Amazon signals 'shift' in online retail with 3D-printing personalisation store launch
Amazon is offering customers the chance to print and design products from third-party sellers on its newly launched 3D printing store.
Customers can personalise items' shape, colour and style
The site will let users customise earrings, pendants, rings, bobble-head dolls and more, through an interface from which they can then select production choices such as the material, size, colour and style of selected items.
Currently the site only provides 200 unique products although variations such as personalised text can be applied to each.
Amazon, which has announced it is leading retail into the future with drone deliveries in addition to a new mobile payment service like Paypal, has more than 240 million users.
It will not print users’ own 3D designs but it is selling guides, parts and programs enabling at-home 3D printing.
Petra Schindler-Carter, director of sales at Amazon, said: “The introduction of our 3D Printed Products store suggests the beginnings of a shift in online retail - that manufacturing can be more nimble to provide an immersive customer experience.
“Sellers, in alignment with designers and manufacturers, can offer more dynamic inventory for customers to personalise and truly make their own.”
3D Printers create objects using a laser which moves along an X, Y and Z axis to build an object in three dimensions - in a relatively new production process touted to be the future of manufactured goods.
The ‘Creative Expressions‘ 3D printing section of the site will supply the demand for further personalisation on consumer goods.