NBDesigner Plugin: Set Up Print Pricing Options

Applies to Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) 2.17.0 · Updated October 2026. Printing Options is the part of the NBDesigner plugin that turns quantity breaks, material upcharges and add-ons into one price: the price the shopper sees before they design, and the price your office bills.

In short

  • Outcome: shoppers see one accurate price from product page to checkout, and your team stops re-quoting custom print orders by hand.
  • How it works: the NBDesigner plugin's Printing Options module attaches a price matrix to a product or a whole category, and the designer, cart and order screen all read it automatically.
  • What it takes: about half an hour to build your first option set, plus a plan for the pricing rules a price matrix can't express, which Cmsmart builds as custom development.

A customer opens your print shop's site, picks a door hanger or a run of stickers, and wants to know one thing before anything else: what will this cost at the quantity they need? If that answer lives in a spreadsheet, or in one staff member's head, it is slow, and it is often wrong by the time the order reaches production.

The NBDesigner plugin was built to answer that question automatically. Its Printing Options module lets you define quantity breaks, per-option charges and conditional fields once, against a product or a whole category, and have the price calculated correctly everywhere the item appears: product page, cart, checkout and the order screen.

This guide configures print pricing options on a live 2.17 install, shows what buyers and your back office actually see, and marks where Cmsmart's custom development picks up once your pricing logic goes beyond what the plugin ships with.

What does manual print pricing cost your shop?

Cmsmart sees the same pattern across web-to-print shops: pricing kept outside the system causes slow quotes, inconsistent discounts and totals that drift between the product page and checkout. The NBDesigner plugin's Printing Options module puts that logic back in one place, so the price a shopper sees is the price production bills.

  • Re-quoting by hand. Every custom order gets a manual price check against a spreadsheet, which does not scale past a handful of orders a day.
  • Inconsistent discounts. Two staff members quote the same bulk order differently because the quantity-break rule is remembered, not configured.
  • Checkout mismatches. A total calculated on the product page can drift from the number WooCommerce charges, which erodes trust right before payment.
  • Reconciliation time. Someone still checks that the order total matches the option that was actually selected before the job goes to press.

Cmsmart insight: the shops that struggle most with pricing usually treat quantity breaks as a note for the sales team rather than a rule in the system. The fix is rarely more discount tiers — it is moving the one rule you already use into Printing Options once, so every channel reads the same number.

Pricing confusion is not a minor annoyance at checkout. Baymard Institute's checkout research (2025) found that 40% of shoppers who abandon an online cart do so because extra costs were higher than they expected — exactly the gap a price that is configured once and read everywhere is built to close.

What could pricing look like for your buyers?

Imagine a shopper moving a quantity selector on your sticker product and watching the per-unit price drop at each break you configured, with no page reload and no call to your office. That is what a correctly configured Printing Options set gives every visitor who reaches the NBDesigner plugin's storefront.

Example scenario. A print shop sells door hangers with a base price and a quantity-break discount. A buyer raises the quantity on the product page; the displayed price updates to the matching break before they add the item to cart. At checkout, WooCommerce shows the same total, and the order arrives in the production queue with the option, the quantity and the design file already attached.

How does Cmsmart's pricing engine work inside the NBDesigner plugin?

Cmsmart built Printing Options as a layer between your products and WooCommerce: a price matrix you configure once, that the storefront, the designer and the order screen all read from the same place. What the plugin can calculate ships today; what a business rule needs beyond that is custom development.

  • Printing Options module. Define fields and a price matrix — quantity breaks with a discount per break — and apply the set to specific products or to a whole category.
  • Per-product base price. Each design-enabled product carries its own starting price, with an optional sale price, managed from the product manager.
  • Storefront read. The product page and the online designer read the active option set and show the resulting price before the shopper adds to cart.
  • Cart and checkout. WooCommerce carries the calculated price and the attached design through to checkout without re-entry.
  • Order record. The order screen keeps the line item, its options and its subtotal together with the print file, for anyone checking the job before it ships.
  • Custom development (not in the plugin today). A price that depends on two option fields together, on a customer's account tier, or on an ERP-synced cost basis is custom pricing-engine work Cmsmart builds on top of the NBDesigner plugin.
NBDesigner plugin Printing Options list showing price-tiered option sets in WordPress admin
Cmsmart > Printing Options: every price-tiered option set, grouped by the products or categories it applies to.
Printing option editor with a quantity break discount table for building a print price matrix
Inside an option: a discount type and a quantity-break table build the price matrix for that option.

What's the business value of configurable print pricing?

Cmsmart frames pricing value in mechanisms, not promises: fewer manual quotes, fewer checkout mismatches, and buyers who self-select a higher quantity instead of emailing for one. The NBDesigner plugin's Printing Options module is what makes those mechanisms possible without a developer touching code for every new product.

Manual pricingPrinting Options in the NBDesigner plugin
Quantity breaks live in a spreadsheet or a quote emailQuantity breaks are a price matrix attached to the product or category
Staff re-check the total before confirming an orderWooCommerce and the order screen already show the configured total
Every new product needs a fresh pricing conversationAn existing option set applies to a new product in minutes
Discounts vary by who answers the phoneThe same rule prices every channel and every shopper
  • Faster quotes to checkout. Shows up as fewer emails before an order is placed. KPI to track: average time from first product view to completed checkout.
  • Fewer pricing errors. Shows up as fewer refunds or reprints caused by a wrong total rather than a production fault. KPI to track: reprint rate attributed to pricing, not production.
  • Orders at the quantity you want to sell. Shows up as buyers choosing a higher quantity break instead of asking for a quote. KPI to track: average order quantity on options-enabled products.

