There’s a slight trend emerging in the 3D printer filament market: volume shipments.
A couple of 3D printer filament sales sites we’ve visited lately have begun offering volume purchases. This is different from what has previously been a “one-price” style that many shops seem to use.
It may be because most people don’t buy very much at a time. Perhaps this is changing due to the increasing reliability of personal 3D printers, where people can now reliably run their machines for longer periods, printing larger items more frequently. If that’s the case, then we could see a burgeoning demand for large piles of filament.
One site that does this is “Cheap 3D Filaments”, which we have to say might not be the most inspiring name for a service, but in any case they offer this form of volume discounts. While their normal order is USD$29 per spool, they offer a “full case” of twelve spools for USD$300, or USD$25 a spool. Yes, it’s definitely cheaper.
But twelve spools is an awful lot of filament, isn’t it? Unless you’re a school or workshop with a farm of 3D printers, it would likely take months to 3D print all of them, even on a fast machine running more or less continuously. The other issue is color choice. Could you live with twelve spools of yellow? It depends on what you’re printing, but for most of us, we probably need a variety of colors.
