Ponoko Blog

I'm not sure if this applies to your situation, but some of the open source hardware vendors run small time operations selling actual, physical things, with only one or two employees, over the internet. Chris Anderson, previous editor of Wired, started such a business and wrote up some interesting lessons for these types of small business:

http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/16/ten-rules-for-maker-businesses-by-wireds-chris-anderson-%E2%80%94-rule-1/

Adafruit, and OSHW vendor also did a few write ups recently about shipping with UPS. You can see those on their blog:

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/01/03/shipping-geeks-and-kit-biz-owners-new-ups-tracking/

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/04/07/thomasatups-for-shipping-geeks-biz-owners-ups-has-a-blog-and-we-have-some-suggestions/

Hope that is helpful!

Thanks.

The basic thought was to get it to a point that we could provide it to designers and university students with little to no engineering experience and they could start printing their 3d models right away. Hence, the heavy emphasis on self-calibration and ease-of-use.

The price range just works because we also designed it from the start to be a manufactured product, so we get an economy of scale very quickly as more people pick it up.

You can see print quality examples on ponoko, Derek swung by our office to see it close up in action yesterday: http://blog.ponoko.com/2012/10/04/pandabot-3d-printer-launches-on-kickstarter/