Rough ROI check: multiply your custom orders per month by the minutes a manual quote currently takes, by your fully loaded hourly staff cost. That is what correctly configured Printing Options gives back every month, before counting the orders you stop losing to a wrong or late quote.

The opportunity behind getting this right is not small: the global web-to-print market was valued at $36.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $52.9 billion by 2034, a 4.15% CAGR, according to IMARC Group (2025). Shops that quote accurately and fast keep a larger share of that growth than shops still pricing by hand.

For a deeper look at automatic calculation across sides, materials and quantities, see our automatic pricing calculator case study.

How do you set up print pricing options in the NBDesigner plugin?

Cmsmart's Printing Options module takes about half an hour to configure for a first product: build the fields, set a quantity-break discount, attach the set, then confirm the price on the storefront and the order screen. The NBDesigner plugin applies the same set to as many products as you choose.

  1. In wp-admin, open Cmsmart > Printing Options and choose Add new, or open an existing option set to edit its price matrix.
  2. Build the fields the shopper needs under Printing fields, then open Printing options > Quantity and choose a discount type, such as a percentage per item.
  3. Add a quantity-break row for each tier, enter the discount for that tier, and mark one row as the default.
  4. Under Apply for, attach the option set to specific products or to a whole category, and set a priority if more than one set could match the same product.
  5. Publish the option set, open the product on the storefront, and confirm the price updates as the quantity changes before you place a test order.
  6. Open Cmsmart > Product manager to confirm the product's base price matches what you intended, then check the test order's line item on the order screen.

For the designer-side fields a pricing rule can depend on — sides, DPI, upload limits — see the individual product settings guide instead of repeating every field here.

Product manager list showing base price and active sale price for each design-enabled product
The product manager lists the configured base price, and any active sale price, for every design-enabled product.
Storefront product page displaying the configured price before the shopper starts designing
The price you configure is what the shopper sees before they open the online designer.
WooCommerce checkout carrying the designed product's price through to order review
The same price follows the order into cart and checkout, with the custom design attached to the line item.
Cmsmart video thumbnail for configuring a price matrix in the NBDesigner plugin
Video: How to configure and use the Price Matrix feature (Cmsmart on YouTube).

Going further: what custom pricing can Cmsmart build for you?

Cmsmart's project team builds pricing logic beyond what a price matrix covers: account-tier pricing, ERP-synced cost, PO-approval gates. The NBDesigner plugin stays the base your storefront runs on, and Cmsmart builds the rules your business actually operates under, as custom development, on top of it.

  • Rules a matrix can't express. A price that depends on two option fields together, on the customer's account tier, or on a negotiated B2B price list is custom pricing-engine development, not a Printing Options setting.
  • ERP or MIS-synced cost. Pull a live cost basis or a stock-dependent price from your ERP or MIS, so the storefront price never drifts from the production cost behind it.
  • Approval-gated quoting. For B2B accounts, route a configured price through a purchase-order approval step before the order is confirmed, building on the approved-artwork lock NBDesigner already applies to the design.
  • Pricing tied to print-ready output. Connect your pricing rules to the print-ready PDF that matches the order, rendered by Cmsmart Cloud at checkout, so production never has to re-check what was paid for.

Get a custom pricing engine quote

Delivery runs the way every Cmsmart project does: discovery, solution design, sprints, QA and launch, with support afterward — see how we run ecommerce projects.

Order detail timeline showing the line item subtotal matching the configured print price
On the order screen, the line item subtotal matches what was configured — no manual reconciling before the job goes to press.

Why work with Cmsmart for your print pricing engine?

Cmsmart has built web-to-print storefronts since 2012, with 6,300+ client projects and 1,800+ live stores behind that experience. The NBDesigner plugin's Printing Options module is the product of that work, and the same team builds the custom pricing engines plugins can't cover.

Cmsmart is a Netbase JSC division operating since 2012, with 6,300+ client projects and 4,600+ projects delivered, serving stores in 80+ countries. Cmsmart holds a 4.2 Trustpilot rating from 404 reviews (verified on Trustpilot), and the team's project history is open on the Cmsmart platform page.

"I would like to highlight that the price is competitive, especially in relation to the quality of the software delivered." — Oscar Hernnan, Trustpilot review, 2024

Frequently asked questions about NBDesigner print pricing

Can one Printing Options set apply to several products at once?

Yes. Under Apply for, attach the option set to a whole category instead of a single product, and set a priority if more than one set could match the same item.

Does the price update live as a shopper changes quantity?

Yes, within the quantity breaks you configured — the storefront reads the matrix and recalculates the price before the item is added to cart.

Can print pricing depend on which customer is buying?

Not out of the box. Account-tier or negotiated B2B pricing is custom development Cmsmart builds on top of the plugin's Printing Options module.

Will the configured price match what the order screen shows?

Yes. The same calculation that prices the product and the cart carries through to the order record, so the line item subtotal and the print job agree.

How long does it take to set up a first option set?

Most shops build their first quantity-break option set in under half an hour; a full B2B pricing engine with ERP sync is a scoped custom development project.

Can Cmsmart connect print pricing to our ERP or MIS?

Yes, as custom development — Cmsmart syncs a live cost basis or a stock-dependent price from your ERP or MIS, so the storefront price never drifts from production cost.

Get pricing that quotes itself

Configure Printing Options once in the NBDesigner plugin, and let Cmsmart's project team build the pricing logic a spreadsheet can't: account tiers, ERP-synced cost, PO approvals.

Get a custom pricing engine quote See the pricing engine service