CNCKing.com Major Upgrade & Update

This is probably the biggest change to happen to CNCKing.com since I rebranded the entire site from WoodMarvels.com a few years back. Here is a list of some of the changes going into effect over the weekend.

• In the top right corner, you’ll now be able to select your currency of choice, Australian Dollars, Euros, Canadian Dollars and American Dollars. All the pricing site-wide is updated realtime to a currency converter. The reason why I chose these currencies (countries?) to start is that I have trusted CNC laser operators in all these countries with the same laser as me so for shipping physical kits, they can be cut and shipped within country, avoiding customs all together! These currency rates are imported daily and conversion is relative to the US dollar.
• I’ve decided overnight that I’m going to have two sections, one geared towards digital cutting files and the other physical products, for now, there will not be any cross product wise between them meaning you can’t buy both a digital and physical version of a file, it’s either one or the other.
• Physical kits are only available in 3 & 6 mm MDF. I really hate MDF but it’s one of the few materials that’s consistent and widely available around the world. It’s easily painted, sanded and modified using the fewest number of tools or skill. Glue works great on this stuff though but all this comes at the cost or durability. Acrylic is an easy material to deal with afterwards, might be great for shapes and the like but bonding is tricky to get right and you can forget about sanding this stuff.
• For now, all physical kits are available in CNC laser cut kits ONLY. Again, the whole global thing that I need time to establish trusted first-hand contacts with so local production is done to my specs. Besides, most consumers don’t know the difference between the different CNC types, the one that’s the easiest to produce with for the scope of what I have in the physical store is laser.
• The Chat Window is now back on CNCKing.com, I took it off about a year ago because I was getting tired of people asking me for free things all the time – getting a request every once in a while isn’t bad but when you got hundreds, man, it gets tiring fast. What’s worse is I’d chat with people for 10 minutes before they’d turn around and ask for something free then run away… it was very much a full-time waste of time.
• I updated our e-commerce platform to the latest version, same with the server and other backend things… should run much smoother now across the board.
• A market I’ve been wanting to get into for a very long time was the 2D wood crafts space, selling bags of circles, stars and other shapes. CNCKing.com will grow dramatically in this space over the next few months… I can create, cut and photograph millions of these things after all, I’ve essentially been doing this and even more complicated shapes for the past 8 years with 3D kits, these are the shapes without the kits!
• Shipping – a headache I’ll just have to live with for now, once orders are made then I’ll have to see how much fits in a box and charge shipping as a separate line item. Sending everything via UPS would be an easy solution but the costs are $$$.
• Oh yeah, I’m going to start spell checking these blog posts but with over a thousand from the past, I’m not doing this retroactively!

Well, my weekend is shot, time to get job quotes for the physical products – moving them from the digital file section to the physical one. Many projects will stay in the digital space but most of the simpler projects will migrate over.