The3Dstudio.com Nightmare

[LordRaven]

Hello everybody,

 

I am sure many of you may be familiar with the3dstudio.com marketplace, known as the second best site for selling/buying 3d models.

If you are an active seller there you most certainly have noticed that the sales dropped to a ridiculous level, but you may not be aware of the fact that sales also disappear from your "seller home" page without any notification. If you are lucky enough to see a sale before it disappears, you can contact support and ask for an explanation but otherwise you would never know that something happened with your product.

Many sellers are beginning to be afraid of the fact that Matt A. might be messing with the sales because of the lack of transparency and the low sales level.

 

If you are doing business with T3DS I strongly suggest you read the article bellow. You will find all the details of my experience with them along with what other sellers (and even family members-former team members of the site) feel about the way Matt Anderson and his mother operate the site nowadays:

http://www.cgdigest.com/the-3d-studio-com-nightmare/

[Nic H]

i always considered it a scam site tbh

never knew it was legit...

Edited June 20, 2012 by nicnic

[RyderSK]

i always considered it a scam site tbh

never knew it was legit...

 

 

The quality of models there only highlights that feeling ;- ). They're worse then those on free repository sites.

[LordRaven]

Until 2 years ago that was a very respected market place.

In the meantime they sold the company to 3D Systems, they cut they advertising funds, sales went down and things kept going from bad to worse.

 

Long story short, nowadays the site is being operated only by Matt Anderson and his mother (incredible, but true). The only reason why they are still online is because some of us were foolish enough to sign a 5 year loyalty program about 2 and a half years ago.

[Jeff Mottle]

Surely in that agreement there must be some language about "breach of contract". I certainly would never sign an agreement without it. If it's there and they are not delivering on what they promised you should be able to exit your agreement with them without issue.

Edited June 20, 2012 by Jeff Mottle

[LordRaven]

Thank you for your input Jeff.

 

At that point sales were great and had nothing but pleasant experience with Matt Anderson so I wasn't worried to much about him breaching the agreement in any way.

 

The entire "contract" was in fact comprised of a few lines (less than a page). I don't know the American Laws but in Europe this contract would be declared NOT VALID for several reasons in any court.

If someone is curious, here is the only piece of paper me and many others signed:

[Jeff Mottle]

I would have never signed an agreement like that personally, but in business we all learn something the hard way. Now you know not to sign anything but a proper agreement with things like a breach of contract clause, termination of contract etc. It does not matter if you are going into business with your best friend or someone you've known and trusted for 20 years. You ALWAYS get a proper contract in place to manage the expectations of what will happen when and if situations change. I would also not have signed something that carries on with the sale of the copyright either. This means you can't sell your copyright until your contract expires with them. Most contracts don't do this and the contract is terminated upon sale of the company or copyright. That having been said, given you are not locked to them why not just sell through Turbo Squid also? Granted you can't get the highest royalty without going exclusive with them either. You could just modify the models a bit so they are not identical and then go exclusive somewhere else.

 

Personally though, if the sales you have are really disappearing and not being paid out as expected and you have tried to resolve it with them I'd just take the models down. I'd consider that a breach of contract clause or not. I'm not a lawyer obviously, but it's highly unlikely they are going to sue you for removing the models. If you're not making money from them, neither are they and it's not going to be worth their while to sue you for such a small amount.

[LordRaven]

Thank you again Jeff, for taking the time to comment.

 

As soon as one signs that agreement his products are "locked". Otherwise everybody would have left long time ago.

I also sell on Turbosquid and on one other marketplace as non-exclusive, obviously. Each month I sell 3-10 times more on Turbosquid than on The3dstudio.com.

Also, I can't just modify the products to look different and sign and go exclusive with them somewhere else, because exclusivity contracts are not "per model" but "per artist". The only solution is the new Squidbridge program developed by TS for people in my situation (and there are many).

 

Anyway, the main reason why I opened this thread was to share my experience with sales disappearing without any notifications on the3dstudio.com. Every seller has the right to know what happens with their products. On every other 3d stock marketplace, whenever a sale is canceled (regardless of the reason), the seller (owner of the model) receives and email/support ticket (or some sort of notification) explaining why it happened. On T3DS, if I hadn't seen those sales disappearing I wouldn't have even known about it... and this definitely raises some question marks.

