Manage Design Products WooCommerce Guide

Applies to Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) 2.18.0-dev · Updated October 2026. Covers Cmsmart > Manage Products and the Edit product screen (General, Templates, Order history, Designer config) in WP Admin — not the frontend design tool shoppers use.

Add ten new SKUs in a season and the gaps show fast: one product has the wrong bleed, another has no price matrix attached, a third still points at a template nobody uses any more — none of it visible from the plain WooCommerce product list.

WooCommerce now powers 7+ million active stores (WordPress.org, 2026), and a growing share sell something a buyer customizes before paying. Cmsmart Product Designer (formerly NBDesigner) turns a plain WooCommerce product into a design-enabled one, and Manage Products is its control room.

What does manual product configuration cost a growing print shop?

• No single list of which products have the designer on — a gap surfaces only when a customer can't personalize one.
• Bleed, DPI and color profile live on the product, but nobody checks them before a design ships, so a file comes back trimmed wrong or too soft.
• Price matrices get copied from an old product by hand, old price and quantity breaks included.
• Templates pile up with no owner, so the storefront keeps showing a design nobody wants any more.
• Every new-product question turns into a search through tabs instead of a one-screen answer.

Count the minutes spent re-answering these per product, multiply by products configured monthly, then by what an hour costs. That is the real cost of skipping one screen for design-enabled products.

What would a well-organized design catalog look like?

Getting there is less about new features than about where today's settings live. If your team needs help mapping that onto your own catalog, talk to an ecommerce expert first.

How does Cmsmart organize every design-enabled product?

Part of Cmsmart's wider web-to-print platform, Manage Products is the first screen a store manager sees after installing the designer:

On the capture above, 34 products have the designer enabled, 29 carry at least one template, and the list shows 20 per page with category, status and search filters. Clicking the pencil icon on any row opens that product's Edit product screen:

The tabs split cleanly: General holds the name, SKU, base price, category, descriptions, a Production specs panel (Material, Bleed, Print resolution, Color profile, Production time) and an Online Designer panel (Designer Canvas, Sides preset). Templates shows a count badge and attached designs. Order history pulls the product's own orders into this screen instead of cross-referencing WooCommerce orders by hand. Designer config opens separately (external-link mark), where side, pricing and print-option detail actually gets configured.

That classic path still exists. The same Sticker product's standard WooCommerce post editor carries the plugin's original metaboxes:

The NBD options box sidebars to Design Editor Setting, Printing Option, Product Builder, Request Quote, Design Guideline, Printing FAQ and Printing Info Tab. The Setting Cmsmart box below has Enable Design/Upload checkboxes, a Design editor layout choice, and template controls — Use templates, Create/Manage Templates, Template type, plus its own DPI and Dimensions unit fields. Two admin doors, one product.

Two blocks sit beside Manage Products, not inside it: AI preflight (Cmsmart Cloud > AI Tools) checks a design before printing, and the render pipeline behind each print-ready PDF that matches the order — a 2.17.0 fix for custom-size products — runs from the order screen.

What each field actually controls

Every label below is one we captured on this plugin version, not a guess — see WooCommerce's product-management documentation for the fields this screen shares with any WooCommerce product.

What's the ROI of organizing Manage Products well?

How to manage design products WooCommerce: configure a product step by step

1. Open Cmsmart > Manage Products and use the category, status and search filters (or + Add new for a new item).
2. Click the pencil action to open Edit product, landing on the General tab.
3. Set product name, SKU, base price, category and descriptions as for any WooCommerce product.
4. In Production specs, fill in Material, Bleed area, Print resolution, Color profile and Production time.
5. In Online Designer, enable Designer Canvas if shoppers should personalize this product, and pick a Sides preset.
6. Click Open Designer config to set the full side, pricing and print-option detail — a separate screen.
7. Switch to Templates to attach or review ready-made designs for this product.
8. Open Printing Options if this product needs a price matrix or conditional field set it doesn't have, and apply it to the product or category.
9. Save, then check Order history once the first order lands to confirm the settings behaved as configured.

Steps 4 and 6 lean on store-wide defaults set once, on Settings > General:

Default design editor layout (Modern, recommended), Default output resolution DPI (150 here) and Dimensions Unit (in) apply to any product that doesn't set its own values. Step 8's price matrix lives on its own screen:

Each row carries a Title, Status, Priority, Applied for scope, target Products/Categories and a date. Priority breaks ties when two sets could apply to one product. Opening or adding one drops into the field catalog and price logic:

Below it, a Quantity section adds Break / Discount / Default rows so unit price drops at chosen quantities, and Appearance sets the Display type. Import/Export buttons move a whole option set between stores.

Common mistakes and troubleshooting

• Designer Canvas is on but shoppers still can't personalize it: confirm the product is Published and Public.
• Print resolution looks wrong: check Production specs and the store-wide Default output resolution — a product with no override inherits the store default, and the classic editor's DPI field can show yet another number.
• Templates (0) even though templates exist: that count reflects this screen only; a template set via the classic Template type field may not show there.
• Price matrix doesn't match the product: check Priority and Applied for scope on Printing Options — a higher-priority set elsewhere can override it.

What can Cmsmart build on top of Manage Products?

• ERP/MIS catalog sync — Cmsmart builds a sync so Manage Products stops mirroring numbers that already live in another system.
• Bulk price-matrix tooling — for catalogs with hundreds of SKUs, Cmsmart builds bulk import/export and validation on top of Printing Options.
• B2B approval rules — Cmsmart builds account-scoped visibility and an approval step for client accounts with contracted pricing.
• Role-scoped views — Cmsmart builds a trimmed view of the screen for staff who only need Order history and print specs.

Each follows the same path: discovery, solution design, build sprints, QA, launch and support — the approach behind our ecommerce projects and our product designer customization service.

Get a custom Manage Products build

Why work with Cmsmart on your product catalog?

"We have had the NB Designer plugin installed for three years and have experienced absolutely no problems during that time. It is wonderful to see their commitment to continuous development, with new features being added frequently." — Web Developer, Trustpilot review, 2026

See real builds on our project case studies, or check review scores on our platform page.

Related chapters

• Installing and activating Cmsmart Product Designer — the hub for this admin settings series.
• Individual product settings in Cmsmart Product Designer — the per-product options this chapter builds on.
• Creating a template for a product — what the Templates tab attaches.
• Building a price matrix with printing options — the Designer config / Printing Options detail.
• Using Cmsmart Product Designer in the back end — a wider tour of the admin.

Further reading

• WooCommerce documentation
• WordPress.org