Multi-Sided Product Designer for WooCommerce Stores

Applies to Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) 2.17.0 · Updated October 2026. Based on today's live demo captures and product tests on nbdesigner.cmsmart.net.

Most WooCommerce product designer setups start as a single canvas: one design area, one print file. That works for a poster or sticker, but it breaks down the moment a product has two faces that matter to the buyer — a business card, a door hanger, a two-sided banner, a front-and-back T-shirt — because the plugin only ever asked for one design.

What does it cost your print shop when customers can't design both sides?

Talk to any print shop owner selling double-sided cards or two-sided signage and the same five pains come up:

• The back becomes a support ticket. A buyer finishes the front, adds to cart, then emails asking for a phone number on the back — someone has to quote and design it.
• Price for the back is guessed, not calculated. Back-of-card printing becomes a flat add-on fee instead of scaling with size, stock or quantity like the front's price matrix.
• Proofing takes two rounds, not one. The front is approved from the designer; the back is approved from an email thread, often after the front is already queued for print.
• Reprints climb. A back never checked against the front's bleed, resolution and DPI rules wastes a print run.
• Staff time disappears into coordination. Every manually handled back side is tracked outside the order system — invisible until a customer complains.

Put a number on it with your own data: N back-side designs a month at M minutes of staff time and an hourly cost of C is N × M × C in hidden labor every month, before counting a single reprint.

What could your checkout look like with full front-and-back design?

Talk to an ecommerce expert if your product range already has two-sided items sitting behind a manual process like this.

How does Cmsmart's multi-sided product designer for WooCommerce work?

Three building blocks make this work, and all three are in the plugin today:

• Sides preset (product-level). A 1-sided / 2-sided toggle on the product's designer config turns on the second canvas — the setting in the screenshot below.
• Designer config editor (per-side setup). Full sides, pricing and print options for each side are configured here, per the admin's own description: "Set canvas sides, pricing and print-ready output."
• Cloud renderer and Create PDF (output). Every print-ready render's certificate records "the page size of each side, for support" (CHANGELOG 2.17.0); the order's Create PDF screen also has a Force all side in the same format toggle, off by default, shown below. The automatic print-ready PDF itself is a Premium-tier export — the free plugin configures and previews every side, but rendering and downloading the final print-ready PDF needs a Premium license.

See how to configure the online designer for each product for the bleed, resolution and DPI settings that sit alongside the Sides preset on the same screen. If your use case is a buyer-entered width and height rather than extra sides, that's a different field — see how to configure Custom dimensions and where it displays.

What's the business value of selling two-sided products online?

Benefit	How it shows up in your business	KPI to track
Fewer manual back-side quotes	Staff stop drafting one-off email quotes for the back of a card or sign	Support tickets tagged "back design" per month
One checkout, one price	Buyers see a combined price for both sides before they pay, instead of a follow-up invoice	Cart abandonment on two-sided products
Fewer reprints	Both sides share the same bleed, resolution and DPI rules from the start	Reprint rate on multi-sided SKUs
Faster production handoff	Print-ready files for every side are ready at "Awaiting review," not days later	Time from order paid to in production

Self-service configuration matters beyond this one feature: the documented average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, averaged across 50 studies run between 2006 and 2025 — every extra step between "I like this" and "I paid," like waiting on a back-design email, is a chance to lose the sale. WooCommerce itself reports 7+ million active installations, and the products most likely to need a second side are a growing category: Grand View Research values the global print-on-demand market at $10.8 billion in 2025, projected to reach $57.5 billion by 2033.

How do you set up a multi-sided product in Cmsmart Product Designer?

