Features

Products

Turn your designs into products ready to publish and sell.

Products overview

Products are what you publish and sell. Once a product is created it stands on its own — you manage, sync, and publish it directly from the Products page, independently of the designs it came from.

A product is created from one or more designs, but it is not a shortcut back to them. It bundles print files, mockups, variants, pricing, and marketplace metadata into a single item that is ready to go live on the platforms you choose.

Adding products

There are two ways to bring a product into MyDesigns. You can create one from your existing designs, or you can import an existing listing from an external platform such as Etsy.

Create from designs

This is the primary path. You select one or more designs, choose your mockups, variants, pricing, and marketplace metadata, and MyDesigns assembles them into a self-contained product. The result is built natively here, so every variant is already mapped to your print partner and every print file is in place.

Import

Importing pulls an existing listing from an external platform in as a real product that is bound to that platform's external ID, so it can be managed and synced like any product you created here. Unlike a design import, which only brings in raw assets, a product import reconstructs a fully structured product — which means it needs manual review before it is production-ready.

Importing is covered in depth in the Importing products section below, including variant mapping and adding print files manually.

Product types

There are two kinds of products in MyDesigns: print-on-demand (POD) products and digital products. Which one you create determines what the product carries and how it is fulfilled.

POD products

Print-on-demand products are physical items such as t-shirts, mugs, or posters. They hold print files and variants — combinations like size, color, and material — each with its own pricing and settings.

When an order comes in, a POD product is produced and shipped by a print partner, so you never handle stock or fulfillment yourself.

Digital products

Digital products are downloadable files delivered straight to the buyer, such as artwork, templates, or bundles. The files are hosted on our platform, and the file itself is what the customer receives.

Digital products have no variants and no print files. There is nothing to print and nothing to vary — only the file that is delivered on purchase.

Products are self-contained instances

Each product is a self-contained instance. At creation time it takes its own copy of every file and value it needs, so it no longer depends on the designs, slots, or collections it was built from.

This means you can freely reorganize, edit, or delete the original designs without affecting products that were already created. The product keeps working and selling on its own.

Because a product carries its own copy of everything, changes you make to a design after creation are never pushed to existing products automatically. To update a live product, edit the product itself and sync it.

Variants and print files

What a product holds

Physical products hold two important things: print files and variants. Print files are the artwork that gets printed, while variants describe the sellable options of the product — such as size, color, or material combinations — each with its own pricing and settings.

Print files: The high-resolution artwork applied to the product. A product can carry multiple print files (for example, front and back placements), and each is stored on the product itself.
Variants: The purchasable combinations of a physical product, such as size and color. Variants can carry their own price, SKU, and enabled or disabled state.
Mockups: Preview images that show the design on the product. Mockups are generated during the product creation flow and travel with the product.

Customizable products

A customizable product is one whose print file is built in our Canvas with editable text and objects. Instead of a flat, fixed image, the print file keeps its layers, so parts of the artwork can still be changed after the product is live.

When a customizable product is sold, you can open the Canvas before the order is approved and edit the print file directly on our platform. For example, a "Happy Birthday" design with a name placeholder can have the buyer's name filled in right there, in our built-in Canvas, before the file goes to production.

Only print files saved from the Canvas in the customizable format stay editable. A print file saved as a flat image is fixed and cannot be changed at order time.

Syncing products

Products are syncable. Once a product is published to a marketplace it is tied to that platform's external ID, which lets MyDesigns push later changes — such as edited titles, tags, pricing, or variants — back to the live listing without recreating it.

You can sync a single product or select many and sync them in bulk. Syncing sends the current state of the product to every platform it is published on, keeping your listings consistent with what you see in MyDesigns.

Because a product is bound to its external platform ID, importing existing listings links them to real products that can then be synced. This is what separates a product import from a design import — designs bring in raw assets only and are not tied to any platform.

Importing products

You can import existing listings from external platforms such as Etsy directly into MyDesigns. Importing pulls a live listing in as a real, self-contained product that is already bound to its external platform ID, so it can be managed and synced from the Products page like any product you created here.

Importing is powerful, but it is not a one-click operation. External platforms do not describe products the way our system does, so an imported product almost always needs manual review before it is production-ready — specifically around variant mapping and print files.

Variant mapping needs your review

External platforms have no concept of your print partner's catalog. When a listing is imported, MyDesigns has no inherent knowledge of how the listing's variants relate to your print partner's product variants, so it attempts to auto-map them for you based on the information available.

Auto-mapping is a best-effort starting point, not a guarantee. Always double-check the mapped variants yourself to confirm that each imported option lines up with the correct print partner variant and satisfies your requirements before publishing or syncing.

Print files must be added manually

An import brings in the listing's mockup images only — the preview photos shown to buyers. It does not bring in any print file, because the source platform does not expose the production-ready artwork. As a result, an imported product has no print file attached to it out of the box.

You must add the print files to each imported product manually. Without a print file there is nothing for the print partner to produce, so this step is required before the product can be fulfilled.

Importing into a system as detailed as MyDesigns is deliberate work. Because we reconstruct a fully functional product from a listing that was never designed to carry this much structure, expect to spend time verifying variant mappings and attaching print files. The payoff is a real, syncable product that behaves exactly like one created natively in MyDesigns.

Product actions

A range of actions can be performed against your products, either individually or in bulk. These actions operate on the product instance itself, so they apply to whichever platforms the product is published on.

Edit product: Opens the product to change its metadata, print files, variants, mockups, and pricing. Changes are saved to the product instance and can then be synced to live listings.
Publish: Publishes the product to one or more marketplaces. A product created for one platform can still be published to another later.
Sync: Pushes the current state of the product to every platform it is published on, updating the live listings tied to its external IDs.
Duplicate product: Creates an independent copy of the product along with its files, variants, and meta. The copy is unbound from any marketplace until you publish it.
Delete product: Removes the product from MyDesigns. Depending on the platform, you can also choose to unpublish or delist the connected listings.
Update meta: Bulk-updates fields such as title, description, tags, or price across the selected products.

Product groups

Product groups are created automatically during the product creation process. If you create ten products at once, they are all bound to a single group ID, because they share the same product and variant structure.

That shared structure is what makes bulk variant updates possible later. Because products in a group line up variant for variant, you can edit their variants together in one step.

Editing variants across products from different groups is not supported — their structures don't necessarily match, so it would be too cumbersome. Groups exist precisely to tie together products created in the same process, so you can bulk edit them easily.

If you edit a single product's variants on its own from within a group, that product is moved out of the group into a newly created group of its own (it becomes disgrouped) and can no longer be edited as part of the original group.

Continue to Print Partners