are planning, sometimes you will trigger a big order right away if they don’t want a delay, and were planning an order!
Orders that come in a few days to a week before your vacation may also be delayed, not just the orders that come in while you are away. (Depending on your workflow and turnaround times, of course). Make this clear to those customers and offer them the discount too, either in the form of a partial refund to match the discount that starts when your vacation begins, OR a coupon for a discount on future orders.
When you get back, you will need to likely work a weekend morning or two, to help get fulfillment back up to speed. Prepare for that.
Have a few extra printers — more than you actually need for your normal sales volume. This is great for overflow when it happens, but also helps you catch up on a backlog very quickly.
It only took me about 2 weeks to get back up to speed after getting back from vacation, even if I was gone for a month.
However, I should state — I had 12 machines at the peak of running my print lab at home, and my normal business volume used about 6–10 of those any given day.
If I get all 12 cranking, catching up on the backlog was easy. I was able to process all the orders that came in after I left, at normal turnaround, while also cranking out my backlog.
Having extra printers also meant that cranking out a backlog of orders did NOT impact the turnaround times of new fresh orders that happened as soon as I got back.
What about Customer Service?
If your product receives a lot of pre-sales questions, and those questions often lead to sales, then you might want to consider a way to automate your customer engagement while you are away.
A simple auto-response with a generic message isn’t enough to close sales on those customers who have questions before they buy.
That is where I decided to get creative. I deployed chatbots and I have been using them since 2020 to support my customers.
At first it was pretty complicated and tedious, but now — with Chat GPT — there are many solutions out there for creating your very own 24/7 virtual employee, there is no excuse not to try. Chatbots are virtual employees who can not only field questions, gather leads, and interact, but also sell products for you.
My chatbots are running my “front of house” the entire time, not just when I am on vacation. However — if you wish to be gone on vacation for an extended period and do not want to be answering pre-sales questions all day, I highly recommend finding a chatbot that integrates with whatever you are using to sell (Shopify? Woo? Marketplace?) and training it for your website.
Here is a video of me doing just that, for my ecom websites:
Platform Engagement
If you are selling your product on a platform, you may not be able to integrate a chatbot. The platform may also rate you on your response times.
Here is how I handled that for Ebay and Etsy:
I could care less what Etsy or Ebay’s policy is, I circumvent and create my own policy by modifying my descriptions.
What did I do?
I bulk edited the descriptions of all my products, which you can do on both Etsy and Ebay.
I added the same text as the banner from my website to the TOP of all product descriptions, so that this text is the FIRST thing people read, and it’s not down at the bottom, being left unread.
“The shop owner will be on vacation in July. All orders received starting June 28th-July 20th, will be delayed. While I am away, I am offering a discount — everything in the store is 15% off! The catch — none of it will ship until I get back! Thank you for understanding!”
In general, this worked just fine. However — I experienced fewer orders via Ebay and Etsy during this time.
When I got back, I could bulk edit again and remove the description.
Tip — It’s a matter of finding the text, and replacing it with an empty space! That removes it.
So — while my website usually experienced MORE sales, my platform channels would experience fewer sales. But fewer sales is better than none, due to closing the shop or setting your profile to “away”.
There it is.
A creative continuity plan that can work for your home based 3D printing business.
This strategy might also be applicable for other businesses, such as CNC, Carpentry, etc…..
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
Automated Income Lifesyle w/ C.W. Morton
I am an automation junkie who loves building "hands-free" online income streams. A few years ago I automated my primary…www.youtube.com
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