The products sold by SpotModel are small and lightweight by definition (from 1/4 to 1/43 scales). Courier companies charge them by volumetric weight, based on the exact dimensions of the parcel. With a manual process, this was prone to error.

Before 3DBP, shipping cost estimation errors were about +-10% of the income, which given our daily shipping volume was A LOT. That meant that some months we lose 10% of the income, while others we overcharged our customers and made them unhappy.

SpotModel’s shipping motto: don't lose money, and don't make our customers lose money either. It was difficult to do it in practice.

Spot Model aims to send their products using the smallest box possible. They use the Pack a Shipment tool and optimize by the Maximum Space Utilization.

Knowing its dimensions, we are now able to give a 100% accurate estimate for the shipping costs charges by a number (actually five) of courier companies, and the customer choose the one they prefer, without any surprises on either side.

Also, we have optimized both our packings and our box sizes, analyzing the accumulated 3DBP results over time, resulting in shipping less 'air' to our customers.

The four most important aspects for Spot Model are reliability, speed of calculation, accuracy and customer support.

In our case, reliability is A MUST, since it is DEEPLY integrated in the whole checkout process: so far, I think we've had a 1-2 minute outage in about 7-8 years. Accuracy is also needed.

The speed of work of 3DBP is important since we show packing results in realtime to our customers.

Customer support is really nice. The API documentation is really good and straightforward to implement.