 

Not to mention the childish explanation and the arrogant attitude that I got from Matt when I sent him an email about this.

[Jeff Mottle]

yeah I read through the comments on that link and saw Michele chimed in about SquidBridge. I did not know they had that special program in place. Nice. I don't think it's reasonable either IMHO to penalize the artist for fraudulent CC charges. When that happens in our own store, we eat those costs as it's the cost of doing business.

[LordRaven]

"I don't think it's reasonable either IMHO to penalize the artist for fraudulent CC charges. When that happens in our own store, we eat those costs as it's the cost of doing business."

 

That is excellent business practice.

Once again, thank you for your feedback on this.

[laszloadrian]

Alex,

 

yes are right Matt is not a customer service guy, however did you tried to put yourself in his shoes? Try to deal with complaints from hundreds of artists (stii tu "artisti" pe romanseste) who believe they deserve first class service and their stuff is the best etc.. I mean it gets paid for it but hey what is your royalty rate on the 3dstudio compared with TurboSquid?

 

Sales on TS where always higher for me vs. 3ds but those guys rip you off. I don't like it but I have no choice. A little is more than nothing.

 

Now that 3dsystem owns 3ds lets hope they did not buy it to kill it off so they create their own marketplace geared towards 3d printable content. In theory Matt is just an employee now. Who knows?

 

What did you do to help promote the site with the best paying royalty rates? - as I know. Ranting about it surely does not help anybody especially if you are an isolated case.

[LordRaven]

" What did you do to help promote the site with the best paying royalty rates? - as I know. Ranting about it surely does not help anybody especially if you are an isolated case."

 

Actually I did A LOT! According to the stats I have referred about 1500 registered members and tons of free traffic from my blog (http://www.cgdigest.com); not to mention some top class clients (ex. Boeing.com).

As I have previously said, customer service is one thing and have sales disappearing WITHOUT any notification is another. I don't know any other marketplace that does this. It is my product that they are selling, so whenever a return occurs for whatever reason (credit card fraud, obj file did not import with textures in C4D, etc.) I should be notified. Not only because otherwise it looks like I am robbed, but if the problem is on my end, I should be given the chance to fix it, otherwise it will happen on the next sale as well.

 

When I asked why he didn't sent any email notifying me about it I got this response:

"“We don't waste our time or yours with a return that is covered by our money back guarantee if there is no chance we can save the sale”

The other time when this happened (a year ago) he said that it was because of credit fraud, and the product was NOT downloaded. As it turned out, this was a big fat lie. According to his own response in this blog post http://www.the3dstudio.com/blog_detail.aspx?id=3467 a sale does not appear on your dashboard until the product is downloaded.

 

Not only this is not high class customer support... this is simply abusive attitude.

 

If Matt is not a customer service guy, where is the customer service department? (And where did the conversions department go, btw?) According to his sister and former employee Tracy, Matt and his mother are the only full time employees over there. How can they compete with 75 employees at Turbosquid?

Nowadays I sell 3-10 times more on TS alone than on T3DS so that 70% doesn't mean anything.

 

And there is much, much more to this situation, so if you are interested visit the link posted in my first post, as I wouldn't want Jeff to be angry with me for ranting too much about The3Dstudio on his forum (he has been nothing but very kind so far).

 

Regards,

Alex

[lee81070]

Forgive me, but after reading that contract over and over, I can't see anything that locks you in to T3DS exclusively... There's a clause that states the agent agrees to allow the artist to continue to sell their files etc at other venues while the agreement is in place, which to me gives you authority to upload your files anywhere you see fit. It simply says you may not remove existing uploads for a period of 5 years.

[laszloadrian]

Alex, I guess you are right. Unless we get all together and we create our own organization with our own marketplace, we are at the hand of these privately run marketplaces. Ranting can get you so far. I mean at least you are venting but how about more constructive ways?

[LordRaven]

@Lee I know I can sell on other marketplaces as well (I already do). Had I not signed that contract though I could have gone exclusive with TS and earned much more. It is my mistake though and I have to live with it. Again, that was not the main reason why I opened this thread.

 

@Laszlo - that idea won't work, I'm afraid. To many people, to many ideas to many potential clients. I believe that it was tried before and it failed.