To configure and set up a two-sided (or more) product:

1. In the Product manager, open the product you want to make multi-sided (or add a new one) and confirm its Designer Canvas is enabled.
2. Under Online Designer, set the Sides preset to 2-sided (or the number of sides your product needs).
3. Click Open Designer config to set each side's canvas size, bleed and DPI individually — don't assume the back should match the front's defaults.
4. In Printing Options, attach or create the print option set this product uses, and set a price for the back side the same way you price the front (per unit, per quantity break, or as a price matrix).
5. Save the product and open it on the storefront to confirm the designer shows both sides and the page counter in the top-right moves between them (1/1 becomes 1/2 and 2/2).
6. Design a test item on side one, switch to side two, add an element, and click Process to confirm both sides reach "Your artwork" correctly.
7. Add the test design to cart and complete checkout up to payment to confirm the combined price is correct.
8. On the resulting order, check the order detail timeline reaches "Awaiting review" or further, then open the design's Create PDF tab and confirm Print-ready PDF status is Ready, rendered by the cloud renderer.
9. Decide whether to leave Force all side in the same format off (one PDF per side, the default) or on (one combined PDF) based on what your print floor expects.
10. Download the design formats from the order's Download design tab and confirm your production team can open every side's file before you publish the product live.

For the print options and pricing fields referenced in step 4, how to create a price matrix table with a printing option's attribute covers the grid in more depth than this guide does.

Can Cmsmart build more than 2 sides or sync each side to your production system?

The 1-sided / 2-sided preset covers most real multi-face products. Past that, Cmsmart builds the rest as custom development:

• Three-or-more-panel products. A tri-fold menu, a gatefold invitation or a multi-panel box needs more canvases than the standard preset exposes; we build and price the extra panels.
• Per-side pricing rules. If the back should price differently from the front at different quantity breaks, common on B2B jobs, we build that on top of the existing price matrix.
• MIS/ERP sync per side. Stores running a production MIS can get each side's print-ready file and page-size metadata pushed automatically, instead of downloaded by hand.
• AI preflight tuned per side. AI Preflight already checks a design's print files; we can tune those checks per side — stricter bleed checks on a die-cut front than a plain-text back.
• B2B approval flows across sides. For corporate accounts ordering multi-sided stationery, we build one approval step that reviews every side before the job releases to production.

Delivery follows the same path as any Cmsmart engagement: discovery, solution design, build sprints, QA and launch — see how Cmsmart runs ecommerce projects.

Get a custom multi-sided designer quote

Why work with Cmsmart for multi-sided product design?

Cmsmart (a Netbase JSC division) has built web-to-print and product-customization storefronts since 2012: 6,300+ client projects, 4,600+ delivered, across 80+ countries. The Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) plugin behind the Sides preset in this guide runs on 1,800+ live stores today.

"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 to keep the software current and highly capable." — Web Developer, Trustpilot

For the print-shop side of this use case rather than the plugin side, see Cmsmart's web-to-print solutions hub, or go deeper on tailoring the designer itself at the product designer customization service page.

Frequently asked questions

Does the free NBDesigner plugin support 2-sided products?

The Sides preset and the Designer config editor that turn on and configure a second canvas are part of the core (free) plugin, verified in the current 2.17.0 build. Rendering and downloading the automatic print-ready PDF for those sides is a Premium-tier export, marked with a PRO badge in the admin. Three-or-more-side layouts and per-side pricing beyond the standard price matrix are custom development.

Does each side need its own print option set and price?

You can reuse one print option set across both sides, or configure them separately — most shops price the back lower than the front since it carries less ink coverage.

Will the print-ready PDF combine both sides into one file?

By default, no — one PDF per side. Turn on Force all side in the same format on the order's Create PDF screen if your print floor wants one combined file instead.

How long does it take to set up an existing product as 2-sided?

Flipping the Sides preset and configuring the second side's canvas and pricing takes minutes — most of the time goes into deciding what the back should look like.

Can Cmsmart connect each side's print file to our MIS or ERP?

Not out of the box. That's a common custom-development request, scoped around the specific MIS or ERP your production floor already runs.

What happens to an order if a buyer only designs one side?

The order still reaches the Customer Design approve box on the order screen; an admin can review both sides there before accepting, and approved artwork is then locked on the server so a later edit can't change what was approved (2.17.0).